...the value of your home being affected by the economy. Anna Quindlen, in her essay “Homeless,” explains how home is what you make it and it is the little details that make it a home and not the material things. First, over decades a home has been transformed into a new meaning because of the short term use of homes. As a matter of fact, Quindlen states, “Where you lived for three years until you could move onto something else.” Many have lost the sense of home their parents and grandparents had, and replaced it with an impermanent sense of home. A home where you move with your father’s job or to a new town that your parent’s think will benefit their children more (691). As a result, we have come to something even worse. “Homes have stopped being homes. They are now just real estate.” Children do not know what it means to come home and go to their room to do homework because they have never had a room to call their own (691). Actually, some people have just reduced to pulling old pictures out of their bags of what used to be their pride and joy, but has turned into nothing but a disappointment (691). Next, home has been adapted into a new meaning because of societies changing views. Many people refer homeless people to “just homeless.” They make it sound as if that is what the person really is instead of the objects that they do not own (691). Also, a number of Americans think that the homeless need a place to live. They think that there are shelters...
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...Katrina Gatewood 9/11/17 4th period Homelessness In the world today we have a large amount of homeless people. Homeless people should have another chance to start over. Some homeless people choose to be on the streets other didn’t have a choice and they should have another chance. Memphis TN have the second largest number of homeless people. 31.7%, in 2012 rate of 10,000 people was homeless. In Tennessee there are 40.3 percent of the population are homeless. Everyday people see homeless people everywhere we have a large amount of people that are homeless. We have over 306,000 people that lives on the streets. They make up 31% of the nation’s homeless population. Many of the people didn’t have a choice. 34 percent of the total...
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... The Hidden Homeless I have previously volunteered at the Mainspring house in Brockton but I never Have eaten among the homeless before. Mainspring house is a homeless shelter that also partners with father bills which is another homeless shelter, Father Bills and Mainspring House have locations in Brockton, Quincy and Taunton. Father Bills and Mainspring take in the homeless, feed them a meal and then let them stay the night before they have to leave the next day. They also have permanent housing programs that the homeless can get into. The mission statement on their website helpfbms.org states " The mission of Father Bills and Mainspring House is to help homeless people obtain a home by giving temporary shelter and food , finding safe and affordable housing and providing permanent housing with supportive services Father Bills and Mainspring helps people who are homeless or at risk of being homeless to achieve self-sufficiency." According to their website 15 percent of the adults that are sheltered are employed but are still homeless, and 388 of the people who are sheltered are children. While I was driving to the facility I was extremely nervous, while I was waiting in the line outside for dinner what really surprised me the most was what the homeless people looked like. When you think of a homeless person you usually think of the people on the street sleeping in a cardboard box and wearing...
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...million people homeless, according to the estimates of the National Law center on Homelessness and Poverty. Homelessness can affect anybody at any time through many situations. There are many reasons people are homeless some stem from natural disaster, to loss of job, to unable to keep bills up, to loss of home, to addiction, and to mental illness and physically and sexually assault. Many fall under federal poverty level and find it hard to bounce back. Many people look down to the homelessness people by thinking they are beneath them and have done wrong to be in the place they are in their lives now. Many people don’t look at the whole picture of what has happened to the person or family has gone through and has endeavored. Most people, whom are homeless, hate to ask for help because they feel that they have ashamed about their situation or they have failed their family. “Since the 1940’s, the issue of homelessness has remained a growing concern with the United States.” I have chosen this topic because a year and a half ago I was homeless. With no place to go and now shelters in my area it was hard to know what to do. I lived in a very rural area and it was not in my area. It was very hard I lived in our car for a while and then in hotels when I had the money. I also had three animals and shelters do not allow them. I had no money to kennel them till we got on our feet. I feel that this is a topic that is very misunderstood. There are many homeless shelters in large...
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...On any given day homeless numbers rise and fall due to economic conditions, incarcerations, death and possibly successfully pulling yourself up out of the situation. There are many factors that can lead to homelessness: job loss, addiction, domestic abuse and mental illness. Once a person is in the grip of homelessness it is hard to rise out of. Survival becomes the number one concern. They face challenges everyday that most people never have to face. Getting money for food, or alcohol or drugs is their most basic goal. A person is at such a low point in their life that they feel worthless, suffer from low self-esteem and hopelessness. For many addiction doesn’t begin until after they find themselves homeless as it is a way to get through the day and forget. Economic problems in society today stemming from the subprime mortgage crises have led to a high number of foreclosures. Unemployment rates have risen at a fast rate and people are finding themselves financially unstable. Combine the two some are finding they have no options left and nowhere to go. Tent cities are growing in numbers which we haven’t seen since the 1980’s. The majority of people living in the tent cities are people suffering because of the economic recession. The addict and mentally Ill can be found in other locations. Many women find themselves in dire straits due to domestic problem. They get married and have children early in life with no post secondary education and one day found themselves in dire...
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...The Homeless Plight Student Name Course/Professor Date The Homeless Plight Homelessness is on the rise. Homeless people can be seen sleeping in a variety of places such as city subways, terminals, stations, and the underground world of transportation. In the winter, the homeless may be sleeping on top of grates for the warm steam; fires may be burning from cylinders on street corners, under bridges, or in alley ways for warmth. In the summer, buses, subway cars, malls, and fountains are but a slight relief for those homeless until an authority figure moves the person(s) on. In small suburban areas, most of the homeless are hidden and out of view. The United States faces many social problems; however, homelessness is a major dilemma. To understanding the issue of homelessness from a sociologist point of view, different lenses need to be used. The sociological perspectives of functionalism, conflict structuralists, and symbolic interactionism, provide the best angles to assess homelessness in the United States as well as analyzing the efforts to resolve the homeless dilemma the nation faces. There are approximately two million homeless men, women, and children, and the numbers are increasing. For the second consecutive year, homeless families are on the rise (AHAR, 2009). Causes of this dilemma are vast and include hardships from loss of employment, illness, lack of affordable housing, poverty, and the current economy. The number of homeless is constantly changing. Researchers...
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...Homeless Persons Heather Gustafson Axia College of University of Phoenix Homeless Persons A problem that continues to grow in the United States is Homeless people. Millions of people are homeless due to a variety of circumstances and the number still grows daily. History In the United States, de-institutionalization of the mentally ill -- unaccompanied by promised outpatient psychiatric and social services -- led to a large increase in the homeless, mentally ill population in the late 1970s. The number of homeless grew in the 1980s, as housing and social service cuts increased. This was in part a consequence of the transfer of federal dollars to a huge military buildup (including the spectacularly wasteful and unsuccessful "Star Wars" strategic missile defense initiative) and consequent large budget deficits. Fortunately, public compassion soared, and in 1986, 5 million Americans joined hands across the country to raise money for homeless programs (May 25, 1986 Hands Across America). In 1987, the McKinney Act authorized millions of dollars for housing and hunger relief (Donahue, 2007). Nature and Issues of Social Problems Homeless and poverty go together. People are unable to pay for food, clothing, shelter, child care, health care, and education. Choices have to be made to have what they need for their daily life so they have to put other things behind to cover necessities. Domestic violence leads people to become homeless because they are...
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...Homeless Volunteer Tera Penrod Purpose: To share my experience of being homeless and how it has affected me. Audience: Readers interested in being enlightened about the homeless at a personal level. “Better is a poor man whose walk is blameless than a rich man whose ways are perverse.”- PROVERBS 28:6. I learned the truth in this verse while living with relatives in Colorado Springs, Colorado and the time I became homeless. What comes to mind when thinking about homeless people? I remember the first time I saw a homeless person begging at an intersection. He looked scruffy, unkempt, and dirty, which really scared me because I did not know what he would do to me. He just stood there, holding a sign that read, “Out of work, need money for food.” Of course I just drove by, with windows up and doors locked, figuring that if he lost his job then he should be trying to get a new one instead of begging. I really didn’t care about homeless people and refused to help them. Little did I know that one day I’d become homeless. I have bounced back and forth from living in Michigan and Colorado for several years and after my divorce in 2006, I finally headed back to Colorado (home). I initially stayed with some relatives until I could get a job and save enough for an apartment, was doing just that until one weekend camping in the mountains, in which I was raped by my cousin, with whose parents I was residing. I didn’t know what to say or do because no one would ever believe...
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...just to find out that they can’t find any jobs. American Veterans risk their life everyday and sacrifice a lot for the United States, just to be rewarded with a struggle of finding a job or in worst cases not being able to get a job at all. Homeless veterans are becoming a big problem everyday and it is the society’s responsibility to take care of them. These veterans risked their lives to give American citizens freedom and a safe home to live in, and all they get is a boot to the street. Now it’s time for those veterans to be rewarded with a clean bed and a hot meal. According to Shaw a writer at Newsmax, wrote that in America it was estimated that there is more than 50,000 homeless veterans. Also, 92 percent of those homeless vets were male and the other 8 percent were female. According to Shaw returning veterans are twice as likely to become chronically homeless. In addition to 50 percent of all homeless veterans suffer from disabilities and are between the ages of 18-50 years old. The cause for veterans becoming homeless is due to poverty, lack of support from groups...
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...This speech will try to persuade people joined together at a fundraiser dinner to donate to the National Alliance to End Homeless, an organization dedicated to preventing and ending homelessness in the United States. This alliance has become well-known in America by improving policy, building capacity, and educating opinion leaders on the topic of homelessness. Donations can be done online, by check, or by credit card and substantially help the organization find ways to improve the lives of homeless individuals and families. Paragraph 2 — Explain the objections or obstacles your audience might have for doing what you ask and how you will counter their objections (counter-argument) There has been news coverage in the past discussing panhandlers...
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...Homeless in Prince William County Introduction and background: Homelessness is one of our nation’s most misunderstood and vexing social problems. Many individuals of all races struggle with the devastating effects of homeless including families with children, single adults, teenagers and the elderly. This is an issue that can be defined as living in unsuitable, unsafe and overcrowded environment. “On a single night in January 2013, there were 610,042 people experiencing homelessness in the United States, including 394,698 people who were homeless in sheltered locations and 215,344 people who were living in unsheltered locations” (Henry & Cortes, 2013). This shows homelessness in American is a crisis, many more individuals become homeless everyday. They struggle moving from place to place, night after night, in constant state of fear and survival. People become homeless for a variety of reasons. Homelessness is primarily an economic problem, and is also affected by a number of political and social factors. Economic factors include the lack of affordable housing, “housing costs have risen steadily across the country, and they have skyrocketed in many areas. Further, the inability to afford housing is concentrated among households with incomes below the poverty level, whose members account for the vast majority of people entering homelessness” (Burt, 2001). The growing gap between wage earnings and the cost of housing leaves millions of families and individuals unable...
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...their lives for us, however, many of these people are now homeless. In America, we have many veterans without a house or shelter, and that number is increasing everyday. Why are there so many Veterans on the street, when they have sacrificed so much for our country and livelihoods? We need to support homeless Veterans in our community, so that they can live in a home, not on the street. People have argued that veterans are homeless only because of the choices that they have made, and that is just not true. Not all veterans are homeless because of the choices that they made, and many of these veterans suffer from PTSD. Some people may argue that we should spend money on paying off America’s national debt, but in reality the national debt is too large for any of us to put a...
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...Homeless Veterans Homeless Veterans, we see them everywhere and we always want to stop and donate but we never have time or no money ourselves. Should we spare a penny or two for them? The homeless veterans you see on the street did a favor for us by serving for our country and we should thank them and take two seconds out of our day to spare a few cents to make their day better. Homeless Veterans are common all around the United States. The percentage of homeless veterans go up when you're in a big city but have you thought of the percentage of homeless people in small towns. You seem them on street corners with their cardboard sign asking for help you look over and see them standing there. Take a second to help them. Even if it's a quarter it could make a...
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...of Veterans Day (n.d.), Armistice Day was started at the end of World War I. Then twenty-eight years later, the name of this holiday changes to Veterans Day to honor all of the veterans who fought in any war. After that, some programs were created to support those veterans. The US Department of Veterans Affairs (2015) said that the purpose of this department is to create programs to help veterans with their needs. Some of these programs provide good benefits for veterans such as health care, disability compensation, and the opportunity to find jobs. Those programs were not enough to support the basic needs of all veterans. According to Farley (2010), many veterans did not receive any rewards from those programs. As a result, some became homeless and many developed mental disorders. Homelessness is one of the major problems faced by veterans. The main reason that increases the possibility of homelessness is the social status. Ghose, Gordon, Adam, Metraux, Stephen, Kristin, and Amy (2015) found that most of the homelessness veterans did not have a higher education. If they do not have experience in any occupation, it is difficult for them to find a job to live as a normal person. However, most of them consume drugs, alcohol, and get sex with strangers for money when they become homelessness. In addition, age is an important factor that increases the possibility of homelessness. According to Clegg, Daigh, Culhane, and Kane (2013), veterans have a higher risk of homelessness when...
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...There in the streets on the highways asking for money because they're homeless due to numerous circumstances. The money that they do get from strangers they may but to good use like buying clothes or food or maybe bus fare to go home. Some don’t they use it to buy drugs and alcohol leading them back to their original dead end path. Which is why people should feel obligated to be compassionate toward those less fortunate because there homeless for numerous amount of circumstances. Helping those less fortunate than us can help us progress as a society and you never it could happen to you without even wanting it to happen. We live in the society that only advanced after we adopted disciplined beliefs in helping others. If we did not, we would decay, ruined by personal rivalry and obsession about our own well being. Those that can't help themselves can receive help and in turn, that can empower them to help others, and so everyone standing and livelihood improves. In the text, it states, “ Homelessness had changed her perception of the world and her place in it” (Author 3). This quote better explains how after being homeless herself Rita now has a motivation to help others that have been in the same situation as her. There’s a time for the struggle for everyone at some...
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