Causes and Effects of Homelessness, Essay Example

No subject as broad and socially meaningful as homelessness may be successfully addressed briefly, but a few basic components of the issue stand out as essentially worthy of analysis. Not unexpectedly, cause and effect play into each other within these elements.

The most evident cause of homelessness is unemployment, and the recent economic crises within the United States have only served to underscore this connection. Homelessness first began to command wide interest in the US in the 1980’s, yet the circumstances of it have altered. Despite shifting unemployment rates, standards of living for even low-income families or individual were typically better in the 1970’s because housing was more affordable. Thus the extreme rise in housing prices of the 1980’s and 1990’s, coupled with the recent and massive job market losses, combined to create an exponential boom in American homelessness: “Because the poor of 2008 were poorer than the poor of the early 1970’s and the real cost of housing was higher, there was a growing population that was vulnerable to homelessness” (Gilbert 216).

Similarly, the dissolution of many higher-paying, “career” jobs brought about a completely unanticipated development, in that homelessness was no longer the province of the traditionally poor. The homes being foreclosed upon were affluent dwellings and the people forced out of them were and are utterly unfamiliar with the basic survival techniques long known to those with experience in poverty. As this includes knowledge of how and where to seek assistance when homelessness is imminent, that population on the streets expanded when, in many cases, alternatives could have been exercised.

With this unemployment factor do we see the cycle of cause and effect. The individual without the job and incomes is deprived of shelter. They seek to regain employment but find that the homelessness is a potent detriment in finding work because of the attached stigma, and only the lowest paying jobs are available. Unable to accumulate sufficient housing money, then, even the employed homeless person is often trapped by these circumstances.

There is no social dysfunction which does not impact and/or fuel homelessness, and  one important cause and consequent effect of it lies within the nature of traditional homes to begin with. As women are increasingly encouraged to abandon domestic situations wherein they are abused, they typically have no recourse except that of the shelter. Motivated, and correctly so, to protect themselves from danger, they nonetheless are reduced to another state of extreme vulnerability. “According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, approximately half of all women and children experiencing homelessness are fleeing domestic violence” (Bringle 8).

This is a scenario of homelessness frequently self-perpetuating, for it incorporates factors beyond that of relatively simple unemployment issues. In cases of abused women being homeless, a host of further dilemmas must be confronted. Such women are dealing with the multiple issues of psychological and physical abuse, feelings of utter displacement, and are typically not equipped to even enter the job market. The cause in this situation creates the ongoing effect because the variety of problems leading to the homeless state are complex and not easily or quickly dealt with.

So too are addiction and alcoholism common reasons for homelessness and effects of it simultaneously. The addict who loses his job and subsequently his home obviously does not merely have a housing problem, and temporary shelter will do nothing to remedy the issue which will most certainly render him homeless again. In this cycle of uncertainty and despair, the addiction usually thrives.

This serves to illustrate, as do the other scenarios behind the homeless state, why there can be no real and effective analysis of homelessness as a condition unto itself. It is, always, a result of other social and/or personal conditions.  A substantive means of responsibly addressing homelessness can only be achieved through treating with its sources, as homelessness is intrinsically both cause and effect of the actual symptom that it is.

Works Cited

Bringle, J. Homelessness in America Today. New York, NY: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2010. Print.

Gilbert, D. The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2010. Print.