Homelessness in America, Outline Example

Topic: Homelessness in America

Central Idea: We are one of the richest countries in the world and our homeless population has grown over the past 10 years.

Introduction

During the early 1980s and before, urban homeless assistance was provided primarily by missions and soup kitchens operating with a religious or charitable motivation (Saulny, 2012). Located almost exclusively in old “skid row” areas of the nation’s cities, these programs usually received no government funding and offered the bare minimum of meals or overnight shelter. They did not form a coherent system of care, did not assess local need for service and try to fill gaps, and were focused primarily on serving a single male homeless and near-homeless clientele (Saulny, 2012). There are many ways in which the government and urgencies are struggling to resolve homelessness:

1. Many federal agencies have spent years “suggesting” a collaborative approach to communities and programs (Saulny, 2012). But even when federal program managers have clear ideas about what service structures they think would best serve the clients of their programs, they often do not have the authority to make these happen at the local level.
2. Federal funding mechanisms such as block grants, formula grants, or single-focus competitive funding streams frequently leave federal officials without the leverage to require service components and service structures that have been shown to work. State officials managing similar programs often labor under equivalent restrictions (Saulny, 2012).
3. Organized systems of programs serving homeless people have been a long time coming in the United States. Many safety net and antipoverty programs to address the needs of the country were instituted during the New Deal in the 1930s and the War on Poverty in the 1960s (Saulny, 2012).

It was not until the mid-1980s that homeless-specific programs and services were seen in more than a handful of major U.S. cities, while in rural areas the New Deal and War on Poverty programs, which are not homeless-specific, offered the primary assistance to any rural poor who experienced homelessness, and are still the backbone of rural homeless assistance today.

References

The Associated Press. (2007). Veterans makes up 1 in 4 homeless. USA Today. Retrived from http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-11-07-homeless-veterans_N.htm

Saulny, S. (2012). After Recession, More Young Adults Are Living on Street

New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/us/since-recession-more-young-americans-are-homeless.html