essay about homeless family

Essays About Homelessness: Top 8 Examples Plus Prompts

Everyone has heard of homeless people at some point in their lives; if you are writing essays about homelessness, read our top essay examples and prompts.

Poverty is one of the greatest evils in the world. Its effects are seen daily, from people begging on the streets to stealing to support their families. But unfortunately, one of the most prominent and upsetting diversity is homelessness. Homelessness is a significant problem in even the most developed nations, including the U.S. and Canada. Despite all the resources used to fight this issue, countries often lack the means to reduce homelessness significantly. With the proper aid, homelessness can be entirely eradicated in the future. 

If you want to write essays about homelessness, keep reading to see our essay examples and helpful writing prompts.

2. A journey with the homeless by Sujata Jena

3. i chose to be homeless: reflections on the homeless challenge by emily kvalheim, 4. my experience being homeless by scott benner, 5. what people get wrong when they try to end homelessness by james abro, 1. causes of homelessness , 2. how can homelessness be reduced, 3. mental illness and homelessness, 4. reflection on homelessness, 5. is homelessness a “personal problem”.

Are you looking for more? Check out our guide packed full of transition words for essays

1. That Homeless Man is My Brother by Megan Regnerus

“But the subtext of my friend’s statement is really Why should I give money to someone who’s lazy; who isn’t willing to work for money like I do?’ And to that I say, her opinion that people who ask for money are freeloaders who could work but choose not to, is based on assumption. It relies on the notion that the two things that shape us into able-bodied adults who can hold down a regular job, nature and nurture, are level playing fields. And they’re not.”

Regnerus writes about a friend’s claim that the homeless are “lazy,” reminding her of her homeless brother. She cites genetics and circumstance as contributing factors to homelessness. Despite the other woman being her friend, Regnerus strongly refutes her belief that the homeless are non-disabled freeloaders- they should be treated with empathy. For more, check out these articles about homelessness .

“I realize that the situation of poverty and homelessness is a huge social problem around the world. But when I meet them, I face fellow human beings, not some abstract “social problem.” The very phrase, “What would Jesus do at this scene?” haunted me.  I ventured to ask their names, age, where they came from, where they live (street, bridges, cemetery) and the reason they are on the streets. Their stories are poignant. Each one has a unique story to tell about his/her reason to be homeless, how they were forced to leave distant rural villages to live on the city streets. I tried to listen to them with empathy.”

In her essay, Jena remembers the homeless people in Manila, Philippines. She can see them beyond some “aspect of society” as human beings. She empathizes with them extensively and recalls the words of Jesus Christ about loving others, particularly the neediest.

“I, too, have not been compassionate enough, and I have allowed my prejudices to distort my view of the homeless. One woman, who sat across from me at a feeding program, talking to herself erratically, may have seemed strange to me before the Homeless Challenge. But when I really saw myself as her equal, and when I took the time to watch her get up and laugh as she danced to the music playing in the background, I thought she was beautiful. She had found her own happiness, amidst despair.”

Kvalheim details her experiences during an immersion challenge with the homeless. She recalls both the discrimination and generosity she experienced and her experiences with other homeless people. She was amazed to see how they could stay positive despite their terrible circumstances. We should be thankful for what we have and use it to help others in need. 

“As my funds dwindled, and the weather got colder, I sought shelter at Father Bill’s in Quincy Ma. When you are homeless, sometimes very small things mean a lot. A dry pair of socks, shoes without holes, a pocketful of change. You begin to realize how much you value your personal space. You begin to realize other people want space too. A lot of people have issues or have suffered in one way or another and you can see their pain. I think that there are people who for a variety of issue are chronically homeless and a larger portion of homeless are transitioning through a series of bad events.”

Benner’s essay, written for the company ArtLifting, reflects on his experience of being homeless for a brief while. Then, he and his wife grew ill, and Benner sought refuge at a homeless shelter after his company shut down. After that, he realized how his struggles were very different from those of others and the value of the more minor things he previously took for granted. Luckily, he escaped homelessness by making art with the help of ArtLifting. 

“The court denied my sister’s request and named me our mother’s legal guardian, but it appointed my sister as guardian of her property.  In 2009, when my mother passed away, my sister evicted me. The day I was scheduled to move out, I stood in a convenience store, dazed, as I stared at microwaveable meals.  These would be my new staple when I moved into the motel room. My phone rang—my sister.  She told me she needed me out of the house in a couple of hours—she was a real estate agent and a client wanted to see the house. ‘No hard feelings,’ she said.”

Similar to Benner, Abro narrates the circumstances surrounding his homelessness. After his mother’s death and a conflict with his sister led to his eviction, he ended up homeless. While his situation was unfortunate, he believes that there are many people worse off than him and that something must change to address the housing and poverty crises in America.

Top 5 Prompts On Essays about Homelessness

For your essay, it would be interesting to write about how people become homeless in the first place. Research the different causes of homelessness and elaborate on them, and be sure to provide sources such as statistics and anecdotes. 

What solutions to homelessness can you think of? In your essay, propose at least one way you think the homelessness problem can be solved or at least reduced. It must be concrete, realistic, and defensible; be sure to explain your solution well and defend its feasibility, backing up your claims with facts and logic. 

Homelessness and mental health can be linked—research into declining mental health and how homelessness can impact a person’s mental well-being. Make sure to use research data and statistics to show your findings. Conclude whether poor mental health can cause homelessness or if homelessness causes poor mental health.

You can write about what homelessness means to you in your essay. Perhaps you’ve heard stories of homeless people, or maybe you know someone who is or has been homeless. Use this essay to highly the effects of homelessness and how we can work together as a society to eradicate it.

Many say that homeless people “choose to be homeless” and are underachievers; otherwise, they would simply “get a job” and lift themselves out of poverty. Is this true? Research this topic and decide on your stance. Then, write about whether you agree with this topic for a compelling argumentative essay.

If you’re still stuck, check out our general resource of essay writing topics .

Martin is an avid writer specializing in editing and proofreading. He also enjoys literary analysis and writing about food and travel.

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5 Essays About Homelessness

Around the world, people experience homelessness. According to a 2005 survey by the United Nations, 1.6 billion people lack adequate housing. The causes vary depending on the place and person. Common reasons include a lack of affordable housing, poverty, a lack of mental health services, and more. Homelessness is rooted in systemic failures that fail to protect those who are most vulnerable. Here are five essays that shine a light on the issue of homelessness:

What Would ‘Housing as a Human Right’ Look Like in California? (2020) – Molly Solomon

For some time, activists and organizations have proclaimed that housing is a human right. This essay explores what that means and that it isn’t a new idea. Housing as a human right was part of federal policy following the Great Depression. In a 1944 speech introducing what he called the “Second Bill of Rights,” President Roosevelt attempted to address poverty and income equality. The right to have a “decent home” was included in his proposals. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration also recognizes housing as a human right. It describes the right to an “adequate standard of living.” Other countries such as France and Scotland include the right to housing in their constitutions. In the US, small local governments have adopted resolutions on housing. How would it work in California?

At KQED, Molly Solomon covers housing affordability. Her stories have aired on NPR’s All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and other places. She’s won three national Edward R. Murrow awards.

“What People Get Wrong When They Try To End Homelessness” – James Abro

In his essay, James Abro explains what led up to six weeks of homelessness and his experiences helping people through social services. Following the death of his mother and eviction, Abro found himself unhoused. He describes himself as “fortunate” and feeling motivated to teach people how social services worked. However, he learned that his experience was somewhat unique. The system is complicated and those involved don’t understand homelessness. Abro believes investing in affordable housing is critical to truly ending homelessness.

James Abro is the founder of Advocate for Economic Fairness and 32 Beach Productions. He works as an advocate for homeless rights locally and nationally. Besides TalkPoverty, he contributes to Rebelle Society and is an active member of the New Jersey Coalition to End Homelessness.

“No Shelter For Some: Street-Sleepers” (2019)

This piece (by an unknown author) introduces the reader to homelessness in urban China. In the past decades, a person wouldn’t see many homeless people. This was because of strict rules on internal migration and government-supplied housing. Now, the rules have changed. People from rural areas can travel more and most urban housing is privatized. People who are homeless – known as “street-sleepers” are more visible. This essay is a good summary of the system (which includes a shift from police management of homelessness to the Ministry of Civil Affairs) and how street-sleepers are treated.

“A Window Onto An American Nightmare” (2020) – Nathan Heller

This essay from the New Yorker focuses on San Francisco’s history with homelessness, the issue’s complexities, and various efforts to address it. It also touches on how the pandemic has affected homelessness. One of the most intriguing parts of this essay is Heller’s description of becoming homeless. He says people “slide” into it, as opposed to plunging. As an example, someone could be staying with friends while looking for a job, but then the friends decide to stop helping. Maybe someone is jumping in and out of Airbnbs, looking for an apartment. Heller’s point is that the line between only needing a place to stay for a night or two and true “homelessness” is very thin.

Nathan Heller joined the New Yorker’s writing staff in 2013. He writes about technology, higher education, the Bay Area, socioeconomics, and more. He’s also a contributing editor at Vogue, a former columnist for Slate, and contributor to other publications.

“Homelessness in Ireland is at crisis point, and the vitriol shown towards homeless people is just as shocking” (2020)#- Megan Nolan

In Ireland, the housing crisis has been a big issue for years. Recently, it’s come to a head in part due to a few high-profile incidents, such as the death of a young woman in emergency accommodation. The number of children experiencing homelessness (around 4,000) has also shone a light on the severity of the issue. In this essay, Megan Nolan explores homelessness in Ireland as well as the contempt that society has for those who are unhoused.

Megan Nolan writes a column for the New Statesman. She also writes essays, criticism, and fiction. She’s from Ireland but based in London.

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City of Boston workers clear encampments in the area known as Mass and Cass.

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Experts cite complexity of problem, which is rooted in poverty, lack of affordable housing but includes medical, psychiatric, substance-use issues

It took seven years for Abigail Judge to see what success looked like for one Boston homeless woman.

The woman had been sex trafficked since she was young, was a drug user, and had been abused, neglected, or exploited in just about every relationship she’d had. If Judge was going to help her, trust had to come first. Everything else — recovery, healing, employment, rejoining society’s mainstream — might be impossible without it. That meant patience despite the daily urgency of the woman’s situation.

“It’s nonlinear. She gets better, stops, gets re-engaged with the trafficker and pulled back into the lifestyle. She does time because she was literally holding the bag of fentanyl for these guys,” said Judge, a psychology instructor at Harvard Medical School whose outreach program, Boston Human Exploitation and Sex Trafficking (HEAT), is supported by Massachusetts General Hospital and the Boston Police Department. “This is someone who’d been initially trafficked as a kid and when I met her was 23 or 24. She turned 30 last year, and now she’s housed, she’s abstinent, she’s on suboxone. And she’s super involved in her community.”

It’s a success story, but one that illustrates some of the difficulties of finding solutions to the nation’s homeless problem. And it’s not a small problem. A  December 2023 report  by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said 653,104 Americans experienced homelessness, tallied on a single night in January last year. That figure was the highest since HUD began reporting on the issue to Congress in 2007 .

Abigail Judge of the Medical School (from left) and Sandra Andrade of Massachusetts General Hospital run the outreach program Boston HEAT (Human Exploitation and Sex Trafficking).

Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

Scholars, healthcare workers, and homeless advocates agree that two major contributing factors are poverty and a lack of affordable housing, both stubbornly intractable societal challenges. But they add that hard-to-treat psychiatric issues and substance-use disorders also often underlie chronic homelessness. All of which explains why those who work with the unhoused refer to what they do as “the long game,” “the long walk,” or “the five-year-plan” as they seek to address the traumas underlying life on the street.

“As a society, we’re looking for a quick fix, but there’s no quick fix for this,” said Stephen Wood, a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics and a nurse practitioner in the emergency room at Carney Hospital in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. “It takes a lot of time to fix this. There will be relapses; there’ll be problems. It requires an interdisciplinary effort for success.”

A recent study of 60,000 homeless people in Boston found the average age of death was decades earlier than the nation’s 2017 life expectancy of 78.8 years.

Illustration by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff

Katherine Koh, an assistant professor of psychiatry at HMS and psychiatrist at MGH on the street team for Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, traced the rise of homelessness in recent decades to a combination of factors, including funding cuts for community-based care, affordable housing, and social services in the 1980s as well as deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals.

“Though we have grown anesthetized to seeing people living on the street in the U.S., homelessness is not inevitable,” said Koh, who sees patients where they feel most comfortable — on the street, in church basements, public libraries. “For most of U.S. history, it has not been nearly as visible as it is now. There are a number of countries with more robust social services but similar prevalence of mental illness, for example, where homelessness rates are significantly lower. We do not have to accept current rates of homelessness as the way it has to be.”

“As a society, we’re looking for a quick fix, but there’s no quick fix for this.” Stephen Wood, visiting fellow, Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics

Success stories exist and illustrate that strong leadership, multidisciplinary collaboration, and adequate resources can significantly reduce the problem. Prevention, meanwhile, in the form of interventions focused on transition periods like military discharge, aging out of foster care, and release from prison, has the potential to vastly reduce the numbers of the newly homeless.

Recognition is also growing — at Harvard and elsewhere — that homelessness is not merely a byproduct of other issues, like drug use or high housing costs, but is itself one of the most difficult problems facing the nation’s cities. Experts say that means interventions have to be multidisciplinary yet focused on the problem; funding for research has to rise; and education of the next generation of leaders on the issue must improve.

“This is an extremely complex problem that is really the physical and most visible embodiment of a lot of the public health challenges that have been happening in this country,” said Carmel Shachar, faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation. “The public health infrastructure has always been the poor Cinderella, compared to the healthcare system, in terms of funding. We need increased investment in public health services, in the public health workforce, such that, for people who are unhoused, are unsheltered, who are struggling with substance use, we have a meaningful answer for them.”

“You can either be admitted to a hospital with a substance-use disorder, or you can be admitted with a psychiatric disorder, but very, very rarely will you be admitted to what’s called a dual-diagnosis bed,” said Wood, a nurse practitioner in the emergency room at Carney Hospital.

Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

Experts say that the nation’s unhoused population not only experiences poverty and exposure to the elements, but also suffers from a lack of basic health care, and so tend to get hit earlier and harder than the general population by various ills — from the flu to opioid dependency to COVID-19.

A recent study of 60,000 homeless people in Boston recorded 7,130 deaths over the 14-year study period. The average age of death was 53.7, decades earlier than the nation’s 2017 life expectancy of 78.8 years. The leading cause of death was drug overdose, which increased 9.35 percent annually, reflecting the track of the nation’s opioid epidemic, though rising more quickly than in the general population.

A closer look at the data shows that impacts vary depending on age, sex, race, and ethnicity. All-cause mortality was highest among white men, age 65 to 79, while suicide was a particular problem among the young. HIV infection and homicide, meanwhile, disproportionately affected Black and Latinx individuals. Together, those results highlight the importance of tailoring interventions to background and circumstances, according to Danielle Fine, instructor in medicine at HMS and MGH and an author of two analyses of the study’s data.

“The takeaway is that the mortality gap between the homeless population and the general population is widening over time,” Fine said. “And this is likely driven in part by a disproportionate number of drug-related overdose deaths in the homeless population compared to the general population.”

Inadequate supplies of housing

Though homelessness has roots in poverty and a lack of affordable housing, it also can be traced to early life issues, Koh said. The journey to the streets often starts in childhood, when neglect and abuse leave their marks, interfering with education, acquisition of work skills, and the ability to maintain healthy relationships.

“A major unaddressed pathway to homelessness, from my vantage point, is childhood trauma. It can ravage people’s lives and minds, until old age,” Koh said. “For example, some of my patients in their 70s still talk about the trauma that their parents inflicted on them. The lack of affordable housing is a key factor, though there are other drivers of homelessness we must also tackle.”

The number was the highest since the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development began reporting on the issue to Congress in 2007 .

Most advocates embrace a “housing first” approach, prioritizing it as a first step to obtaining other vital services. But they say the type of housing also matters. Temporary shelters are a key part of the response, but many of the unhoused avoid them because of fears of theft, assault, and sexual assault. Instead, long-term beds, including those designated for people struggling with substance use and mental health issues, are needed.

“You can either be admitted to a hospital with a substance-use disorder, or you can be admitted with a psychiatric disorder, but very, very rarely will you be admitted to what’s called a dual-diagnosis bed,” said Petrie-Flom’s Wood. “The data is pretty solid on this issue: If you have a substance-use disorder there’s likely some underlying, severe trauma. Yet, when we go to treat them, we address one but not the other. You’re never going to find success in the system that we currently have if you don’t recognize that dual diagnosis.”

Services offered to those in housing should avoid what Koh describes as a “one-size-fits-none” approach. Some might need monthly visits from a caseworker to ensure they’re getting the support they need, she said. But others struggle once off the streets. They need weekly — even daily — support from counselors, caseworkers, and other service providers.

“I have seen, sadly, people who get housed and move very quickly back out on the streets or, even more tragically, lose their life from an unwitnessed overdose in housing,” Koh said. “There’s a community that’s formed on the street so if you overdose, somebody can give you Narcan or call 911. If you don’t have the safety of peers around, people can die. We had a patient who literally died just a few days after being housed, from an overdose. We really cannot just house people and expect their problems to be solved. We need to continue to provide the best care we can to help people succeed once in housing.”

“We really cannot just house people and expect their problems to be solved.”  Katherine Koh, Mass. General psychiatrist

Koh works on the street team for Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program.

Photo by Dylan Goodman

The nation’s failure to address the causes of homelessness has led to the rise of informal encampments from Portland, Maine, to the large cities of the West Coast. In Boston, an informal settlement of tents and tarps near the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard was a point of controversy before it was cleared in November.

In the aftermath, more than 100 former “Mass and Cass” residents have been moved into housing, according to media reports. But experts were cautious in their assessment of the city’s plans. They gave positive marks for features such as a guaranteed place to sleep, “low threshold” shelters that don’t require sobriety, and increased outreach to connect people with services. But they also said it’s clear that unintended consequences have arisen. and the city’s homelessness problem is far from solved.

Examples abound. Judge, who leads Boston HEAT in collaboration with Sandra Andrade of MGH, said that a woman she’d been working with for two years, who had been making positive strides despite fragile health, ongoing sexual exploitation, and severe substance use disorder, disappeared after Mass and Cass was cleared.

Mike Jellison, a peer counselor who works on Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program’s street team, said dismantling the encampment dispersed people around the city and set his team scrambling to find and reconnect people who had been receiving medical care with providers. It’s also clear, he said, that Boston Police are taking a hard line to prevent new encampments from popping up in other neighborhoods, quickly clearing tents and other structures.

“We were out there Wednesday morning on our usual route in Charlesgate,” Jellison said in early December. “And there was a really young couple who had all their stuff packed. And [the police] just told them, ‘You’ve got to leave, you can’t stay here.’ She was crying, ‘Where am I going to go?’ This was a couple who works; they’re employed and work out of a tent. It was like 20 degrees out there. It was heartbreaking.”

Prevention as cure?

Successes in reducing homelessness in the U.S. are scarce, but not unknown. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, has reduced veteran homelessness nationally by more than 50 percent since 2010.

Experts point out, however, that the agency has advantages in dealing with the problem. It is a single, nationwide, administrative entity so medical records follow patients when they move, offering continuity of care often absent for those without insurance or dealing with multiple private providers. Another advantage is that the VA’s push, begun during the Obama administration, benefited from both political will on the part of the White House and Congress and received support and resources from other federal agencies.

The city of Houston is another example. In 2011, Houston had the nation’s fifth-largest homeless population. Then-Mayor Annise Parker began a program that coordinated 100 regional nonprofits to provide needed services and boost the construction of low-cost housing in the relatively inexpensive Houston market.

Neither the VA nor Houston was able to eliminate homelessness, however.

To Koh, that highlights the importance of prevention. In 2022, she published research in which she and a team used an artificial-intelligence-driven model to identify those who could benefit from early intervention before they wound up on the streets. The researchers examined a group of U.S. service members and found that self-reported histories of depression, trauma due to a loved one’s murder, and post-traumatic stress disorder were the three strongest predictors of homelessness after discharge.

In April 2023, Koh, with co-author Benjamin Land Gorman, suggested in the Journal of the American Medical Association that using “Critical Time Intervention,” where help is focused on key transitions, such as military discharge or release from prison or the hospital, has the potential to head off homelessness.

“So much of the clinical research and policy focus is on housing those who are already homeless,” Koh said. “But even if we were to house everybody who’s homeless today, there are many more people coming down the line. We need sustainable policies that address these upstream determinants of homelessness, in order to truly solve this problem.”

The education imperative

Despite the obvious presence of people living and sleeping on city sidewalks, the topic of homelessness has been largely absent from the nation’s colleges and universities. Howard Koh, former Massachusetts commissioner of public health and former U.S. assistant secretary for Health and Human Services, is working to change that.

In 2019, Koh, who is also the Harvey V. Fineberg Professor of the Practice of Public Health Leadership, founded the Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health’s pilot Initiative on Health and Homelessness. The program seeks to educate tomorrow’s leaders about homelessness and support research and interdisciplinary collaboration to create new knowledge on the topic. The Chan School’s course “Homelessness and Health: Lessons from Health Care, Public Health, and Research” is one of just a handful focused on homelessness offered by schools of public health nationwide.

“The topic remains an orphan,” said Koh. The national public health leader (who also happens to be Katherine’s father) traced his interest in the topic to a bitter winter while he was Massachusetts public health commissioner when 13 homeless people froze to death on Boston’s streets. “I’ve been haunted by this issue for several decades as a public health professional. We now want to motivate courageous and compassionate young leaders to step up and address the crisis, educate students, motivate researchers, and better inform policymakers about evidence-based studies. We want every student who walks through Harvard Yard and sees vulnerable people lying in Harvard Square to not accept their suffering as normal.”

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How To Write Essay About Homelessness

Homelessness remains a severe crisis among the low-income earners in most parts of the world. Statics reveal that in the United States alone, over 500,000 people are homeless every single night. That said, writing an excellent essay on homelessness to your examiner not only awards you a top grade but also positions you as a student passionate about everything that revolves around homelessness.

How to Organize an Essay on Homelessness

What matters most in your homelessness essay, what to write in your homelessness essay: essay topics on homelessness, common types of essay about homelessness, are homelessness essay examples helpful.

But here’s the thing: writing solutions to homelessness essay, homelessness essay cause, and effect, or any other topic you settle on is not a walk in the park. You need to research extensively, follow the necessary instructions, and exhaust the topic in a precise and detailed approach. Luckily, our essay for homelessness writers will make everything easy for you.

What Is Homelessness Essay?

A homelessness essay is a piece of writing that allows the students to showcase their thoughts on homelessness without deviating from their chosen topic. A good example is writing a homelessness solutions essay or what causes homelessness essay to your professor. It must come out nicely from the start to the conclusion of the homelessness essay.

Your essay about homelessness might address the episodic, transitional, or chronic types of homelessness. It’s because people are considered homeless whenever they lack a roof over their head, whether staying with friends, on the streets, or in a shelter. But how do you structure your homelessness essay?

Your homelessness essay needs well-written thoughts expressed in a way your examiner finds it easy to read all the sections, understand your idea, and internalize to see whether you present facts appropriately. All this is possible if you use the recommended format. Here’s what you need:

• Attractive introduction: Your homelessness essay introduction should have the reader’s attention from the word go. It’s here where you claim your idea and create some anticipation. Your last introductory sentence is a debatable thesis statement you’ll be arguing.
• Idealistic main body: Support your cause and effect essay on homelessness or anything else you’re writing with well-researched data. Write and cite your logical ideas. Your examiner will primarily focus on the facts and flow of your solution to homelessness essay.
• Satisfactory conclusion: Do you know that homelessness essay conclusions are the most assumed sections? Your conclusion paragraph homelessness essay’s main goal is to summarize the essay. If you write your homelessness conclusion essay right, the examiner knows how to end homelessness essay is not a problem to you and awards you a high score.

Whether you are writing a one-page problem solution essay about homelessness, the cause, and effect of homelessness essay, or a longer essay on homelessness in America, there are things you can’t assume. It’s because they define your prowess and determine the quality of your final paper. Here’s what we’re talking about:

• Homelessness essay sources
• Homelessness essay outline
• Homelessness essay conclusion
• Homelessness essay referencing
• Homelessness essay proofreading

Are you looking for homelessness essay topics to write for your professor? There’s a lot to write about. You can get a topic idea from the following types of homelessness essays:

• Mental illness and homelessness essay . Topic idea: how homelessness results in mental illness in young street mothers.
• Essay about homelessness cause and effect . Topic idea: to what extent does the shortage of affordable homes in America contribute to homelessness?
• Causes of homelessness essay . Topic idea: fundamental reasons why evictions continue to cause homelessness severely.
• Solution for homelessness essay . Topic idea: is there’s a need for changing policies on homelessness where a whole family is involved?
• Youth homelessness essay . Topic idea: factual prove that mandatory drug testing will reduce homelessness in youths.
• Homelessness social problem essay . Topic idea: homelessness vs. settled citizens concerning the view on community responsibilities.
• Homelessness in America essay . Topic idea: how can discrimination reduce homelessness in America?
• Poverty and homelessness essay . Topic idea: government rental assistance and its effectiveness in solving the modern homelessness crisis.

Every student must understand different essays to write what suits the examined context. High school, college, and university examiners are very concerned about the essay you choose to write because it helps them weigh your understanding and skills. These essays include:

• Argumentative essay on homelessness: a homelessness argumentative essay must convince anybody who reads the essay. The secret here is to give both sides of the story and let your professor see your reasoning.
• Persuasive essay about homelessness: looking forward to writing a persuasive essay on homelessness? A homelessness persuasive essay without expert touch, opinions, logic, and facts won’t earn you a good grade. Do the necessary.
• Descriptive essay on homelessness: Sometimes, you might need to describe specific issues revolving around homeless people. In such an essay, focus on the event and visualize it in detail to bring out your imagination and creativity.

A resounding yes! You can depend on previous examples to learn what a homelessness essay requires. It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing a homelessness and mental illness essay, causes, and effects of homelessness essay, essay about homelessness in America, or essay on homelessness in Ireland; examples make your writing easy and clearer.

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College Essay: Overcoming homelessness

Homelessness can happen to anyone. I know because I experienced it. One day in fifth grade, my parents sat my siblings and me down together in our tiny apartment. Mom is calm and says, “Dad got fired, and we don’t have a place to stay.”

I felt worried that the six of us are now homeless. We packed up our heavy furniture and dishes and locked them away in a storage unit. The rest of our belongings came with us to a shelter called Mary’s Place in downtown Minneapolis. It’s a nonprofit charitable organization that uses donations to provide transitional apartments for homeless families with children.

Our apartment at Mary’s Place had two small rooms, one bathroom and a huge living room connected to the kitchen. They offered us free food and clothes. On the weekdays, we rode to school in big buses or taxi cars with strangers because we didn’t have other transportation to school.

When we got home from school, my brother and I pretended to be like race cars riding down the long hallways. In one room, students and teachers were scattered working on homework. We moved around the building using magnetic-striped cards that we used to enter and exit rooms. I visualized my parents as being spies.

For the most part, I felt grateful for a warm place to stay for all of us. But, for two months I was homesick because a shelter never felt like home and people were always watching. I felt like a prisoner sinking into the huge ocean that was swallowing us up.

After two months, my dad finally found a job to support our family. We moved out of Mary’s Place and found a nice apartment in St. Paul for us to settle in. Moving out, I felt like a bird flying freely in the big, beautiful sky. I don’t ever want to be homeless again.

As soon as I could legally work, I applied for a job at an organization called Urban Roots. I said to myself, “I need this job so I can save money for college and earn a good job that can support my family!”

At first it was hard for me to display my personality and communicate with my coworkers. By the end of the summer, I gained confidence to talk with more of my peers and open up. I returned a second year and I was promoted to having more hours and took on more responsibility at Urban Roots. During the summer, I learned how to become a leader to the new employees and teach them what I learned. My team and I helped fix the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary in St. Paul, and also helped with a huge project for the Department of Natural Resources to create a better environment for visitors. We also fixed Dayton’s Bluff Elementary School’s garden while working with young students.

Working at Urban Roots for two years allowed me to save money to help my family and to pay for college. Urban Roots, just like the kind, compassionate people at Mary’s Place, provided opportunities for people like me to feel like they’re a part of a community. And I want to do the same for others. My family and I are a long way away from being homeless, but we will never forget our experiences.

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‘We just need food’: Manila’s newly homeless tell stories of survival in lockdown – photo essay

As Covid hit, thousands of Filipinos were left trapped in the capital without work. Many ended up on the street and are still waiting to rebuild their lives

L ike so many others before her, Michelle Sicat, a 28-year-old single mother from the province of Nueva Ecija, had come to Metro Manila to get a job to support her family. She left her daughter with her parents so she could work as a shop assistant in one of the city’s busiest commercial districts. Sicat’s sacrifice was one that many Filipinos from rural areas have to make.

Despite missing home, Sicat was happy to have a job. But then the Covid-19 pandemic struck. The Philippine government placed the entire island of Luzon – where the Metro Manila region is located – under the strictest level of lockdown . The restrictions forced most businesses to close. Most people were ordered to stay at home.

For many living on the streets, there is no shelter from the elements

Many people – like Sicat – who lived from one payday to another suddenly found themselves without jobs. Without government support, going hungry was a serious threat.

Sicat tried to get home. But when she arrived at the bus station, she found there were hordes of people like her already there, desperate to leave Manila. She was willing to queue for hours to get on a bus. She didn’t care if she had to stand for the journey, or sit on the floor, as long as she could go home.

But she could not get on a bus. Instead, she found herself, along with others who were now stranded and homeless, taking refuge along the Manila Baywalk – a seaside promenade overlooking Manila Bay.

As public transport ceased, the areas near Manila Bay became a refuge to many homeless and stranded people

Before the pandemic, there were already an estimated 3 million homeless people in the city of Manila , largely the result of poverty caused by unemployment. Covid-19 added to the number.

The government deployed social workers to round up homeless people and place them in temporary shelters, which is where Sicat found herself.

It’s where she met Jerwin Mendoza, 36. Mendoza became homeless when the shopping mall where he worked as an electrician closed. Unable to pay for food or lodgings, he was forced to go to a shelter.

At first, he thought that living in the shelter would tide him over during the lockdown. NGOs and private individuals sent provisions. He said that the people running the shelter would ask him – along with others – to pose for photos while receiving boxes of food, clothes, and sanitary items. “After each ceremony, we always hoped to receive something from the donations,” said Mendoza. “But the donations were immediately locked up in the storage room of the facility. I thought we were supposed to enjoy some treats in lieu of the unchanging and bland meals that they served us every day. I don’t know why these shelter volunteers were keeping the donations from us.”

Neither Mendoza or Sicat ever thought they would end up living in a shelter, which soon became crowded and cramped. The government-run facility was supposed to offer reprieve. Instead, they felt like prisoners, they say.

These pop-up cubicles were supposed to be temporary shelters for those on the streets but felt more like jail cells

“Keeping us there was a death sentence to those who depend on us,” Sicat said. “My family hasn’t eaten properly because I haven’t been able to send them money. I don’t know what to do.”

People who had taken refuge in the shelter were not allowed to leave unless a family member picked them up, even though roads were blocked and there was no public transport because of lockdown. Quarantine passes were handed out to make sure that only one person from each house went out to get food and other essential goods.

The pair were desperate to leave the shelter to find jobs. They didn’t want their families to starve. So, they planned their escape. After three failed attempts that involved beatings from the shelter’s security guards, they were able to scale a wall and jump to freedom.

Thousands of those stranded in Manila and rendered homeless took refuge in shelters run by churches and private institutions during the early phase of the lockdown in 2020

Outside the shelters, the attempted exodus to the provinces continued. Thousands of people, including returning and laid-off overseas workers, waited in sports arenas, on piers and at airports in the hope of leaving the city. Several local authorities around the country had implemented stringent rules that further prevented many people from going back to their home towns.

Some people were fortunate to slip through checkpoints around Metro Manila to leave the city. Others were left with no option but to stay and cope with the daily struggle of surviving the pandemic. As the government scrambled to contain the virus, people in the streets were saying: “We won’t die from Covid-19 because we’ll die from hunger.”

To avoid roundups and being placed in community shelters, homeless people hide in the Liwasang Bonifacio underpass

After escaping the shelter, but unable to leave Manila, Sicat and Mendoza ended up at the Liwasang Bonifacio underpass in the centre of the city. Before the pandemic, people from the provinces seeking work in Manila would go there. It served as a recruitment centre for those still looking for work. Employers knew to go to the plaza to find cheap labour, and most people staying there managed to get manual work – in small food factories, as stevedores, market helpers and construction workers. Daily wages ranged from $2 to $11. Though earnings were modest, people were at least able to send money to their families, retaining some to pay for food and accommodation. Those who earned the least ate from soup kitchens and slept on park benches. But over lockdown, the jobs dried up.

“Since I can’t bring anything to the table, I don’t want them to have another mouth to feed. Leaving is my way of helping them,” Alan Yongco explained

B efore the streets became his home, Alan Yongco, 58, was a mobile phone salesperson. He lost his job because of lockdown. Yongco was so ashamed of being unemployed that he decided to leave his family. His home was just a few kilometres from where he used to work.

Despite his daughter’s pleas for him to come home, Yongco refused. He said he didn’t want to be a burden to his family. It was left to Yongco’s eldest son, who works overseas, to get the family through the pandemic.

Yongco visited food banks to eat. He befriended Father Flaviano “Flavie” Villanueva, of the Society of the Divine Word (SVD). The priest had been offering meals, clothes and temporary refuge for homeless people at the St Arnold Janssen Kalinga Center (AJKC) in the Santa Cruz area of Manila, until it was closed by officials soon after lockdown for allegedly violating social distancing rules .

With the centre closed, Flavie worried that homeless people would become more susceptible to Covid if they were weak from hunger. He decided on some outreach work.

Children, pregnant women, elderly people and those with disabilities are prioritised in the distribution lines. Troublemakers are pushed to the back or denied a donation pack for that day

He asked Yongco to be the lead coordinator in the distribution of food packs, vitamins and hygiene kits – containing soap and face masks – to homeless people. Yongco felt he had found his new purpose in life – helping those in the same circumstances as him.

Yongco asked Marlon and Tisay Adesas to help him serve close to a hundred individuals and several homeless families staying at Liwasang Bonifacio. Marlon and Tisay had both worked at a market but had to stop because of coronavirus travel restrictions. They had been living with their 15-year-old son in a house shared by three families. But the cramped space became toxic and Marlon would get into fights. To avoid further rows, the family left for a life on the streets.

Top left: Homeless people wait for potential employers and food rations in Liwasang Bonifacio, one of Manila’s ‘freedom parks’ where permission is not required to hold gatherings. Top right: A Kalinga Center worker distributes face masks as hundreds of people line up to receive food and hygiene packs. Above: Marlon and Tisay Adesas and Alan Yongco with his head bandaged. Yongco had run out of meal coupons to distribute and had been attacked by an irate homeless person

The AJKC team created a list of those who would receive support packages – to maintain order and ensure that everything would be distributed properly. It was also to deter hoarding, and prevent other homeless wanderers from following the distribution route in the hope of getting supplies. “If we don’t do this, no one will and there will be chaos,” says Marlon.

The AJKC prioritises the sick, elderly people, and those with families to receive food packs. But as not all homeless people around the underpass could be listed as recipients, Yongco and his fellow volunteers have been threatened and physically attacked.

Tisay Adedas tends to a baby rescued from child traffickers. Illegal adoption of newborn babies from very poor families is widespread

Behind Manila’s central post office is a dead-end street that by evening transforms into the “sleeping quarters” for hundreds of homeless people. The area is also designated for sick and elderly people. The Adesases manage this area.

Whenever someone is ill, Marlon takes them to a nearby health centre for treatment. If medication is required, the couple seek help from local government and officials. “Our hearts are with the people here. They depend on us and we can’t just leave them,” says Tisay, adding that Marlon turned down a job because it would mean leaving the city. “He chose to stay here for them,” Tisay says with a laugh. “All we need is food for the day to survive. We have no reason to leave as long as we’re able to eat.”

A church volunteer distributes a meal of chocolate porridge. Donations became scarce as the lockdown dragged on

As the pandemic drags on, support for those left homeless and struggling has dwindled. With fewer donations, some NGOs and other institutions have been forced to scale down their operations.

O n the other side of Liwasang Bonifacio, Jose Quizon, 33, is starting to rebuild his life. He didn’t make it on to AJKC’s priority list for support, but says he no longer wants to depend on food donations.

Quizon left his job as a farmhand in Isabela province to seek better opportunities in Manila. At first, he jumped from one job to another until he was hired as an assistant cook at a Chinese restaurant. This brought him financial stability and he was able to provide for his family.

Jose Quizon built a push cart from scrap materials to carry his home and livelihood

When the pandemic started, Chinese Philippine offshore gaming operators halted their operations. Most employees returned to China. Among them was Quizon’s boss, who promised to return once the situation returned to normal. As days passed, Quizon waited for his employer to return. He depleted his savings, could no longer afford rent and was forced to live on the streets.

Unsheltered, alone and famished, Quizon found himself knocking on car windows to beg for loose change. Other beggars would ask him to write signs for them since, unlike most of them, he had a basic education. One day, a few months ago, while begging in front of the park, a car passenger rolled down his window and called to Quizon. “A car honked and the man called me over. He gave me 10 pesos ($0.20) and said: ‘You look like a big, healthy and able man. Why don’t you work, sell a few things, rather than beg for change?”

Top left: when food donations aren’t enough some families have to make do with what little they have. Top right: some homeless people, advised to maintain good hygiene to curb the spread of the virus, use unfiltered water from the park’s fountain for bathing. Above: homeless people are forbidden to stay in the park at Liwasang Bonifacio. Resourcefulness is required to find nearby spaces in which to sleep.

So, with $3 left of his savings, Jose bought packs of cigarettes and a few bags of sweets and started selling to passersby, as well as to homeless people. In time, he was able to add other items. He now has a modified push cart loaded with bottled water, juices and crisps.

“Begging for change was a rough time for me,” he says. “Having this cart and selling these items is no doubt more fulfilling. I am happy, and I know my old boss would be happy to know how I survived.”

Quizon is usually seen by the park’s fountain in the afternoons, where he was recruited years ago. He is still anticipating his boss’s return.

It helps when homeless families can find a small patch of soil in which to grow vegetables to supplement their diets

In August, Metro Manila and nearby provinces underwent another round of strict lockdowns owing to a surge in Delta variant cases. The country’s chief economist estimated that 177, 000 more Filipinos would be thrown into poverty and 444,000 more would lose their jobs in Metro Manila and other high-risk areas as a result of the lockdown, suggesting the likelihood of a further rise in homelessness.

Projections from the Asian Development Bank already showed that poverty in the Philippines had worsened during the pandemic and was set to remain elevated this year.

The bank’s country director Kelly Bird said in April that the crisis would probably “push the Philippine poverty incidence to 20% this year from 16.7% in 2018 .”

Government executives and business leaders are optimistic that the economy will rebound once Covid restrictions are eased. They expect poverty to decline as the economy reopens and levels of immunity rise.

After the April lockdown, Yuri, pictured, died from complications resulting from a bacterial infection. The incident led the Adesases to convince others to enter the shelter for their own protection

The government’s socioeconomic planning secretary Karl Kendrick Chua said that the Philippines could still bring down poverty incidence to its target of 14% by 2022, despite the pandemic. Poverty in the country declined from 23.3% in 2015 to 16.7% in 2018, improving the lives of almost 6 million Filipinos.

“The 14% target is still doable given the anticipated head start and recovery this year,” Chua said. However, he said the government was “monitoring recent developments, such as a surge in the new Covid variants and imposition of stricter quarantine”.

So, will this projected economic recovery be felt by the people seeking refuge at Liwasang Bonifacio? There is cause for optimism. Some employers are returning to the plaza to hire staff. But Sicat, Mendoza, Quizon, Yongco and the Adesas family continue to live day-to-day without knowing what lies ahead.

Homeless people head for ‘home’ as curfew approaches during April’s lockdown

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The Homeless in Our Community Essay

The underlying reasons for homelessness emanate from numerous social and economic sources such as poverty caused by unemployment or poor paying jobs, a deficit of affordable housing, and the lack of services for those who suffer from domestic violence, mental illness, and substance abuse. It is these and other factors that contribute to homelessness, a condition that is seldom a choice for people who must live outside the comfort and security of a home environment. This discussion will examine the homelessness issue including why and what type of people become homeless. It will also review agencies and programs offering assistance to individuals and families living on the street.

Thanks to recent public awareness campaigns by private and government agencies such as the National Coalition for the Homeless and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development respectively, long-standing societal stereotypes of the homeless are gradually evaporating. Images of creatively clothed white-bearded old men leaning against an alley wall clutching a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag have morphed into a family living in their car or a single mother and her children living in a shelter. The estimated half a million children that, at any one time, is homeless in America and their mothers represent the “fastest growing segment of the homeless population” (“Face” 2007). According to current research conducted on homeless shelters, single males comprise forty-five percent and single females fifteen percent of the estimated two million homeless in America. Forty percent of the homeless population is comprised of families and a third of them are single parents with children (“Face” 2007).

It is a misconception that most homeless persons prefer that horrific lifestyle after having adjusted to it. Studies show that ninety-four percent of those without a home certainly would not choose to live this way another day if they had an alternative. Another common fallacy regarding the homeless is that they made poor decisions thus are culpable for their fate. In addition to the large percentage of children that are homeless, many others are victims of their circumstances as well. Some veterans suffer from mental and physical disabilities resulting from combat and cannot maintain a ‘normal’ existence. Others were abused as children or raised in homelessness. Still, others fell victims to the addiction of drugs and alcohol which decimated their working and family life. Some have become ‘unemployable for various reasons or can find only menial jobs after being laid-off from a high-paying position. All homeless are victims in the sense that they do not have a place to call home (“Facts and Myths”, 2007).

Twenty-five percent of homeless women are in this demeaning and dangerous situation because they are escaping violence in the home. Predictably, this is not the case for men as only an insignificant percentage cite family violence as the main reason for their homeless condition. Unemployment is men’s most often answered response and the second most for women. (“Women and Men”, 2001). Other than family violence and to lesser extent unemployment, the differences between the stated causes for their homelessness are statistically equal for men and women. A similar segment of both genders cited drug and alcohol abuse, prolonged illnesses or disabilities, and reaching the limits of federal assistance for their homelessness to the same degree. Recent studies and public exposure have helped displace popular gender misconceptions regarding the main cause of homelessness. One of the most prevalent was that a higher percentage of men were homeless as a result of alcohol and/or drug abuse. The two genders become homeless for essentially the same reasons and to a similar extent outside of the extra cross women must bear, domestic violence (“Women and Men” 2001).

Health issues, both physical and psychological, often negatively affect a homeless person’s re-entry into society. Health care services for the homeless are intrinsically inadequate. Persons without homes seldom possess credit cards or even have bank accounts. Those that are homeless have numerous, multifaceted needs, particularly if they have been forced to sleep outside during their ordeal. The number and extent of the problems homeless persons endure only compound over time. It is financially advantageous for the public and politicians to solve the problem. Helping to take someone off the streets and place them back into mainstream society allows them to contribute to the economy rather than continuing to rely on public assistance (Wallace & Quilgars, 2005). Though there are examples of agencies that offer innovative services and have greatly improved the lives of the homeless, the problem surpasses what resources the private sector and government combined are presently directing towards it and this imbalance is growing along with the homeless population.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) offers four programs to help the homeless. Emergency Shelter Grants provides support services and shelter for homeless persons. It also provides monetary assistance intended to prevent a family from losing their home in the first place including short-term utility bills, rent, and mortgage payment assistance for those in imminent danger of losing their house. The Continuum of Care program helps communities to reduce their homeless population by offering a wide range of options including permanent, transitory, or emergency housing to those in need. “HUD believes the best approach for alleviating homelessness is through a community-based process that provides a comprehensive response to the different needs of homeless persons” (“Resource Guide”, 2007). HUD also operates the Single Room Occupancy and The Shelter Plus Care programs which provide additional services.

The Family & Youth Services Bureau of the Administration for Children and Families operates the Basic Center Program which helps communities fund shelters and free meal centers while establishing programs that serve the needs of homeless, exploited, and missing children. The Transitional Living and Street Outreach programs targets youths age 16 to 21, the ‘at-risk group for homelessness. Other federal benefit programs include “Supplemental Security Income, Social Security Disability Insurance, Veteran’s Affairs Compensation, Veterans Affairs Health Care, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Food Stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, One-Stop Career Center System and State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP)” (“Resource Guide”, 2007). A bill that would have expanded the SCHIP program was vetoed by President Bush this week but is likely to be re-introduced with some possible compromises. The federal government mandates that homeless children be allowed entry and will be appropriately accommodated by public schools, no matter the circumstance.

The resolve of the public and therefore politicians to abolish homelessness will determine how many men, women, and children, most blameless victims of circumstance, will continue to suffer the wretched and humiliating condition of homelessness. Of course, enacting legislation alone will not lessen the number of homeless. Adequate resources must be allocated to produce additional affordable housing units by creating, restructuring, or improving collaborative efforts between homelessness agency services in the public and private sectors. If these agencies can effectively prevent the instances of homelessness before the actual event as well as to adapt to various challenges facing those currently without a permanent residence, such as the Continuum of Care program, the goal of abolishing homelessness will be closer to becoming a reality.

Works Cited

“Do women and men have different reasons to become homeless?” Texas Homeless Network. (2001). Web.

“Face of Homelessness.” City Rescue Mission of Saginaw. (2007). Web.

“Facts and Myths about the Homeless.” A Place to Call Home. (2007). Web.

“Federal Homelessness Resource Guide.” Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. (2007). Web.

Wallace A. & Quilgars, D. Homelessness and Financial Exclusion: A Literature Review. London: Friends Provident/London Housing Foundation, (2005). Web.

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IvyPanda. (2021, October 28). The Homeless in Our Community. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-homeless-in-our-community/

"The Homeless in Our Community." IvyPanda , 28 Oct. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/the-homeless-in-our-community/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'The Homeless in Our Community'. 28 October.

IvyPanda . 2021. "The Homeless in Our Community." October 28, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-homeless-in-our-community/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Homeless in Our Community." October 28, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-homeless-in-our-community/.

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IvyPanda . "The Homeless in Our Community." October 28, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-homeless-in-our-community/.

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A growing share of Americans say affordable housing is a major problem where they live

Prospective homebuyers and renters across the United States have seen prices surge and supply plummet during the coronavirus pandemic . Amid these circumstances, about half of Americans (49%) say the availability of affordable housing in their local community is a major problem, up 10 percentage points from early 2018, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in October 2021.

This Pew Research Center analysis about the levels of concern among Americans about the affordability of housing draws from a Center survey designed to understand Americans’ views and preferences for where they live.

The survey of 9,676 U.S. adults was conducted from Oct. 18 to 24, 2021. Everyone who took part is a member of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the  ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology .

References to White, Black and Asian adults include only those who are not Hispanic and identify as only one race. Hispanics are of any race.

“Middle income” is defined here as two-thirds to double the median annual family income for panelists on the American Trends Panel. “Lower income” falls below that range; “upper income” falls above it. Read the  methodology  for more details.

References to respondents who live in urban, suburban or rural communities are based on respondents’ answer to the following question: “How would you describe the community where you currently live? (1) urban, (2) suburban, (3) rural.”

Another 36% of U.S. adults said in the fall that affordable housing availability is a minor problem in their community, while just 14% said it is not a problem.

Americans’ concerns about the availability of affordable housing have outpaced worries about other local issues. The percentage of adults who say this is a major problem where they live is larger than the shares who say the same about drug addiction (35%), the economic and health impacts of COVID-19 (34% and 26%, respectively) and crime (22%).

Opinions on the question of housing affordability differ by a variety of demographic factors, including income, race and ethnicity, and age. A majority of adults living in lower-income households (57%) say availability of affordable housing is a major issue in their community, larger than the shares of those in middle- (47%) or upper-income households (42%) who say it is a major problem.

Fewer than half of White adults (44%) say that availability of affordable housing is a major problem where they live – lower than the shares of Black (57%), Hispanic and Asian American adults (both 55%) who say the same.

Adults under 50 are more likely than their older counterparts to say affordable housing availability is a major problem locally. More than half of adults ages 18 to 29 and 30 to 49 say this (55% in both age groups), compared with smaller shares of those 50 to 64 and those 65 and older (44% and 39%, respectively).

Americans’ perceptions of this issue also vary based on where they live. About six-in-ten U.S. adults living in urban areas (63%) say that the availability of affordable housing in their community is a major problem, compared with 46% of suburban residents and 40% of those living in rural areas.

Regardless of income level, city dwellers generally tend to view affordable housing availability as a bigger issue than those living in the suburbs or rural areas. Two-thirds of urban adults with lower household incomes (66%) say affordable housing in their area is a major problem, compared with 56% of suburban dwellers with lower incomes and 52% of those with lower incomes living in rural areas. Among upper-income adults, 58% of those living in urban areas say housing affordability is a major problem, compared with 43% of upper-income Americans living in suburban places and 25% of upper-income rural residents.

There are also regional differences. Around seven-in-ten Americans living in the West (69%) say affordable housing availability is a major problem locally. This compares with 49% of Northeasterners, 44% of Americans in the South and 33% of those living in the Midwest.

Since 2018, there have been increases across demographic groups in the shares who say that the availability of affordable housing in their community is a major problem. For example, 55% of adults under 30 now say this is a major problem – a 16 percentage point rise from the 39% who said so in 2018. The share of adults ages 30 to 49 who hold this view has also risen from 42% in 2018 to 55% last year.

About six-in-ten Democrats and independents who lean to the Democratic Party (59%) said in 2021 that affordable housing availability is a major problem in their community, compared with 36% of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents.

These partisan differences remain when looking separately at those who live in urban, suburban and rural communities. Among urban residents, two-thirds of Democrats (67%) see the availability of affordable housing locally as a major problem, compared with 54% of Republicans in urban areas. In suburban or rural communities, smaller majorities of Democrats hold this view (56% in the suburbs and 54% in rural places), compared with around a third of Republicans in those areas (35% and 31%, respectively).

Note: Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology .

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Katherine Schaeffer is a research analyst at Pew Research Center

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Homelessness — Argumentative Essay On The Homeless

Argumentative Essay on The Homeless

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Published: Mar 14, 2024

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Opinion The homeless right-to-camp issue comes to the Supreme Court

The phrase “often in error but never in doubt” could have been coined for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit . The appellate court most frequently reversed by the Supreme Court in recent years should brace itself for another reprimand during Monday’s oral arguments before that court.

The town of Grants Pass, Ore. , and many other cities in the nine Western states within the 9th Circuit’s jurisdiction are seeking relief from one of its decisions. The consequences of it include ( Grants Pass said in asking the Supreme Court to hear the case) “the reemergence of medieval diseases” such as typhus and tuberculosis.

In 2020, a court in nearby Medford struck down a Grants Pass ordinance imposing fines, as well as a possible 30-day sentence for repeat offenders, on homeless people camping on public property, when there are sufficient shelter beds available in the city. The court said this violated the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments, and excessive fines. In 2022, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit affirmed this decision, having ruled similarly in a previous case, requiring sufficient “ secular shelter space .” (Otherwise, the First Amendment guarantee against “establishment of religion” would be violated. Really.) Grants Pass’s only shelter has a religious affiliation.

The full 9th Circuit refused to reconsider this. Dissenting from this refusal, one judge (joined by 14 others) said that the majority had created a constitutional right “to camp or to sleep on sidewalks and in parks, playgrounds, and other public places in defiance of traditional health, safety, and welfare laws.”

Enforcement of camping ordinances is impermissible if even one homeless person is without a bed. This paralyzes cities’ attempts to cope with the disease, disorder and crime associated with homeless encampments. And many homeless people — sometimes a majority — reject shelters, fearing violence and inhibitions on drug use.

Progressives say the 9th Circuit’s decision regarding “our unhoused neighbors” simply prevents criminalizing the “underlying status” of being homeless. This, they say, results from racism, low wages and insufficient affordable housing. Disregard the verbal tic about racism. Rhetoric about “ living wages ” and “affordable” this or that ignores a fact: Most of those who are homeless are unemployable casualties of mental illness (schizophrenias, depression, bipolar disorder, etc.) and drug abuse.

Furthermore, the court-concocted constitutional right to unrestricted camping misconstrues the Eighth Amendment, which concerns modes of punishment (e.g., burning at the stake, branding, flogging), not activities that might be punished. The 9th Circuit thinks the Eighth Amendment prohibits punishing conduct (e.g., drug abuse) that is supposedly involuntary because it is unavoidable: It is inseparable from a status (homelessness).

But by erasing the distinction between an activity and a status, such reasoning erases individual agency, a foundational concept of law. And it potentially places sweeping limits on what conduct can be criminalized. The 9th Circuit transforms the Eighth Amendment from a restriction on kinds of punishment into a doctrine that radically dilutes the idea of criminal responsibility.

An amicus brief from the Pacific Research Institute notes that, in all eras, vagrants have experienced pressures from circumstances. (As have most criminals.) So, is any punishment disproportional for behavior an individual cannot control? What about a “compulsive” desire for child pornography? Beware, the PRI brief says, of “simplistic dichotomies between voluntary and involuntary conduct or avoidable and unavoidable choices.”

The 9th Circuit has, in effect, created a subsidy for being homeless, which often is the outcome of multiple choices. And if homeless people lack, as some of their advocates seem to say, volition in controlling their behavior, they lack the capacity to care for themselves, and could be involuntarily committed to institutions.

Homelessness involves political choices that courts are ill-suited to make. And it is a subject concerning which public health institutions can further ruin the reputations they damaged during the pandemic.

The meddlesome Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which recommends social distancing in homeless shelters, warns that clearing encampments of the homeless will “break connections with service providers” and should not occur unless “ individual housing units ” are provided. The CDC is the 9th Circuit of public health institutions. But, then, the 9th Circuit seems to fancy itself a public health policymaker, sweepingly removing choices from local governments.

Since 2007, the Supreme Court has reversed 80 percent of the rulings it has considered from the 9th Circuit. In the term that began in October 2020, the court reversed 94 percent; in the October 2021 term, 100 percent. Grants Pass should have an agreeable Monday in court.

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Do Not Make Survival Even More Difficult for People on the Streets

By Laura Riley

Ms. Riley is the director of the clinical program at the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Homeless Advocacy.”

In 2013, Grants Pass, Ore., came up with a strategy to deal with a growing homeless population in the city of roughly 40,000, one that might best be described as kicking the can down the road.

Through a series of ordinances, the city essentially made it illegal to sleep outside in public. In particular, anyone sleeping anywhere in public with bedding, a blanket or a sleeping bag would be breaking the law.

“The point,” the City Council president explained at the time, “is to make it uncomfortable enough for them in our city so they will want to move on down the road.”

Unhoused individuals wouldn’t have much choice. There are no homeless shelters in Grants Pass. At least 600 people in the city were unhoused in 2018 and 2019, according to counts by a local nonprofit that serves the unhoused.

Now the United States Supreme Court is being asked whether the enforcement of the city’s camping regulations, which apply to all of the city’s residents but affect them in vastly different ways, violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Oral arguments are scheduled for Monday.

Of course, weighing the legality of camping obscures the real issue, which is how, in a nation with roughly 650,000 unhoused people, the federal, state and local governments can make sure there are enough beds for people to sleep in. Forcing unhoused people to the next town does not create housing that is affordable or available.

The case is an appeal to a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that prohibited Grants Pass from using citations to enforce its public camping ordinance. The Ninth Circuit had earlier prohibited cities from enforcing criminal restrictions on public camping unless there was access to adequate temporary shelter.

In the decision being challenged by Grants Pass, the Ninth Circuit concluded that the city “cannot, consistent with the Eighth Amendment, enforce its anti-camping ordinances against homeless persons for the mere act of sleeping outside with rudimentary protection from the elements, or for sleeping in their car at night, when there is no other place in the city for them to go.”

Which there rarely is, in Grants Pass or elsewhere, and which is why people often have no choice but to sleep outside.

In a friend of the court brief, the National Homelessness Law Center argued that Grants Pass had “rejected” its obligation to care for unhoused residents and that vulnerable groups would continue to be marginalized unless the court decides once and for all that those ordinances are cruel. In its brief to the court, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund noted that the laws disproportionately affect people with disabilities and don’t serve any rehabilitative or deterrent interest.

If nothing else, one thing this case has done is unite many officials on the left and the right of the political spectrum, from San Francisco to Arizona. They have complained in briefs to the court that the Ninth Circuit has hamstrung their communities in dealing with homeless encampments.

But homelessness arises from policy decisions, not from a ruling by an appellate court. The Supreme Court should uphold the Ninth Circuit’s ruling. Otherwise it will open the door for communities to pass local laws that effectively punish unhoused people for existing within their borders, making what is clearly cruel permissible.

It would not be unexpected for the Supreme Court’s conservative majority to give the green light for the kind of camping bans at issue. Unhoused people would be pushed further to the margins, increasingly out of sight and mind. They will still be out there, parked in cars in rural areas or subsisting on urban streets, perhaps after being fined or jailed for the crime of trying to survive without a roof over their heads.

This case shines a light on the abdication of responsibility by governments at all levels to their unhoused residents. Instead of arguing about the legality of bans on sleeping in public, we should be asking: Why move people down the road to another community, one that is likely also short on shelter beds?

There is no doubt that the path to creating permanent housing (and more temporary shelter) is politically challenging and expensive. But there are many solutions along this path that go beyond what lawyers and the courts, even our highest one, can accomplish, and that the public should be demanding.

Governments at all levels should invest in homelessness prevention programs and strategies. Those include providing housing subsidies to people who otherwise could lose their housing and supportive transitional services for those leaving mental health treatment and correctional centers.

People on the brink of homelessness should have a right to counsel in eviction proceedings and should be offered the possibility of mediation in housing courts to give them a chance to remain in their houses or apartments.

Businesses should be increasing employment opportunities by not requiring a permanent address in job applications. Lawmakers should create more pathways for people to clear their criminal records, some that arise from targeted enforcement of low-level, nonviolent offenses, because those records can make it much more difficult to get a job.

For populations with unique needs, such as young people and veterans, social service agencies should pursue particularized interventions that address the underlying reasons that pushed individuals into homelessness.

And, of course, we should be building more housing, plain and simple, and we should be providing affordable housing incentives in areas with grocery stores and medical care nearby.

The Supreme Court should not further criminalize homelessness. But whether it does or not, this case should put governments at all levels on notice that humane policies can help to reduce homelessness. We don’t have to let this crisis continue.

Laura Riley is the director of the clinical program at the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Homeless Advocacy.”

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How Massachusetts spent nearly $1 billion sheltering homeless families and migrants

In the scramble to accommodate thousands of migrant families, the Healey administration has approved scores of hastily arranged contracts with little transparency, sometimes handing out multimillion-dollar deals without competitive bids, a Globe review of contracts found.

The documents, provided in response to Globe public records requests, offer a window into the breathtaking scope of the state’s rapid and often piecemeal approach to accommodating thousands of homeless families — about half of them migrants who made their way to Massachusetts from the southern US border.

The state is now housing, feeding, and caring for 7,499 families — around 23,000 people.

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Massachusetts will spend about $932 million — three times what was budgeted — on emergency shelters for homeless families this fiscal year. Lawmakers negotiating next year’s budget — when the cost is again expected to surpass $900 million — are still trying to find the money to pay off this year’s tab.

The Globe reviewed nearly 80 state contracts, as well as recent invoices from individual hotels and providers. State agencies have not yet provided the Globe some contracts whose costs are reflected in those totals. Still missing are agreements with the National Guard, which provides staffing in 21 of the 75 hotels being used as shelters, and for the large overflow shelters in places like the Melnea A. Cass Recreational Complex in Roxbury and a former Cambridge courthouse , which were established after the state capped the family shelter system at 7,500 families.

State officials have, in fact, been reluctant to provide much transparency at all about the shelter system. They have restricted visits by the media and declined to provide the addresses or even the names of the hotels being used as shelters. They point to the speed with which they had to act and also concerns about protecting families’ privacy; neo-Nazis staged demonstrations at some shelters last summer.

But the lack of transparency also means watchdogs cannot hold the administration accountable for how the money is spent or for the living conditions of the migrants now within their care.

Hotel operators are prohibited by state contracts from speaking to the media about the shelter program, the state’s housing agency, or the families staying in their buildings. And some city officials were upset by the sudden appearance of shelters in their local hotels, with little public notice or transparency.

Taunton Mayor Shaunna O’Connell said she was opposed to turning the entire Clarion Hotel into a shelter and called the hotel management last spring to tell them so. ”But unknown to me they had already been contracting with the state and working out all the details,” she said. “We did not appreciate ... the only hotel in Taunton being shut down.”

In the rush to find shelter quickly, the contracts indicate, the state negotiated deals directly with about a dozen hotel companies, instead of relying, as it usually does, on social services groups to find shelter accommodations. Hotels and nonprofits often began housing families and helping them sign up for health checkups and public benefits before their vendor contracts with the state were fully negotiated and inked.

“Due to federal inaction, our administration has had to move quickly to provide food, shelter, and other services to unprecedented numbers of families in need,” said Kevin Connor, a spokesman for the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities, which is leading the response to the migrant crisis. That office issued at least four contracts without competitive bids, raising questions about how rigorously the state has managed this nearly $1 billion-a-year taxpayer endeavor.

“I don’t think there’s been much oversight at all here,” said Senator Peter J. Durant, a Spencer Republican who flipped a Senate seat in November after campaigning on the migrant crisis. He questioned why some contracts were handed out without competitive bidding.

“Where’s that transparency so we can understand these costs?” said Durant.

The largest no-bid contract, a $10 million, eight-month deal, went to an East Boston restaurant and catering facility called Spinelli’s, to deliver meals to more than 30 shelter sites. Spinelli’s owner Rita Roberto has been an active political donor, and she and other company executives have given $7,550 to Governor Maura Healey and Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll since 2019. Roberto did not respond to calls and emails for comment.

A state official said political considerations were not involved and that the top priority was to feed homeless children.

“This is a longtime state vendor that has been contracted for services over multiple administrations, particularly during COVID when they were called upon to provide emergency services,” said Connor.

Other no-bid contracts went to Mercedes Cab, a Truro-based company that the state is paying $6.8 million through June for transportation services; United Way to provide $5 million in grants to other shelter providers; and Ascentria Community Services, a Worcester-based agency that provided wrap-around shelter services for just over six months for $946,000.

In cities and towns that charge local hotel room occupancy taxes, the state is picking up the tab for stays under 90 days and reimbursing communities whose hotel room excise taxes dropped as a result of lost room rentals. One contract amendment shows the state agreeing to pay the city of Woburn $127,935 in taxes.

State officials did not inspect each hotel before signing contracts or placing families in them, a spokesman confirmed. Cities and towns have authority over licensing the hotels, which are required by contract to comply with all local, state, and federal codes. But local policies were not always followed. One Brighton motel, the Catholic Charities Inn, was never inspected last year, city records show. Its inspection certificate expired just a few weeks after it opened as a shelter last summer. The state was paying $345 a night for each family’s motel room and social services, until recently, when — after complaints from numerous guests — the building was evacuated due to a mold infestation . The state sanitary code calls for all residential buildings to be watertight and free of the appearance of mold.

Additional costs associated with hotel living also drive up expenses, the contracts show. In Everett, in addition to the hotel room and help with signing up for social services, taxpayers are also picking up incidentals: linen service, a meeting room rental, extra trash pickup, and an emergency alarm fix earlier this year came to a total cost of about $25,600 one month.

In Taunton, where city officials have sued the hotel for failing to initially meet occupancy limits and pay the corresponding fines, the state is footing the bill for private security guards and Taunton Police Department details to patrol the site. The tab? About $100,000 a month, according to invoices, on top of the $214 daily rate for shelter, food, and case management services for each homeless family.

Massachusetts has a unique right-to-shelter law that guarantees temporary housing and services to families with children and those who are pregnant, including new arrivals in the country who are lawfully seeking asylum.

Those numbers began to soar last summer. By August, Healey declared an emergency and activated up to 250 National Guard members to staff hotels being repurposed as shelters.

Mark DeJoie, the chief executive officer of Centerboard, a Lynn nonprofit that provides shelter, financial workshops, and youth mentoring, said state and social services agencies had to act quickly to ensure families had somewhere to stay and that children weren’t going hungry.

“There wasn’t a plan for this. Everybody was going as fast as they could,” DeJoie said. “For a while, it was every hand on deck.”

As a sign of how slapdash the effort was, the state pulled in Centerboard as a middleman to receive and pay bills from individual restaurants and caterers that delivered food to other shelter sites but weren’t directly contracted with the state. Centerboard then billed the state and verified “to the extent we could” that the food delivered at other sites matched the bills paid, he said.

“There were mistakes that were going to be made,” DeJoie said. “There is no organization anywhere, the state and other providers, that could have done what we did.”

Stephanie Ebbert can be reached at [email protected] . Follow her @StephanieEbbert . Deirdre Fernandes can be reached at [email protected] . Follow her @fernandesglobe .

Homeless shelters in Massachusetts raise concerns as lawmakers consider historic limit to family stays

Homeless shelter providers in Massachusetts are raising concerns as lawmakers move to pass legislation that would limit stays to nine months for the first time in the 40-year history of the state's "right to shelter" law. 

Massachusetts is the only state to provide families and pregnant women with a right to shelter, which has existed since 1983. But the system has come under historic strain due to an influx of migrant families and a growing number of Massachusetts families displaced under an increasingly unaffordable housing market, public officials and community leaders say. According to the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless, a little over half of the current 7,500 families in the state’s emergency shelter system are those who recently came to the state as refugees or migrants. 

“The shelter system is being overwhelmed, and we cannot, as a provider, we cannot handle it,” said Mark DeJoie, CEO of Centerboard, one of the largest emergency shelter providers in the state. 

The Massachusetts House of Representatives passed a new spending bill in March outlining a nearly billion-dollar plan to address the shelter crisis. Shortly after, the Senate passed a new version , requiring leaders from the chambers to enter negotiations to work out their differences. Both bills would impose a nine-month limit on emergency shelter stays, but the sticking points include what kind of extensions could be given to families and how the proposals would be funded. 

Rep. Aaron Michlewitz, chair of the House Ways and Means committee, which is involved in the negotiations, said he believes a resolution can be reached on the proposals’ differences, adding that Massachusetts’ system would still be more generous than most states if it adopts a time limit of nine months for stay. 

“It’s still one of the most generous, it is probably the most generous program in the country, in terms of what it provides," Michlewitz said. While some other major cities like Chicago and New York allow only short stays in their shelter systems, "we’re talking months here in Massachusetts,” he said.

Shelter directors hope that the legislation will include meaningful extensions past the initial nine months for struggling families, as the average length of stays for families in the system is nearly twice as long, about 16 months, according to the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities, which oversees the state’s emergency shelter program. 

“There are many families who are in shelters for a much longer period of time than 14 months and it has nothing to do with people’s willingness to leave shelter. It’s about the ability to leave,” said Shiela Moore, CEO of Hildebrand Family Self-Help Center, Inc., a shelter provider in the Boston area.  

Hildebrand currently houses about 140 families in its Cambridge units, which include both apartment-style units and larger, congregant houses wherein families receive a room and share bathrooms, kitchens and living spaces with other families. Moore said more than 80 families have been there for nine months or longer. 

In October, Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, capped the number of shelter units at 7,500 , saying it was necessary because continuing to expand the shelter program would be “unsustainable.” 

The cap comes after a jump in families qualifying for shelter. The Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities said that there were just about 3,000 families in the state system in March 2022. One year later, the system housed just under 4,000 families. By April of this year, the shelters supported about 7,500 families, with more than 3,500 of them staying in the system's traditional units and the rest in hotels. There are an additional 736 families on a waiting list for emergency shelter as of earlier this month.

Shelter leaders say the influx of migrant families has put stress on an already struggling system. 

“There’s an immigration and a human crisis,” DeJoie, of Centerboard, said. “Our shelter system was never ever built to handle both of those. We do shelter, but the crisis that’s come to our front door, we weren’t equipped for that.” 

DeJoie added that it’s imperative that the federal government steps in to help support the unique needs of migrant families, including obtaining the federal authorization necessary for migrants to apply for jobs in the U.S. 

“We, Massachusetts and all the other places around the country, can’t do this without federal government support. It’s just — it’s impossible,” he said. 

Elizabeth Sweet, the executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy (MIRA) Coalition, said the federal government must improve its system for granting work permits to migrant families — a process that in some cases can take as long as a year or more, officials say. She added that many of the families in Massachusetts’ shelter system are there because they can’t start seeking work opportunities until they are approved to do so. 

“The new immigrants don’t want to be staying in hotels and motels,” Sweet said. “They don’t want to be dependent on state-run shelters. They want to be working in jobs and be self-sufficient.”

“For many, many of these folks, they’re waiting some months for when they arrive to when they actually can even start looking for work,” she added. 

When asked about the lack of action by lawmakers in Washington on immigration issues, U.S. Rep. Stephen F. Lynch, D-Mass., emphasized the disfunction in Congress over a bipartisan border security bill that was abruptly scuttled by Senate Republicans.

The bill, which would impose stricter immigration and asylum laws, collapsed in February following criticism from key GOP lawmakers and Donald Trump.

“Personally, I would welcome the opportunity to vote on a sensible and bipartisan measure to tighten restrictions at the border,” Lynch said in the statement. “I believe the Senate has come up with a workable draft that could work with some tweaks, and I think we have the votes for that. Unfortunately, there are some who would rather campaign on the issue than fix it.”

While shelter leaders are concerned about the possibility of families being forced out before they have someplace new to go, they support the lawmakers’ efforts to find ways to address the situation as the system continues to buckle.

Danielle Ferrier, CEO of Heading Home, a major shelter provider headquartered in Boston whose 350 units are currently fully occupied, said there needs to be “some kind of guardrails” on the system to keep it from spiraling out of control. 

“We have to come up with something that seems like it’s as reasonable as can be, as fiscally responsible and sustainable and as humane,” she added.  

Ferrier said she would not be supportive of the original bill passed by the state’s House, which would allow families only one three-month extension in state shelters after the initial nine months have run out. After that, if they couldn’t find housing, families would essentially be put out onto the street, she said. Instead, Ferrier would back a time limit that would include multiple extensions for families who were trying to leave the system but were unable. 

“What I believe is having a very clear nine months and then a waiver process where we can say, look, that family almost has an apartment. We’re not going to kick them out today. We’re going to make sure they get that apartment, right?” Ferrier said. 

“You have to create the room for the system to flex to be humane and to work,” she added. 

Moore echoed Ferrier’s sentiments, saying she understood something needed to be done to address the burdens on the system, but families should not be abandoned in the process. 

“I’m very clear and I’m a realist, we all have budgets to manage,” Moore said. “But I’m hoping that the legislation will be nimble enough to make adjustments that are needed to keep people from falling through the cracks.”

Kyla Guilfoil is an intern for NBC News Digital Politics.

Los Angeles is using AI in a pilot program to try to predict homelessness and allocate aid

• In Los Angeles, the Homelessness Prevention Program uses predictive AI to identify individuals and families at risk of becoming homeless, offering aid to help them get stabilized and remain housed.
• Launched in 2021, the program has helped serve nearly 800 individuals and families at risk of becoming homeless, with 86 percent of participants retaining permanent housing when they leave, according to Dana Vanderford, associate director at the county's Department of Health Services.
• Individuals and families have access to between $4,000 and $8,000, she said.

In December of last year, single mom Courtney Peterson was laid off from her job working for a now-shuttered inpatient transitional living program. Aside from giving her the ability to bring her 7-year-old son to work, the job also paid enough to cover rent in a studio apartment in the Van Nuys neighborhood in Los Angeles, where they had lived for a year and a half. 

After she was laid off, Peterson said she grew immediately concerned about making January's rent and began researching potential avenues for help. When her son was an infant, they lived in a travel trailer, she said, a situation she did not want to return to.

"I started to reach out to local churches or places that said they offered rent assistance," Peterson told CNBC. "But a lot of them wanted me to have active eviction notices in order to give me assistance. I felt like I was running out of options. I'd reached out to pretty much everyone I could possibly think of with no luck."

Instead of an eviction notice, Peterson received a letter from the Homelessness Prevention Unit within the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, offering a lifeline. The pilot program uses predictive artificial intelligence to identify individuals and families at risk of becoming homeless, offering aid to help them get stabilized and remain housed.

In 2023, California had more than 181,000 homeless individuals, up more than 30 percent since 2007, according to data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. A report from the California State Auditor's Office found that the state spent $24 billion on homelessness from 2018 through 2023.

Launched in 2021, the program has helped the department serve nearly 800 individuals and families at risk of becoming homeless, with 86 percent of participants retaining permanent housing when they leave, according to Dana Vanderford, associate director of homelessness prevention at the county's Department of Health Services. 

Individuals and families have access to between $4,000 and $8,000, she said, with the majority of the funding for the program coming from the American Rescue Plan Act. Tracking individuals down to help and convincing them that the offer is real and not a scam can be a challenge, but once contact is established, aid is quickly put into motion.

"We often meet our clients within days of a loss of housing, or days after they've had a medical emergency. The timing with which we meet people feels critical," Vanderford said. "Our ability to appear out of nowhere, cold-call a person, provide them with resources and prevent that imminent loss of housing for 86 percent of the people that we've worked with feels remarkable."

Peterson said she and her son received some $8,000 to cover rent, utilities and basic needs, allowing her to stay put in her apartment while she looks for a new job. The program works with clients for four months and then follows up with them at the six-month mark and the 12-month mark, as well as 18 months after discharge. Caseworkers like Amber Lung, who helped Peterson, say they can see how important preventive work is firsthand.

"Once folks do lose that housing, it feels like there's so many more hurdles to get back to [being] housed, and so if we can fill in just a little bit of a gap there might be to help them retain that housing, I think it's much easier to stabilize things than if folks end up in a shelter or on the streets to get them back into that position," Lung said.

Predicting risk

The AI model was developed by the California Policy Lab at UCLA over the course of several years, using data provided by Los Angeles County's Chief Information Office, or CIO. The CIO integrated data from seven different county departments, de-identified for privacy, including emergency room visits, behavioral health care and large public benefits programs from food stamps to income support and homeless services, according to Janey Rountree, executive director of the California Policy Lab. The program also pulled data from the criminal justice system.

That data, linked together over many years, are what would be used to make predictions about who would go on to experience homelessness.

Once the model identified patterns in who experienced homelessness, the lab used it to attempt to make predictions about the future, creating an anonymized list of individuals ranked from highest risk to lowest. The lab provided the list to the county so it could reach out to people who may be at risk of losing housing before it happened.

However, past research has found that anonymized data can be traced back to individuals based on demographic information. A sweeping study on data privacy, based on 1990 U.S. Census data, found that 87% of Americans could be identified using ZIP code, birth date and gender.

"We have a deep, multi-decade long housing shortage in California, and the cost of housing is going up, increasingly, and that is the cause of our people experiencing homelessness," Rountree said. "The biggest misperception is that homelessness is caused by individual risk factors, when in fact it's very clear that the root cause of this is a structural economic issue."

The Policy Lab provided the software to the county for free, Rountree said, and does not plan to monetize it. Using AI in close partnership with people who have relevant subject-matter expertise — from teachers to social workers — can help to promote positive social outcomes, she said. 

"I just want to emphasize how important it is for every community experiencing homelessness, to test and innovate around prevention," she said. "It's a relatively new strategy in the lifespan of homeless services. We need more evidence. We need to do more experiments around how to find people at risk. I think this is just one way to do that."

The National Alliance to End Homelessness found in 2017 that a chronically homeless person costs the taxpayer an average of $35,578 per year, and those costs are reduced by an average of nearly half when they are placed in supportive housing.

Los Angeles County has had initial conversations with Santa Clara County about the program, and San Diego County is also exploring a similar approach, Vanderford said.

Government use of artificial intelligence

AI in the hands of government agencies has faced scrutiny due to potential outcomes. Police reliance on AI technology has led to wrongful arrests , and, in California, voters rejected a plan to repeal the state's bail system in 2020 and replace it with an algorithm to determine individual risk, over concerns it would increase bias in the justice system.

Broadly speaking, Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at AI startup Hugging Face, said ethics around the government use of AI hinge on the context of use and safety of identifiable information, even if anonymized. Mitchell also pointed to the importance of receiving informed consent from people seeking help from government programs.

 "Are the people aware of all the signals that are being collected and the risk of it being associated to them and then the dual use concerns for malicious use against them?" Mitchell said. "There's also the issue of how long this data is being kept and who might eventually see it."

While the technology aims to provide aid to those in need before their housing is lost in Los Angeles County, which Mitchell said is a positive thing to do from a "virtue ethics" perspective, there are broader questions from a utilitarian viewpoint.

 "Those would be concerns like, 'What is the cost to the taxpayer and how likely is this system to actually avoid houselessness?'" she said.

As for Peterson, she's in the process of looking for work, hoping for a remote position that will allow her flexibility. Down the road, she's hoping to obtain her licensed vocational nursing certification and one day buy a home where her son has his own room.

"It has meant a lot just because you know my son hasn't always had that stability. I haven't always had that stability," she said of the aid from the program. "To be able to call this place home and know that I'm not going to have to move out tomorrow, my son's not going to have to find new friends right away… It's meant a lot to both me and my son."