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In terms of homelessness by state , California ranked highest with a raw amount of , people and North Dakota ranked the lowest in raw count with homeless people through a point-in-time count.
Compared to , about , people in the United States had experienced homelessness on a single night. When looking at California in , about , people, more than a sixth of the total, had experienced some type of homelessness. Sheltered Homelessness: referring to those who stay in emergency shelters, transitional housing programs, or safe havens. Unsheltered Homelessness: referring to those whose primary nighttime location is a public or private place not designated for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for people streets, vehicles, or parks.
Chronically Homeless Individual: referring to an individual with a disability who has been continuously homeless for one year or more or has experienced at least four episodes of homelessness in the last three years where the combined length of time homeless in those occasions is at least 12 months.
Here, he introduces the U. After such praise, he contrasts the country with his own observations and data gathered from OECD. He also indirectly attacks the U. In the same report, Alston also noted the at-the-time recent policies that the U. One of the solutions proposed to such an important issue was to decriminalize being poor. This exacerbates the living conditions of those charged because they are struggling to make necessary payments on time, such as healthcare, food, water, and some sort of shelter, be it a tent or living out on the street.
Homelessness is a systemic problem that touches not just every major American city, but every city in the Puget Sound region. While there are many root causes, in many cases adverse life events such as a health issue, the loss of a job, or the need to escape a domestic violence situation can quickly catapult our neighbors into homelessness. These root causes are inter-related and, for our unsheltered neighbors, each factor listed below is often compounded by the others.
Drug overdose is currently the leading cause of death among people who are homeless. In King County, more people enter detox for heroin than they do alcohol. In , the opiate overdose deaths were the highest ever recorded in King County - more than triple the number of deaths in More than 3, people received methadone treatment in King County, but our region's lack of treatment capacity leaves more than people on a waitlist each day. Washington State ranks 47th in the nation for psychiatric beds per capita.
Seattle has a booming economy and high-wage jobs. But too many residents are being pushed out in the face of rising housing and living costs, and the growth in our economy has not been shared nearly widely enough. The past several decades were marked by a large change in the availability of affordable housing. Most single-room occupancy housing was lost as part of urban renewal strategies. Much of the affordable rental housing was converted to higher priced housing, cooperatives, and condominiums.
Hospitals for people with mental illness were closed down in favor of a system of community-based housing and care. These changes had many positive effects. Downtowns were revitalized, and for people with serious mental illnesses, community-based housing and care was a superior alternative to institutionalization.
At the same time, other forces were reshaping the landscape for low-income Americans. Jobs requiring low-skilled labor were lost. New and powerful illegal drugs came onto the scene. Public resources to assist low-income people did not keep pace with their growing needs. The Industrial Revolution ushered in a shift from the individual living and surviving on farms or working in skilled trades to the wage-earning worker dependent upon wealthy employers.
By the s, lodging rooms for vagrants located in police stations served as the major shelter system, and most major cities reported increasing numbers of vagabonds Kusmer, After declining briefly after the Civil War, homelessness first became a national issue in the s. Willing to embrace hard work, they constituted a counterculture with rules and habits that often engendered the wrath of mainstream society.
This culture of migrant laborers was often romanticized in American literature, including by writers such as Walt Whitman, Bret Harte, and Sinclair Lewis. World War II emerged as an economic engine that put the nation to work. Over the ensuing three decades, the typical individual experiencing homelessness continued to be disproportionately white and male but became increasingly older usually over 50 years old , disabled, dependent on welfare or social security, and resided in cheap hotels, flophouses, and in single room occupancy hotels SROs located in the poorest neighborhoods and Skid Row areas of urban America Rossi, This observation underscores the difficulty in defining and studying homelessness throughout U.
The early s marked the emergence of what now may be considered the modern era of homelessness. Department of Housing and Urban Development HUD and social service agencies in response to what was then the country's worst recession since the Great Depression Jones, In some cities, property values increased dramatically in the areas near downtown, and Skid Row areas disappeared as the SROs and rooming houses that were home to thousands of transients were razed or converted into apartments and condominiums.
Since the s, rents in metro areas across the country have been increasing while wages have stagnated Katz, Recent research indicates that families experiencing homelessness are more likely to continue to face poverty and homelessness in the future Desmond, Deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill has roots in the civil rights and civil liberties movements of the s, which envisioned more fulfilling lives for those who had been languishing in understaffed psychiatric hospitals through new medications and robust community-based services.
The number of patients living in state hospitals dropped from , in to , in California saw a dramatic reduction in state hospital beds from 37, in to 2, in Flynn, Funding for the needed housing and community-based services proved inadequate, and, as cheap housing disappeared, vast numbers of previously institutionalized individuals with severe and persistent mental illness or those who might have gone to institutions in earlier eras drifted onto the streets and into temporary shelters.
Two changes in policy particularly contributed to the rise in homelessness during that period. First, cuts in Supplemental Security Income SSI in the late s, accompanied by a tightening of the disability eligibility process Social Security Act of , adversely affected mentally ill persons living in rooming houses.
The subsequent loss of personal income contributed to homelessness for many of these individuals Collin and Barry, The Social Security Disability Benefits Reform Act of was later enacted to pull back on some of the aspects of the Social Security Act, which impeded the efforts of some individuals experiencing illness and homelessness to pursue benefits.
Second, public inebriation was decriminalized in many cities, and those once jailed for public drunkenness now avoided arrest and often entered shelters or remained on the streets McCarty et al.
Those shelter users who were male, substance abusers, and diagnosed with a serious mental illness often had a co-occurring AIDS diagnosis due to risky behaviors such as sharing needles for intravenous IV drug use Culhane et al. The authors also noted that Philadelphia shelter utilizers had nine times the risk of having AIDS compared to the general population. Lebow et al. The authors noted that IV drug use was a common risk behavior for the homeless men when compared to the housed men.
The program was created due to inadequate housing resources for low-income people living with AIDS, who also faced difficulty obtaining supportive services and experienced discrimination GAO, HOPWA funds are provided to eligible states and cities based on a formula; there is also a small competitive grant program. The confluence of these and other events changed the face of homelessness yet again. The typical homeless person of the s was younger less than 40 years old , more impoverished, and had a higher burden of co-occurring medical, mental health, and substance use disorders than previous generations of persons experiencing homelessness.
For the first time, women and families appeared in significant numbers Rossi, Shelters that had long served poor and older alcoholic men withstood a new and eclectic wave of impoverished men and women displaced from their homes, many of them struggling with undue burdens of co-occurring medical, psychiatric, and substance use disorders.
Many others were simply living in poverty. The amount of time that individuals who experience homelessness are without stable housing varies considerably, from short to more extended periods. Kuhn and Culhane categorized homelessness with a temporal topography when examining the utilization patterns of single adults in public shelters in New York City NYC and Philadelphia during the s.
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