Homeless Housing

P1. We don’t know much about homeless people, but what we do know is that we feel sympathy for them, wanting to help but not knowing how to. In order to help the homeless like we wish, we need to become more educated on these citizens. For example, not a lot of us were aware that a vast amount of homeless people are “five times more likely than ordinary Americans to have suffered a traumatic brain injury” (A Plan to Make Homeless History, p.1). And that it would be far costlier to the tax payer for the homeless the not be getting the assistance they need. We need to step up and make a change, such a the organization Common Ground, and get more homeless people back on their feet in the US. First though, to do that, we have to understand how their minds work.

P2. People who do not have stable homes and who live on the streets go through cycles of emergency room visits, psychiatric facilities, addiction treatment, and prison. The costs of these visits are far costlier than providing them with stable housing and care. With this in people’s mind, it has given them more ambition to create housing for the homeless, though only if they are deemed “housing ready” (A Plan to Make Homeless History, p. 7). This means that they have to be drug and alcohol free, which is a contradiction because the shelters are supposed to be helping them get back on their feet, but they cannot do that if they are not getting help out on the street. Again, this falls into people not understanding homeless people, so they cannot get their proper help. They need their medicine, they need their insulin, they need all they can to help them survive but many citizens fail to realize that being homeless is a life or death situation, and the homeless person is most likely not at fault for their situation, it’s their mental health.

P3. In another article, The Street-Level Solution, Bornstein goes on to talk about how most readers “were skeptical, and a few downright dismissive, about the chances of long-term homeless people adapting well to housing” (The Street Solution, p. 3). He says that this is expected, because it takes people a while to adapt to a new environment after being in a different one for so long. That would be like throwing a wild dog into a house and domesticating it. It takes time. This is a reason why people are so skeptical to fund shelters for homeless people because they think their money is going to waste to people who won’t really use it to their advantage. The similar thing goes with even giving a homeless person ten dollars on the street. People’s mind goes straight to drugs or alcohol, when we really have no idea what they are going to use it for.

P4. A head injury can make it even harder for those to adapt to a new environment. The person might not understand what is happening, or they will be afraid of something going wrong, because that’s all they are used to: everything going wrong. Though with proper help and medicine, they can learn to cope with their injury and illness. In “Head Injury and Mortality in the Homeless” the statistics show that homeless people from the ages of 0-34 have suffered a head injury without hospitalization. After that, the numbers are not as intense, but that is due to the fact that they have suffered some kind of mentality issue, which is still a brain injury.

P5. The arguments here are convincing that money is being wasted on the homeless who get housing but do not have the proper tools to dwindle in society. Though just because they are convincing does not mean they are valid. In order to get homeless people, the help they need more research needs to be done to understand why they have become homeless, and grind down to the root problem of homelessness in the United States. Also Trump fucking sucks.

Works Cited

Bornstein, David. “A Plan to Make Homelessness History.” Blog post.
Opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com. New York Times, 20 Dec. 2010. Web. 28 Jan. 2017.
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/a-plan-to-make-homelessness-history/.

Bornstein, David. “The Street-Level Solution.” Blog post. Opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com. New York Times, 24 Dec. 2010. Web. 28 Jan. 2017.
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/24/the-street-level-solution/.

Mcmillian, Thomas M., Marie Laurie, Michael Oddy, Mark Mezies, Elaine Stewart, and Jessica Wainman-Lefley. “Head Injury and Mortality in the Homeless.” Journal of Neurotrauma 32.2 (2015) 116-19. Web. 28 Jan. 2017.