Poverty
...People become homeless
for different reasons. Usually, they cannot pay for housing.
People with little education and few jobs skills cannot earn much money. With low income, they stay poor. As housing costs rise, more and more people cannot afford homes. Around thirteen million children in America live in poverty at any given time nearly two hundred thousand children are homeless (Worth 6).
Health problems and job layoffs also keep people from working steadily. Sometimes relatives or friends are able to help until the poor find work. But without help poor people often become homeless. A high rate of divorce, and
London 2
fathers abandoning families, leaving women and children with little or no money. There are also teen-age mothers raising children without help (9).
This belief maybe growing as a result of significant changes in welfare laws and hardening attitudes toward the needy. Welfare was long considered an entitlement that the poor could receive for a lifetime. Now states are setting strict time limits on welfare benefits and forcing many poor people to go to work. Meanwhile, more communities are refusing to expand their aid to the needy, restricting panhandling by the homeless, and permitting practices that exploit poor migrant farm workers (Bowden 6).
All of these changes are occurring at the time when the American poverty rate is climbing. The rise has been blamed on a number of causes: the decay of large cities, the bankrupt of many family farms across country, a decline in the number of unskilled jobs traditionally filled by poor people, and an increasing number of single-parent families who often rely on welfare to survive. While politicians devise ways to move people off welfare and into work, there is no guarantee that work alone will eliminate the problem of poverty. Most former...
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