 | This article possibly contains original research .(July 2024) |
Homelessness significantly reduces student graduation and retention. From 2019 to 2020, approximately 1.3 million students in public schools in the United States experienced homelessness. [1]
According to the National Center for Homeless Education, there were more than 50,000 families with children who lost their home in 2022 and the number of homeless children reached more than one million in 2020. According to Esther Rivera, program manager of Denver Public Schools' Homeless Education Network, homeless families were supported by receiving vouchers for motels and food in Denver. [2]
According to 2020 studies, the number of homeless students had reached its highest level in the last ten years. More than 1.5 million students live with their families or acquaintances due to the loss of their homes. According to the National Homeless Education Center, 7% of homeless students live in abandoned buildings or cars. [3]
According to a 2019 report based on a survey the prior school year by Temple University's Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice, 55% of New York University students from its 19 campuses did not have secure housing. Due to financial problems or living in crowded houses, they were unable to pay electricity and rent bills and were constantly moving. [4]
According to new federal data on 2019, the number of students in kindergarten through the 12th grade who are homeless has grown up by 70% over the last decade. In 2019, it was announced that compared to the last three years, the number of homeless students has increased by 20%. Since homeless students often do not use homeless shelters or sleep on the street, they are usually described as "hidden in plain sight". According to the report, 76% of homeless students lived in sharing house or lived with others. 14% of homeless student were in shelters, 6% of them were in their primary overnight accommodation of hotels or motels, and 4% were identified as "homeless". [5]
Homelessness is caused by many things, such as not having a suitable job, high house prices, domestic violence and drugs. Millions of people spend more than half of their income on housing and cannot afford to buy a home. In California, people have been forced to turn to inadequate housing due to housing shortages and rising rents. Factory closings and a deteriorating economy have made it difficult to pay rent. Two million people's addiction to drugs has caused parents to divorce and young people to leave their homes. [3]
Seven out of ten people said that the cause of homelessness was being rejected from the family and being abused at home. Experts believe that providing affordable housing and supporting families who deal with drugs can help reduce the number of homeless students. [3]
The Neighborhood Coalition for Shelter, or NCS, a non-profit organization founded in 1982, has launched a pilot project to remove educational barriers for homeless students of CUNY. [4] CNN reported that food and housing insecurity affects the health and mental health of students and causes them to leave their education and reduce their income. [4]
California is the first state to budget for homelessness students. [4] Some universities, such as those in California, have reduced the number of homeless students entering the university. [6] The project to provide housing for Santa Cruz students was stopped by the people of the area due to the damage to the nature of the area. This project would support 3000 students. [6] Experts believe that providing affordable housing and supporting families who deal with drugs can help reduce the number of homeless students. [3]
In the United States, the number of homeless people on a given night in January 2023 was more than 650,000 according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Homelessness has increased in recent years, in large part due to an increasingly severe housing shortage and rising home prices in the United States.
Affordable housing is housing which is deemed affordable to those with a household income at or below the median as rated by the national government or a local government by a recognized housing affordability index. Most of the literature on affordable housing refers to mortgages and a number of forms that exist along a continuum – from emergency homeless shelters, to transitional housing, to non-market rental, to formal and informal rental, indigenous housing, and ending with affordable home ownership.
Housing First is a policy that offers unconditional, permanent housing as quickly as possible to homeless people, and other supportive services afterward. It was first discussed in the 1990s, and in the following decades became government policy in certain locations within the Western world. There is a substantial base of evidence showing that Housing First is both an effective solution to homelessness and a form of cost savings, as it also reduces the use of public services like hospitals, jails, and emergency shelters. Cities like Helsinki and Vienna in Europe have seen dramatic reductions in homelessness due to the adaptation of Housing First policies, as have the North American cities Columbus, Ohio, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Medicine Hat, Alberta.
Poverty in the United Kingdom is the condition experienced by the portion of the population of the United Kingdom that lacks adequate financial resources for a certain standard of living, as defined under the various measures of poverty.
Breaking Ground, formerly Common Ground, is a nonprofit social services organization in New York City whose goal is to create high-quality permanent and transitional housing for the homeless. Its philosophy holds that supportive housing costs substantially less than homeless shelters — and many times less than jail cells or hospital rooms, and that people with psychiatric and other problems can better manage them once they are permanently housed and provided with services. Since its founding in 1990 by Rosanne Haggerty, the organization has created more than 5,000 units of housing for the homeless. "This is about creating a small town, rather than just a building," according to Haggerty. "It's about a real mixed society, working with many different people." Haggerty left the organization in 2011 to found Community Solutions, Inc. Brenda Rosen was promoted from Director, Housing Operations and Programs to Executive Director, and has led the organization since.
Homelessness, also known as houselessness or being unhoused or unsheltered, is the condition of lacking stable, safe, and functional housing. The general category includes disparate situations, such as living on the streets, moving between temporary accommodation such as family or friends, living in boarding houses with no security of tenure, and people who leave their domiciles because of civil conflict and are refugees within their country.
Housing inequality is a disparity in the quality of housing in a society which is a form of economic inequality. The right to housing is recognized by many national constitutions, and the lack of adequate housing can have adverse consequences for an individual or a family. The term may apply regionally, temporally or culturally. Housing inequality is directly related to racial, social, income and wealth inequality. It is often the result of market forces, discrimination and segregation.
Homelessness is a major issue in India. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights defines 'homeless' as those who do not live in a regular residence. The United Nations Economic and Social Council Statement has a broader definition for homelessness; it defines homelessness as follows: ‘When we are talking about housing, we are not just talking about four walls and a roof. The right to adequate housing is about security of tenure, affordability, access to services and cultural adequacy. It is about protection from forced eviction and displacement, fighting homelessness, poverty and exclusion. India defines 'homeless' as those who do not live in Census houses, but rather stay on pavements, roadsides, railway platforms, staircases, temples, streets, in pipes, or other open spaces. There are 1.77 million homeless people in India, or 0.15% of the country's total population, according to the 2011 census consisting of single men, women, mothers, the elderly, and the disabled. However, it is argued that the numbers are far greater than accounted by the point in time method. For example, while the Census of 2011 counted 46,724 homeless individuals in Delhi, the Indo-Global Social Service Society counted them to be 88,410, and another organization called the Delhi Development Authority counted them to be 150,000. Furthermore, there is a high proportion of mentally ill and street children in the homeless population. There are 18 million street children in India, the largest number of any country in the world, with 11 million being urban. Finally, more than three million men and women are homeless in India's capital city of New Delhi; the same population in Canada would make up approximately 30 electoral districts. A family of four members has an average of five homeless generations in India.
Affordable housing in Canada refers to living spaces that are deemed financially accessible to households with a median household income. Housing affordability is generally measured based on a shelter-cost-to-income ratio (STIR) of 30% by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), the national housing agency of Canada. It encompasses a continuum ranging from market-based options like affordable rental housing and affordable home ownership, to non-market alternatives such as government-subsidized housing. Canada ranks among the lowest of the most developed countries for housing affordability.
Homelessness is a social crisis that has been rapidly accelerating in the Canadian city of Vancouver, British Columbia, over the last decade. According to the United Nations, homelessness can either be relative or absolute. Absolute homelessness describes people living in absence of proper physical shelter. Relative homelessness describes people living in poor conditions of health or security, including an absence of both personal safety and steady income despite having physical shelter to reside in. As of 2023, roughly 2,420 people in Vancouver are subject to one of these types of homelessness, or are transitioning between them.
The San Francisco Bay Area comprises nine northern California counties and contains five of the ten most expensive counties in the United States. Strong economic growth has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs, but coupled with severe restrictions on building new housing units, it has resulted in a statewide housing shortage which has driven rents to extremely high levels. The Sacramento Bee notes that large cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles both attribute their recent increases in homeless people to the housing shortage, with the result that homelessness in California overall has increased by 15% from 2015 to 2017. In September 2019, the Council of Economic Advisers released a report in which they stated that deregulation of the housing markets would reduce homelessness in some of the most constrained markets by estimates of 54% in San Francisco, 40 percent in Los Angeles, and 38 percent in San Diego, because rents would fall by 55 percent, 41 percent, and 39 percent respectively. In San Francisco, a minimum wage worker would have to work approximately 4.7 full-time jobs to be able to spend less than 30% of their income on renting a two-bedroom apartment.
Family homelessness refers to a family unit who do not have access to long term accommodation due to various circumstances such as socioeconomic status, access to resources and relationship breakdowns. In some Western countries, such as the United States, family homelessness is a new form of poverty, and a fast growing group of the homelessness population. Some American researchers argue that family homelessness is the inevitable result of imbalanced “low-income housing ratio” where there are more low-income households than there are low-cost housing units. A study in 2018 projected a total of 56,342 family households were recognized as homeless. Roughly 16,390 of these people were living in a place not meant for human habitation. It is believed that homeless families make up about a third of the United States’ population, with generally women being the lead of the household.
The number of people living in dangerous and subpar housing has significantly expanded as a result of the economic and financial crisis. The issue at hand no longer solely affects one nation in the world. The majority of nations are attempting to solve this issue in some form. Because of increased unemployment and declining wages, more people are unable to afford housing costs, increasing their risk of being homeless. Spain, which suffered greatly from COVID-19 and the accompanying economic downturn, is likewise grappling with a huge rural population decline problem. Homelessness is a serious socioeconomic issue that affects 40,000 people in Spain. Immigrants make up a disproportionate number of the homeless population. There are a lot of young people who are homeless; according to some estimates, 30% of Spain's homeless are between the ages of 18 and 29. Just 5% of the country's population, according to Spain's Research Institute for Depopulation and Development of Rural Areas, resides there. Homelessness and public begging are not officially forbidden under Spanish law.
Homelessness is a growing problem in Colorado and is considered the most important social determinants of health. Homelessness is very difficult for many Coloradoans to escape due to the continuous increase in costs for housing in Colorado, along with mental health treatments and other factors. When people are forced to live without stable shelter, they are then exposed to a number of risk factors that affect physical and mental health. Although it is difficult to pin point any one cause of homelessness, there is a complicated combination of societal and individual causes.
The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that more than 181,399 people were experiencing homelessness in California in January 2023. This is one of the highest per capita rates in the nation, with 0.46% of residents estimated as being homeless. More than two-thirds of homeless people in California are unsheltered, which is the highest percentage of any state in the United States. 49% of the unsheltered homeless people in the United States live in California. Even those who are sheltered are so insecurely, with 90% of homeless adults in California reporting that they spent at least one night unsheltered in the past six months.
Housing insecurity is the lack of security in an individual shelter that is the result of high housing costs relative to income and is associated with poor housing quality, unstable neighborhoods, overcrowding, and homelessness.
For many decades, the New York metropolitan area has suffered from an increasing shortage of housing, as housing supply has not met housing demand. As a result, New York City has the highest rents of any city in the United States.
Columbus, the capital city of Ohio, has a history of social services to provide for low- and no-income residents. The city has many neighborhoods below the poverty line, and has experienced a rise in homelessness in recent decades. Social services include cash- and housing-related assistance, case management, treatment for mental health and substance abuse, and legal and budget/credit assistance.
Housing in the United States comes in a variety of forms and tenures. The rate of homeownership in the United States, as measured by the fraction of units that are owner-occupied, was 64% as of 2017. This rate is less than the rates in other large countries such as China (90%), Russia (89%) Mexico (80%), or Brazil (73%).
The 2022 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress, produced by The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, estimated that 10,654 Ohioans faced homelessness during the year, representing 9 in every 10,000 individuals. Over 80% of the homeless were sheltered. This population was made up of 3,214 people who belonged to families with children, 703 unaccompanied youth, 633 veterans, and 1,023 chronically homeless individuals.