How to Fix Homelessness: Permits to Give Homeless People the Right to Beg

Entering an academic program, that I have since dropped out of, and trying to win a scholarship, I was called upon to write an essay on either three issues. The other two I can not recall, but the one I chose, I remember clearly enough, was about homelessness in American and how would I fix it.

After much consideration, I told of a story of a woman I took a class with. She rarely visited downtown Chicago, she lived out in the surrounding, upper class suburbs and after talking to me about various issues, most having to do with her boyfriend, she told me a story of once as a child, her parents bringing her and her younger sister to visit downtown Chicago, and that her sister, never having seen a homeless person before, was scared of them.

Since I could not think of a reasonable response, I remained quiet and continued to listened. But it had me thinking that maybe insulating ones' children from all poverty was not a good thing. This story leads me to a some solutions for taking care of homelessness in America.

Homelessness or the issue of homelessness tends to be put under one big universal blanket which makes the problem harder to combat. What we should do is make the problem smaller therefore more fixable and in order to do that we should compartmentalize it , and once that is done, deal with the problems within each compartment.

The first thing would be to distinguish between the various people who are classified as homeless- the mentally ill, the drug and alcohol addicts and people who are down on their luck. If we do not know how or why they have become to be in such circumstances then we can not help them properly. We can not treat or help a drug addict or a person suffering from mental illness in the same way sufficiently.

A fair question to ask is how do we begin to accurately classify or take account of the number of people on city streets. I did not say it was going to be easy, but I think is best to send people to where a homeless person is likely to be found.