Homeless & Poverty

881 Words4 Pages
Poverty and social exclusion are causes of homelessness across developed the country. A comparative perception on the ways that social policies and cultural practices in the United States shape both levels of inequality and the particular groups who lack resources, and hence both rates of homelessness and the groups who are most likely to experience it. It argues that patterns of social exclusion are related to homelessness at two levels they influenced the overall generosity of social welfare programmers and they affected the ability of particular households to access income, wealth, jobs and housing. Structural factors such as poverty and social exclusion may interact with individual vulnerabilities to produce and maintain homelessness The relationship between structural factors in American society individual short-comings and inadequacies did start explaining the rise of homelessness over the past decades. In particular, it will posit that structural and individual factors are often inextricably linked in the cycle of poverty and homelessness, and that they tend to re-enforce each other as they are manifest socially, politically, and economically in American society. And yet, the degree to which structural or individual factors play the most decisive role in contributing to homelessness in a particular case varies significantly depending upon the specific circumstances of that case. As a result, the first section of this essay will outline some of the broad-based structural and individual factors which largely account for poverty and homelessness in the American context. The second section will then analyze the relative strengths and weaknesses of these differing factors as they play out in the lives of the majority of the American homeless. Poverty has existed in some form in American society since the founding of the nation in the late eighteenth century.
Open Document