Homelessness in Flint

Causes of Homelessness

The numbers of the homeless in America and their visibility began to increase in the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, (Fact Sheet, 1991). There are many explanations offered for these developments, although they all seem to fall into two broad categories: structural factors, which set the context for pervasive homelessness; and individual vulnerabilities, which earmark those people at highest risk of homelessness within tight housing and job markets, (Koegel, 2004). Structural factors include among others, a complex set of changes in the housing market, in income distribution, in social policy regarding marginal populations, and in the availability of urban zones of tolerance all come together to set the stage for homelessness. While with individual vulnerabilities, risk factors emerge at critical points during an individual's life span compound themselves to generate the kinds of problems that leave the person with impaired or incapacitated to compete for the scarce social and economic resources. This puts the person at an elevated risk for a structure to ...