Homeless People Essay

When most of today’s society thinks about homeless people, they usually associate this lifestyle with laziness or other negative stereotypes. People assume that because people are living on the streets with no jobs or belongings that they simply refuse to work in order to be able to own things; however, this is usually not the case. Homeless people often find themselves being in their living situation because they lose or cannot find an occupation, they lose all of their possessions due to tragic natural events such as fire or weather, or they grow up in poverty and do not know how to break the vicious economic cycle. No matter the issue, most homeless people are targeted as having no ambition to change their situation. This paper will not

Without owning a home or having accessibility to items such as medicine or food, life expectancies for homeless people are very low. According to O’Toole and other authors, “Several studies have reported life expectancies in the fifth decade” for people with no home which is significantly lower than the “eighth decade for the general public” (O’Toole). Most people do not realize the large amount of homeless people there are in the world. An anonymous author writing An SOS From Homeless People explains, “The scale is massive. Overall estimates for Europe as a whole and the USA are each in excess of 3 million people” (An SOS). With these numbers, one can tell that homelessness is obviously an issue if that many people are experiencing poor health and short lives. Not only are homeless people unhealthy because they cannot afford medicine and other things that help their health, but they also face personal dangers while living on the streets. One article discusses some of these dangers homeless people face: “They are more than ten times likely to be robbed than those who have a home” (O’Toole). Homeless people own very minimal belongings, if any, and these statistics show how the small amount of things they might have are often stolen. Homelessness also affects the general population because the homeless men and women occupy space throughout cities and are usually forced to beg the public for food, water, and