Homelessness

[SamDLowe]

Hello,

Homelessness is a real issue in the UK and quite recently, a friend of mine has been made homeless. He was in the care system and has no family and since being kicked out, has been sleeping rough in the local woods for three nights before staying at my house temporarily.

My family have spent the day on the phone to our local council, numerous hostels and other support organisations but nobody has been able to support him and the only appointment able to be made available is Thursday.

The system is flawed and something needs to be done. What can be done to support the homeless and prevent others from being in this position?

I will be working alongside charities to help improve the support for the homeless and will send off any suggestions.

Thank you

 

[John]

I can't speak too much about the UK, but in the US, it normally is due to one of three things. All of which I'll cover.

The first one is poor education. Pretty rarely do people WANT to be homeless. If you don't have an education, you won't get a job. Staying in school, and reforming highschools to actually teach you something is what can solve this pretty easily.

The next issue is the lack of jobs. Honestly, it's pretty hard to find a full time job due to things like the Affordable Care Act, increasing minimum wage, and overregulation. If things like this were fixed, many more places would go into business, and the already existing business would feel compelled to hire more people.

The final thing is how poor our charities have become. Don't get me wrong: there are plenty of perfectly good charities out there, but lately it seems that they all have 100k board members who are more interested in getting their dollar than helping people who their charity is supposed to help.

 

[SamDLowe]

I can't speak too much about the UK, but in the US, it normally is due to one of three things. All of which I'll cover.

The first one is poor education. Pretty rarely do people WANT to be homeless. If you don't have an education, you won't get a job. Staying in school, and reforming highschools to actually teach you something is what can solve this pretty easily.

The next issue is the lack of jobs. Honestly, it's pretty hard to find a full time job due to things like the Affordable Care Act, increasing minimum wage, and overregulation. If things like this were fixed, many more places would go into business, and the already existing business would feel compelled to hire more people.

The final thing is how poor our charities have become. Don't get me wrong: there are plenty of perfectly good charities out there, but lately it seems that they all have 100k board members who are more interested in getting their dollar than helping people who their charity is supposed to help.

Thanks for the reply! I agree with a lot of what you say and back when I was doing business at school, I even raised the job issue. By raising the minimum wage, businesses will end up cutting jobs and more people will become unemployed, with jobs being harder to obtain. Instead, they should keep the minimum wage low but offer benefits for businesses who increase it. That way, businesses can legally hire employees at an affordable rate but are encouraged to increase their pay if they can afford it. In the UK, we are fortunate enough to have the NHS for our health care so private health care is optional, which reduces the cost of an employee.

Charities aren't as effective as they make out to be, especially homeless ones. Yes, they do offer support however that is usually ineffective as i've witnessed first hand. What they should be doing is providing temporary accommodation so they are actually in a bed at night, and then support them with jobs and claiming benefits that they are entitled to etc and then support them with housing on a more permanent basis. The YMCA in the UK are great at this however they have long waiting times which require an appointment and interview and aren't that well known, so not many homeless people know about their service. They should be approaching homeless people themselves or at least educating people about their service.

 

[Poser]

I was not expecting that these countries--big countries--also have these kinds of problems. In the Philippines, homelessness is widespread. There are a lot of street urchins, as well as people who are living under the bridge. I do hope that with our new administration in the country, things like this will be put into consideration.