There Is an Easy Fix, but We're Not Doing it
Maddie Hunt
July 16, 2018
After seeing the staggering numbers of homeless people on the streets and in shelters within the US, i'd like to think that most people's first reaction is What can we do to fix this problem?
Luckily, there are people out there working hard to come up with feasible solutions. After conducting some research myself, I found that there is a quick and easy fix.
Three news sources - The Guardian, Bloomberg.com, & The Week - all give comically simplistic solutions to this worldwide crisis.
Dawn Foster gives her quick fix in The Guardian. She claims "What is infuriating is that we know how to solve homelessness: by giving people affordable, secure homes."
Over on Bloomberg.com, Noah Smith gives another astonishingly simple solution. He writes "Homelessness is a tragedy the US can Afford to Fix". His claim is that the US is spending money in all the wrong places. He argues "If temporarily homeless people were housed in temporary housing, and if each temporary residence were occupied half the time, homelessness of all kinds could be eliminated for about $10 billion a year. That’s less than a seventh of what the government spends on food stamps."
Finally, Ryan Cooper shares a similar plea in The Week: "Solving Homelessness is easy. So why don't we just do it?". Cooper cites "Utah tried just handing such people their own apartment in a program called Housing First and combined that with regular attention from social workers, hey presto — the state decreased chronic homelessness by 91 percent."
All of these solutions make perfect sense. They are quick, easy, and seemingly cost friendly. What is the cause of homelessness? People not having a home, of course. So, why not start at the source of the problem?
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