Why is Homelessness Important?

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The thing with homelessness is that it is a bad experience for everyone. No person enjoys being homeless. Most people don't even choose it.

Society doesn't enjoy people being homeless either. To the housed, homelessness is unhealthy, expensive, ugly, and depressing.

The two most significant reasons why homelessness is important, then, is because it is a bad experience for everyone, and it remains unsolved.

Here is a further discussion of why homelessness is important:

1) HOMELESSNESS IS IMPORTANT BECAUSE IT IS A BAD EXPERIENCE

The first reason why homelessness is important is it is a bad experience for both the individual and society.

homelessness to the individual

To the individual, no temperature control, a place to shower, sleep, remain, leave possessions, charge electronics, or way to work presents difficulties. In these ways, to the individual, homelessness is a bad experience.

no temperature control

First and foremost, the worst part about being homeless is no way exists to control temperature. In the winter, it gets ear-shatteringly cold. The only way to stay warm in subzero temperatures is dry and away from the wind. The homeless often lack a place to do so. As a result, 800 people freeze to death on the streets each year. Not only does hypothermia kill them, but they suffer from the cold until they die. So in that way, homelessness is a bad experience.

The cold is not the only way that homelessness is a bad experience though. The summer can also be brain-bubblingly warm. With no way to rig up an air conditioner, the homeless also sometimes suffer until their heart stops from heat stroke. Each year, hundreds of homeless die from extreme heat.

no place to shower

Homelessness need not lead to severe suffering to be a bad experience, though. Sometimes it's the little things that make homelessness bad. Lacking a place to shower, the homeless often worry about whether the stench of their unbathed body offends other people. Because they are often embarrassed to reveal to society that they are unhoused, knowing that they smell terrible creates anxiety. They worry about what people think about them.

no place to sleep

In addition to not having a place to shower, lacking a place to sleep can also be a bad experience. Laws exist against sleeping in parks or under bridges, and homeless shelters are always full. So for almost anywhere sleeping in the great outdoors when homeless is illegal. It takes just one disgruntled apartment complex owner to report a homeless guy sleeping in a field behind the complex.

no place to remain

Even if one makes it through the night without being harassed by the housed or police department, the homeless must still figure out what to do with their day. The park provides a place for the homeless to go temporarily. But they can't be there 24-7. There are police against even loitering at parks. Forced to explain to law enforcement that where they sleep at night is not the park, anywhere the homeless do confess to sleeping that is not a shelter is a crime. Thus, not having a place to go is no walk in the park.

no place to leave possessions

In addition to not having a place to go in the evening or a place to remain in the daytime, the homeless also are challenged by the situation of having no place to leave their belongings. Lacking a home to store their stuff, the homeless are burdened with carrying all their belongings with them. If they push it around in shopping carts, they may be ticketed for shopping cart theft. If they carry all of it with them, they can be ticketed for having too many possessions on a person in public. Laws exist against that too. So when caught at the park with all of their belongings, the homeless can be legally told to leave because they are breaking the law. So not having a place to leave possessions is another way in which homelessness is a bad experience for the individual.

no place to charge electronics or work

Then, of course, there's the problem that if they don't have a home, no place exists to charge electronics. This means that, while loitering on park benches, no browsing Facebook or doing anything even remotely entertaining. This also means that the homeless can't get a job if they tried. Even if they fill out a thousand applications, how will employers be able to reach them for an interview?

homelessness is a bad experience for society

The members of the non-homeless community put their hearts out to the unfortunate individuals who experience the suffering related to homelessness. They recognize the suffering that exists in living a life unhoused.

But society is acutely aware of the difficulties that homelessness presents to the non-homeless community as well. Homelessness is unhealthy, expensive, ugly, and depressing. It also opposes societal goals, negatively impacts the economy, is inconvenient to society, and cultivates a higher risk of illness in the community as well. In short, homelessness is not only a problem for the individual, homelessness is a social problem as well.

The fact that homelessness presents all these problems and remains unsolved creates a sense of urgency for a solution.

2) HOMELESSNESS IS IMPORTANT BECAUSE IT REMAINS UNSOLVED

So not only is it a bad experience for both the individual and society, but homelessness is also important because it remains unsolved. The fact that homelessness is bad to experience for all, and no solution exists makes homelessness significant.

Homelessness is important to you, then, because the world needs your help to solve it.

Here is a short discussion on why homelessness remains unsolved:

Why homelessness remains unsolved

Homelessness remains unsolved because no person in society fully understands its causes. It appears that poverty, unaffordable housing, mental illness, unexpected life circumstances (like job loss, eviction, physical illness,) and an attempt to gain personal freedom from societal obligations are all reasons homelessness exists.

But each of these problems is either (a) outside the homeless or non-homeless person's control, or (b) is so fundamental to the fabric of society that any attempt to eliminate the possibility of occurrence of homelessness requires massive societal reformation. Put simply, to solve homelessness, we need to change society.

Since no legitimate way has been proposed to reformulate society, since no legitimate way has been proposed to prevent social problems like homelessness from occurring, no solution to homelessness exists.

We know that a lack of money, cheap housing, and a desire to play hooky from work are the root causes of homelessness. What we don't know, however, is how to remedy these problems.

A lack of money and cheap housing are symptoms of a bad economy. (An economy is a marketplace for trading goods and services. The current economic system in the US is capitalism.) And yet, in one of the greatest economies in the modern world, the United States, homelessness is abundant; In the US, a quarter-million people sleep on the streets each night.

Thus, if homelessness is a problem of poverty and one of the greatest economies in the world still has homelessness, then poverty itself is unsolvable. It must be because even in current times the best economy we have doesn't even eliminate poverty.

Homelessness will never be solved given the current economic systems we have at our disposal. (Economic systems are just the rules and ways in which society runs businesses and makes money.)

The problem thus appears to be with the economic systems themselves. Something about the way world economies work seems to make a solution to homelessness impossible.

homelessness is important to you because you may be able to solve it with entrepreneurship

That's why the world needs someone like you to design a better alternative to current economic systems. That's why the world needs someone like you to figure out how to change the economy so that it works better and so homelessness can disappear.

The only other way to eliminate homelessness is to figure out how to generate enough money to house the unhoused ourselves. If the current economic system is capitalism, then you or I need to build businesses that generate enough money to put homeless people in homes.

Governments aren't going to do it. Many reasons exist as to why they won't. Governments have had the entire span of human civilization to house the unhoused, but never have they. It's going to take someone smart and altruistic to pay for the unhoused to live in homes. And that smart and altruistic person is going to need a lot of money.

So the solution to homelessness appears to be in entrepreneurship.

FINAL THOUGHTS

While it is true that homelessness is created by the individual and so the bad a person experience is ultimately a product of their own doing, homelessness is usually not a choice. Often, a person is homeless due to factors outside their control. Mental illness, for example, makes it difficult to hold down a job. Over half the homeless population is mentally ill. As another example, veterans who are homeless often suffer from physical injuries like traumatic brain injuries. These are problems that the homeless person does not choose.

Furthermore, the same problems that cause homelessness for these individuals also prevent them from ever getting out of homelessness themselves. This means that if they are ever going to escape their dire situations, the solution is going to need to be through you and me. Since we can't rely on the government to end homelessness, (we gave them their shot and they dropped the ball,) me and you are going to have to end homelessness ourselves. I think the way to do that is through altruism and entrepreneurship. It's going to be through creating businesses that are designed specifically to generate money to house the unhoused. It's not going to be easy but it can be done. The answer to homelessness lies if not within me, within you.

conclusion

Homelessness is important because it is a bad experience and remains unsolved. It is a bad experience for both the individual and society. To the individual, being homeless is a bad experience because no way to control temperature results in suffering and even sometimes death. The individual also experiences adversity due to no place to shower, sleep, remain, or leave possessions. Having no way to charge electronics makes attaining work difficult.

In addition, homelessness is a bad experience for society. It is unhealthy, expensive, ugly, depressing, opposes societal goals, negatively impacts the economy, is inconvenient to society, and cultivates a higher risk of illness in the community.

In short, homelessness is important because it is a huge, complicated problem that remains yet solved, and its existence is bad.