The Secret Lives of Homeless Students
I think it is a shame that this has been upvoted so much and not commented upon yet. I happen to be homeless and I know there are other people here who are struggling in the present -- pleas for help sometimes show up here by people in real trouble -- and I know there are people here who have been homeless in the past.<p>As a nation, we need to work on putting together a better social safety net and we need to work on making a whole lot more affordable housing available. I don't recall the exact figures off the top of my head, but the number of available affordable housing units is some relatively small percentage of demand. This is in part because of the way taxes and financing and things like that are structured. It is in part because we have done away with a lot of affordable options in a lot of places, like SROs and boarding houses. The types of places young single people used to live largely no longer exist.<p>As a nation, our track record for caring for our children really sucks. This is a very poor policy that hurts the future of our country. We are churning out relatively large numbers of people with terrible childhoods and then wondering why so much fails to go smoothly. We are grinding up a very high percentage of future citizens and then expecting them to somehow solve it themselves. Aside from any moral concerns, this is just a terrible thing to do to ourselves as a nation. We are flushing a great deal of human capital down the toilet by caring so little about the welfare of our children.<p>Edit:<p>From the end of the article: <i>This also means that we need to de-stigmatize homelessness, so students in need will self-identify and get the help they need.</i><p>This is part of why I am open about being homeless, although I know that in the short term it hurts me. I would probably be taken more seriously here and other places if I weren't open about being homeless currently. I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class. I have about six years of college, including an AA and 2 certificates and I am a few classes short of a bachelor's. But I realize that my lack of housing is something that convinces many people I am simply incompetent and I get dismissed and they move on. And that needs to change if things are ever going to improve in this country. As long as people figure homeless folks are merely inept, they aren't going to try to get at the real roots of the problem, like sky high housing costs.