Administering to the Homeless Population - Essay Example

Administering to the Homeless Your School There are few experiences that would be as frightening as losing one's home.Whether or not one has grown up moving from one cheap apartment to the next, or has suddenly been the victim of foreclosure and only has a short time to find a new place to live, the transition is among the most earth-shattering experiences that happen to people. There are those who believe that shelter is a fundamental right, and so it is the job of the government to help people who have fallen into homelessness, so that all people have a home.

There are also those, though, who feel that people should be responsible for themselves and take steps to ensure that they always have shelter, such as maintaining savings, finishing high school (and even college), and having an alternative when the current job dries up and blows away in the wind. Of course, as the economic downturn that began in 2008 has shown, even people in high-salary positions can end up unemployed at the drop of a hat, and it may just be that we have less control over our economic status than we think we do.

As one of Senator Chris Bond's staffers put it, “People need to understand that anybody can slip into homelessness. Just go into shelters and talk to people and realize that a lot of them were middle-income, or owned small businesses, and because of one little thing in their life, they just fell down” (Katel, 2009). When it comes to solving the problem of homelessness, though, the government cannot handle the problem on its own. A partnership of public and private entities is crucial to ending the cycle of homelessness.

One of the main issues when it comes to solving the problem of homelessness has to do with spreading out the homeless population so that they can see that there are alternatives to their current situations. In many urban centers, the homeless had come to occupy park benches, public library lobbies, and bus stations throughout the downtowns, making the cities turn into doughnuts, at least in terms of the well-to-do, as none of them would live in the city centers. Many cities turned to laws against panhandling, but they actually exacerbated the problem, because the jails and the homeless shelters were all in the same area – still downtown.

This did not give the homeless people an atmosphere that was hopeful, where they could change their lifestyles. Even strategies to clear the homeless out of particular areas did not work, as “any clearance strategy is simply going to disperse people into other areas, where they will remain homeless” (Culhane, 2010, p. 852). Instead, the optimal strategy is still to move the homeless – but into areas where their numbers are not so concentrated, and where they have access to services on several tiers.

They do need emergency services, such as initial housing, food and clothing, but they also need access to education and training programs ranging from GED completion to parenting classes to resume preparation and interview practice. In many instances, private agencies can step in and provide help where public entities would fail. Even at the municipal level, the problems of a large city mean that too many people and issues will fall through the cracks. In a time of recession, every level of government has to use its money sparingly, because of the drop in tax revenues.

When this happens, nonessential services tend to go first, with the assumption that federal funding will fill the gap. Public case workers have high case loads and receive low pay, leading to burnout and turnover, which leaves the people they are serving with inconsistent treatment. Private agencies can work on a smaller scale to serve individuals who are left out of the government-provided safety net (McAllister, Kuang and Lennon, 2010, p. 14). There are many donors who will fund private nonprofit agencies and foundations who will not increase their contribution to government tax coffers willingly, because of fears that the government will simply waste the money.

Because private agencies can gain access to these funds, and because they are locally based, giving their staff the expertise to meet local needs less clumsily than the leviathan federal government, a partnership is necessary. There is no way that private foundations can provide for all of the needs of the homeless, but there is also no way that tax revenues will solve the problems either. It is clear that a partnership is necessary for the cycle of homelessness to end. Works Cited Culhane, P. (2010). Tackling homelessness in Los Angeles' Skid Row.

Criminology & Public Policy 9(4): 851-858. Katel, P. (2009). Housing the homeless. CQ Online 19(44). http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre2009121800 McAlister, W., Kuang, L., and Lennon, M. (2010). Re-thinking research on typologizing homelessness. Columbia Population Research Center Working Paper No. 10-01. http://cupop.columbia.edu/files_cupop/imce_shared/McAllister_et_al_CPRC_WPS_10-01.pdf