Poverty and Homelessness

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Poverty and Homelessness
Poverty refers to scarcity thereof material possessions, money or even inability to fulfill one’s basic needs or obligations. Homelessness, on the other hand, depicts the lack of a stable housing condition. Poverty contributes to homelessness which intensify the perceptions of powerlessness, insecurity and even stress (Lister, 2004). It is often associated with inequality and may seem chronic. Targets have been set by many nations, humanitarian bodies and even the individuals themselves on how to curb this poverty. Poverty and homelessness are a recipe for disaster in other sectors of the economy and even the realm of life, for example, it might contribute to the deterioration of the education and health sectors in any economy. In Poverty (pg. 150), by Ruth Lister, she describes the experience of poverty as the determinant of identity and subjectivity aspects which are important in the development of the political agency. The poverty and homelessness experiences are a blow to self-esteem and affect one’s identity, which is required in the capacity for political agency. Daly Gerald, in Homeless:Policies,Strategies and Lives on the Street, looks at the homelessness situation across the North America especially the cities of Los Angeles, California where the statistics for the homelessness situation are worse. The causes of abject poverty can become political and economic hazard if not controlled considering the systems are well merged that any disturbance can cause the entire web of systems to rattle and even disintegrate. Though Joel A. Devine, in the Greatest of Evils: Urban Poverty and the American Underclass, defines poverty from the economic realm, he does associate this with a specific group as chronic poor. These included households headed by the elderly, blacks, females and those living in the South. This is purely hypothetical as poverty is situational and involves a much wider spectrum. Attempts have been made to categorize poverty and even measure the same. Philip Kotler in Up and Out of Poverty: The Social Marketing Solution places two categories for measuring poverty. These included:
Absolute poverty: refers to complete lack of basic human needs for survival such as food, shelter and clothing. It describes forthwith the struggle to survive compounded with destitution. It is often associated with developing economies.
Relative poverty: usually associated with developed countries, in that poverty is understood considering the generally accepted standard of living in that society and even participating in activities regarded as the norm for this society. This depicts that poverty does not concern only money.
Exclusion helps us understand poverty in a wider perspective, its causes and the net impact on those affected. Social exclusion segregates people further and distances them from the chance of falling into adequate income or even job opportunities. Without adequate income, the affected person(s) is bound to search for affordable housing which are rare in the current economic situations. The society at large does little to accommodate them forcing the poor and homeless to look for alternative shelter in public places which are normally not me...