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This article is about how many people are homeless. People who are homeless have been homeless for a long time.Homeless is a world wide thing it doesn't just happen in one country or city. People should help the homeless get back on there feet. Also 1.6 homeless youths are identify as LGBTQ.

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Since the early 1990s, those coping with homelessness have also faced increasing criminalization of homeless activities by local and state governments, including sleeping, eating, sitting, and begging in public spaces. As of November 2016, 27 percent of cities in the United States impose citywide bans on begging in public, including Clearwater, Florida; Manchester, New Hampshire; and Santa Cruz, California, according to the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty.

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People are homeless all over the country that need help. Obama is making a stimulus package includes a ninefold immediate increase in an existing grant program that funds shelters. People who are homeless either go to a shelter or live with friends and family.

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Homelessness Is a Serious Problem Nationwide

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Homelessness, edited by Tamara Thompson, Greenhaven Press, 2012. Opposing Viewpoints. Opposing Viewpoints in Context, http%3A%2F%2Flink.galegroup.com%2Fapps%2Fdoc%2FEJ3010812206%2FOVIC%3Fu%3Dpl2683%26sid%3DOVIC%26xid%3D27ce0faf. Accessed 27 Feb. 2019. Originally published as "States Cope with Rising Homelessness," Stateline.org, 18 Mar. 2009.

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Cutting Assistance for Homelessness Would Be Disastrous

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Homelessness, edited by Tamara Thompson, Greenhaven Press, 2012. Opposing Viewpoints. Opposing Viewpoints in Context, http%3A%2F%2Flink.galegroup.com%2Fapps%2Fdoc%2FEJ3010812227%2FOVIC%3Fu%3Dpl2683%26sid%3DOVIC%26xid%3D5fcb905a. Accessed 11 Mar. 2019. Originally published as "A Devastating Impact: How More Budget Cuts and Delayed Payments Will Increase Homelessness in Illinois,", 24 Mar. 2010.

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People who are homeless go to some sort of shelter. Most of the shelters are full of people. Also other homeless people can't find a place to sleep. homeless people have kids that are very young. So they can't stay out in the cold or heat.

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Some 544,000 people in the United States have no shelter every night, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Homeless families make up over one-third of this total.

Beyond exposing them to weather, crime and unsanitary conditions, homelessness can also damage people's self-esteem, making them feel helpless or hopeless. Being homeless is a traumatic experience, in part because of the stigma associated with this situation.

Recovering from homelessness may therefore involve not just finding a job and permanent home but also rebuilding one's self-esteem.

My research on the built environment suggests that the interior design of homeless shelters can either support or hinder people's ability to assert control over their future.

How design affects people

Research has long demonstrated that physical spaces affect human moods and behaviors.

Office environments with many common spaces foster collaboration, for example, while stock investors who work on higher floors take more risks.

Homeless shelters, too, can influence how residents see the world and themselves. A shelter with sterile corridor and glaring lights may silently send the message that, "People don't think you deserve a nice place to live."

Homeless housing designed with warm colors, thoughtful lighting and useful signage, on the other hand, can send the opposite message: "Someone cares."

In my experience, most homeless shelters are designed simply to house as many people as possible. Others are so dilapidated, violent or dirty that people actually prefer to sleep outside.

What unhoused families need

I undertook a three-month field experiment at a shelter in Florida to understand how bedroom design could support or hinder two families trying to transition from homelessness into permanent housing.

Each family consisted of a single mother with two children. One family had two girls, ages 3 and 4. The other had two boys, ages 3 and 18.

Both parents had generally positive relationships with their children, had completed high school through the 10th grade and were living in the shelter because they had lost their jobs.

Initially, both families stayed in identical 9-by-12 bedrooms. Each had two metal bunk beds, one dresser, pale green walls, a single light fixture and a bathroom shared with a family of four. With so little storage, the families piled their belongings on the unused fourth bunk.

The bedroom door had no lock, so that staff could check in on residents as needed. This is common in shelters.

Housing that looks like jail

After two months, one family moved into a room that our team had upgraded with 18 new features intended to empower residents by offering them control over their environment.

These included drawer-and-bin storage for their possessions, lap desks, privacy curtains around the beds, bulletin boards and shelving. We also painted the walls a light blue.

I interviewed the mothers in the beginning and the end of their experience.

The mother who would later move into an upgraded room felt "aggravated and frustrated" in the first space. The mother who stayed in that room for all three months described it as "crowded," "claustrophobic" and "grim." She even said the metal beds and hard, cold floors reminded her of jail.

Both families piled their belongings on the unused fourth bunk for lack of other storage.

"The more time you spend in it, the more you feel like the walls are closing in," she told me after four weeks, explaining that she often stayed out late to avoid coming home to this cramped situation.

So did her older son, who sometimes spent all night in the shelter's computer lab. His mother worried about her son's "vampire" hours.

This family seemed agitated throughout the three-month study. They sought relief from their housing situation - and from each other - elsewhere.

The family's experience in the altered room

Things looked different for the other family.

The good lighting and wall cushions encouraged them to read together. They had guests more often. A case worker told me that the family would sometimes spend the entire day together in their shelter bedroom - something they'd never done in their previous space.

Though the two rooms were the same size, a divided dutch door and bed curtains allowed the residents in the altered room to create personal spaces for listening to music or reading.

They organized and put away their possessions in the storage provided, reducing clutter.

The children liked drawing on the marker boards, so the mother allowed them to use it as a reward for good behavior, exerting parental authority in a positive way.

Signs of ownership

Tellingly, the families also expressed themselves differently in the two rooms.
In the upgraded room with shelving, the family displayed photographs, art and beloved stuffed animals. The kids played dress up in front of the mirror. These are both territorial acts that define and confirm identities.

The family in the unaltered bedroom displayed little art, in part because the mother felt it was an imposition to ask shelter staff for tape to affix items to the wall.

When her 3-year-old boy tried to play cars on the floor, his mom told him it was too dirty. Bored, he would peel paint off the wall near his bed.

She reprimanded him for this behavior, causing arguments. The children also argued frequently with each other.

A place to call home

At the study's end, I asked the mother living in the upgraded space how she would have felt if her family had stayed in the unaltered bedroom. Her answer reflected the role housing plays in keeping a family happy and healthy.

"I don't know if I would say I would be depressed, but I would have had a different feeling," she responded. "Sometimes you just want peace and quiet" - which the bed curtains and dutch door now offered her.

She also thought her kids might have eventually "cracked," she said, because they couldn't act as they would in "a regular home."

"My older girl will pull the curtains and read books to her sister" now, the mother said. "She feels like she has something that belongs to her."

The new bedroom, which could be adjusted to fit the family's needs, empowered them to take ownership of it. I believe such actions may help combat underlying feelings of helplessness.

This small, only partially controlled study is not the final word in shelter design.

But it certainly suggests that shelter architecture can help families experiencing homelessness by giving them a calm, positive and supportive home base for planning their future.

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Shelter design can help people recover from homelessness

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Studies show that people's environments influence their mood. The same is true of homeless shelters, which can either help or hurt residents' psychological well-being - and, possibly, their futures.

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There are so much homeless people out in the world that need help. There are 554,000 people homeless today that needs home. 11% of those homeless people are kids under the age of 18. People have dirty clothes on and probally haven't taken a shower in a while.

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The number of homeless people in the U.S. is rising for the first time in years. What's behind the increase? Here's everything you need to know:
How bad is the problem?
About 554,000 people in the U.S. were homeless on any given night in 2017 - including nearly 58,000 families with children - meaning they didn't have a safe, permanent place to sleep. That figure represents a 1 percent rise since 2016 - the first time the nation's homeless population has increased in seven years. But the country's biggest cities, especially those on the West Coast, have seen a far bigger rise in homelessness. New York City, which has the nation's largest homeless population, reported a 4 percent increase since 2016 to about 76,500 people, San Diego a 5 percent increase to 9,160, and Los Angeles a 26 percent increase to nearly 55,200. Many of those homeless people crowd into places like L.A.'s "Skid Row," where hundreds of tents and tarpaulin shanties crowd the sidewalks just blocks from City Hall. "Skid Row is - and long has been - a national disgrace," the Los Angeles Times wrote in a recent editorial. "In the world's richest nation, homelessness on this scale should be shameful and shocking."

Do all homeless people live on the street?
No, in fact about two-thirds of homeless people in the U.S. live in some kind of shelter or temporary housing, staying with friends or family or in a motel. But the number of street sleepers varies from city to city. In New York, which is required by law to provide shelter for all residents, about 3,000 people sleep on the streets. In Los Angeles, three-quarters of the homeless - some 40,000 people - don't have shelter, and sleep outside or in their vehicles. Many communities make it a crime to live outside. More than 80 cities have passed laws making it illegal to sleep in vehicles, and more than 60 have banned camping in public. Cities such as Denver and San Francisco have handed out free one-way bus tickets to the homeless, hoping to off-load the problem onto another community. "Society's message to the homeless is abundantly clear: You don't matter, because you don't have money," says Veronica Harnish, who blogs about her experiences with intermittent homelessness.

Why is homelessness rising?
While some people become homeless because of mental illness and drug addiction, more than 75 percent simply can't afford a place to live. There are now only 12 counties in the U.S. where a worker earning the state minimum wage or federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour would be able to afford a one-bedroom rental home on their own, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. And while wage growth has remained flat for the past 20 years, the median rent for a vacant home or apartment has doubled over the same period, to about $910 in 2017. A shortage of housing is pushing up rents, and so is gentrification of neighborhoods where poor people used to live. In most cities, the demand for housing far outstrips the supply. New York City, for example, added 62,345 new housing units from 2011 to 2015, enough to house about 125,000 people, but its population grew by more than 300,000 over the same period.

What's being done to help?
With no signs of the problem disappearing, some communities are turning away from punitive approaches. Instead of razing its homeless encampments, Oakland has started providing trash pickup and portable bathrooms for residents. After a Hepatitis A outbreak began ravaging Southern California's homeless community, private donors, charities, and city authorities worked together to erect three "bridge shelters" in San Diego. The tent-like structures are the size of a city block and filled with rows of bunk beds. They have heating and cooling, laundry facilities, and communal dining areas, plus 24/7 security and access to social services. Seattle has authorized permanent encampments for the past decade, with 11 sanctioned camps in the Puget Sound area that receive city funding. But such projects remain controversial, among both Seattleites who don't want to live near such camps and homelessness advocates who say they're a stopgap solution.

How can cities get people off the street?
Many experts believe the best solution is to simply put the homeless into low-cost or free apartments, without preconditions. Utah, which has a "Housing First" strategy, has one of the nation's lowest rates of chronic homelessness. Just 6 percent of the state's homeless are considered chronic - people who have been living on the streets for more than a year - compared with 24 percent nationwide. Evidence suggests that programs like Utah's are far more cost-effective than putting homeless people in transitional housing. One Colorado study found that the average homeless person costs taxpayers $43,000 a year in shelters, emergency-room visits, and other expenses, while providing permanent housing for the same person would cost $17,000 a year.

Would that work elsewhere?
Finding vacant homes is a challenge in crowded, booming states like California, which would need to build 180,000 new housing units each year - 100,000 more than are currently being built - simply to keep up with population growth. "It's obvious what the answer is: affordable housing," said Bob Erlenbusch, who began working with the homeless in Los Angeles in 1984. "I never in a million years thought that it would drag on for three decades with no end in sight."

Working while homeless
While many people associate the homeless with begging, about 25 percent of the homeless population has a job, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Institute. In the heart of California's Silicon Valley, where rents are $3,000 or more, low-income workers in industries like food service, retail, and hospitality juggle their day jobs with finding a place to sleep at night. Tes Saldana, 51, works as a cook for two hotels in Palo Alto. She lives in an RV with her three adult sons, two of whom also work; their monthly vehicle payments come to $700. Until recently, she parked on a tree-lined street in nearby Mountain View along with a group of fellow homeless RV campers. Late last year, the city banned vehicles more than 6 feet high from parking there. It's tough, she says, living in the shadow of enormous wealth. "How about for us people who are serving these tech people?" Saldana said. "We don't get the same paycheck that they do."

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The number of homeless people in the U.S. is rising for the first time in years. What's behind the increase? Here's everything you need to know: How bad is the problem? About 554,000 people in the U.S. were homeless on any given night in 2017 - including nearly 58,000 families with children - meaning they didn't have a safe, permanent place to sleep.

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This picture tells us that people are really tired and sick. also need a home to stay in and keep cool or cool.

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People are helping the homeless people get better.

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The homeless people sit outside with a cup and hope that they get money to get food.

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These people should not be out in the streets or sidewalks with two little kids with her.

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Most veterain after the war are homeless because they can find a home to rent.

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This video is about how everyone tries to help end the homeless.

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This video is about people trying to escape homeless.

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Two Homeless Women Explain Why It's So Hard To Get Off The Streets