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To live a normal life requires having a home to live in. Yet homeless people can be found in every country, in smaller numbers or in larger numbers, with no home and unable to afford any - but often just because they cannot get the housing loans or welfare available to others.
The causes of homelessness may have been family breakdown or tragedy (maybe via orphanage or prison), or perhaps a natural disaster or war - but in developed countries it can largely be the socially less competent or disabled failing to get the welfare help that is in principal available (as often some otherwise good welfare systems are very bad at handling homeless people). While a few governments do expend great effort to try to deal with homelessness, though generally failing to find adequate solutions, many governments are doing little or nothing to try to tackle it.
Having no home can make it extremely hard for adults to get or keep work, being one of the causes of poverty which in addition to helping to maintain homelessness also helps turn households trying to be useful prospering citizens into victimised anti-social problem households breeding further poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction and crime and problem children. Democratic governments generally help worsen the social exclusion of the homeless by also robbing them of their voting rights - often on a bogus 'impracticality' basis (but often too for pre-trial criminal defendants who have been found guilty of nothing and for whom no voting impacticality can be remotely claimed).
Solutions offered to the homeless can often be unacceptable fearful hostels or orphanages. Families who find themselves homeless for whatever reason can find themselves split up, with the children put into orphanages and the parents into single person hostels. Or being desperate they may have to accept housing that nobody else wants, often said to be temporary when it is actually indefinite. Much of this site is about these poor housing alternatives that can help to destroy lives and intensify social exclusion of the less fortunate in societies. Of course those with better incomes may be offered much better options, as with the UK government funded Key Worker, Shared Ownership, Homebuy and Right To Buy schemes. There are also often homeless street children whose extreme problems may be more a social care issue than just a housing issue but who are also often largely ignored or handled badly.
Generally the homeless may often need only affordable housing being available, or that plus housing loans that are available to others, but some can afford nothing and need welfare to pay housing costs for them. In developing countries without welfare, and with simpler housing systems, the homeless can often themselves best advise on the cheapest solutions locally possible. This is likely to be much less useful in developed countries with complex welfare and housing systems. see Shack or Squat
For the best site on the basic causes and solutions of poverty see World Poverty.
Or see this live social exclusion news story ;
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NOTE : You can use this with confidence as we do not share and do not store this information at all.
This is not a charity, educational or government associated website, and is not Wikipedia, and without their editorial policies we can independently give the real truth on poverty to an extent that they may often not manage. (if you have seen it you will realise that the Wikipedia section on social exclusion is entirely useless)
Much that is said or written about or for the poor as supposedly expert or educational is middle-class blindness, but some useful bits can often be found as in some of the Family articles below ;
You can do a good search of this website, or of the web, below ;
Life for homeless people ....
