Main Causes of Homelessness

Homelessness in a term denoting a person lacking adequate shelter or otherwise residing below the minimal standard of what's considered a safe and typical dwelling.
Main causes of homelessness usually involve economical, psychological, political, environmental, and medical reasons. There haven't been any solutions shown to successively eliminate homelessness, but only a sort of superficial assistance or "Band-Aid-Fix" a euphemism often used to describe temporary solutions to complex problems.

Economical Causes

A healthy economy provides jobs involving the production, exchanging and distributing products in demand. Unfortunately, economic activities are unable to provide employment to everyone, economist call this the "unemployment rate." A person experiencing prolonged unemployment may decline. This situation may eventually lead to hardships below the national poverty line within the United States. That results in inadequate hygiene, poor health care, scarce shelter, and limited access to nutritional meals.

Psychological Causes

The July 2008 issue of the Journal of Psychosocial Rehabilitation addressed psychological causes of homelessness involving substance abuse resulting in an unwillingness to work, or "doomed-to-failure" interpretations of their social and work environment leading to a kind of self-imposed poverty.

Psychological reasons for homelessness are as vast as the experiences themselves, and range from physiologic damage causing a mental illness to a demoralizing, disempowering belief system from an otherwise normal mind.

Political Cause

Governments and its citizenry bear the burden of sharing the irony of being both victims and causes of homelessness. For example, politics often influences the economic behavior of a society and vice-versa. As a result of this bi-lateral relationship, also known as "political economy," political activities have far reaching consequences. While not an exhaustive list, causes for homelessness may come in the form of: forced eviction, lack of heath care, unemployment, forced termination of institutionalization, and mortgage foreclosures.

Subjective views of "what causes homelessness" often influence policy that attempts, or claims, to deal with the problem objectively. Societal views regarding homelessness are often expressed as inconvenient in one public forum and a humanitarian crisis in another. Those involved in the debate may , at the same time, be collectively participating in political activates that may directly or indirectly contribute to the homeless problem.

Environmental Causes

In March 1, 2006, data gathered from the University of Maryland, addressed some environmental causes of homelessness resulting from natural disasters--such as earthquakes or hurricanes destroying homes and displacing large groups of people instantly. A percentage of those displaced groups may never recover and assimilate back into mainstream society. Furthermore, environmental causes may also include man made disasters involving war.

War-torn environments--regional, national or international--may have the same destructive force as any natural disaster with the added tragedy of upsetting the "economic and political stability" of government(s) that would otherwise act as a safety-net against homelessness.

Medical Causes

Medical causes of homelessness involve an actual physical condition, inhibiting or disabling someone from providing adequate shelter for themselves. Lack of health care, for any reason, may cause a delayed diagnosis of severe health problems leading to loss wages, poverty and eventually homelessness.