The Homeless: Discarded Like Garbage

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Homelessness affects millions each year within the United States with poverty-stricken children roaming the streets, prostitutes on every street corner, and Vietnam veterans sick with mental illnesses. With today’s failing economy, homelessness is a common thing to see in massive cities such as Los Angeles where Central City East, more commonly known as Skid Row, contains the largest amount of homeless persons within our country. Inside this area, camping tents are frequently seen on the streets and cardboard boxes litter the sidewalk for use as makeshift beds for those without a roof. With this problem progressively getting worse, the homeless who reside at Skid Row will eventually overpopulate the district with a multitude not receiving the help they need for housing, mental illnesses and various other problems. A solution has been proposed for a suburb tucked in the mountains in the San Fernando Valley called Kagel Canyon, where the Hope Gardens Family Center intends to temporarily house homeless women and children at their facility for two years. This has led residents of Kagel Canyon to oppose the project (Covarrubias). Although citizens of Kagel Canyon believe that a homeless center would create dangers and more crime for the community, the settlement would essentially take people off the street and help them not turn into criminals. In addition, the approach to having a homeless shelter allows the homeless a way to acquire basic necessities and facilities and an opportunity to receive services such as mental illness treatment in order to refine their own lives.

According to Amanda Covarrubias’s article “Homeless Center Plan Spurs Resistance”, a majority of residents have opposed the project believing fugitives and drug...

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...en do not find their way inside. The amount of ignorance shown toward the many problems of the homeless have been neglected like trash which causes them to seek other ways of making income such as mugging and prostitution. If cities and towns were open to the idea of a homeless center, our country would be able to clean up these individuals for them to be accomplished members of our society. Homelessness is an increasingly atrocious predicament for the United States, and the Hope Gardens Family Center’s objective is to solve that problem.

Works Cited

Covarrubias, Amanda. “Homeless Center Plan Spurs Resistance.” Los Angeles Times 25 May 2006. Print.

Lopez, Steve. The Soloist: A Lost Dream and an Unlikely Friendship, and Redemptive Power of Music. New York: Penguin Group, 2008. Print.

Roberts, John Joel. How to Increase Homelessness. Oregon: Loyal, 2004. Print.

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