Homelessness

Homelessness is when a person or family do not have a place to live and sleep at night and they carry around the very few items they own wherever they go and usually sleep in whatever are they are. It is both a cause and effect of social problems, such as financial instability, unemployment, and the decline of both mental and physical health. The most visible form of homelessness is the people sleeping on the streets. The number of homeless people sleeping on the street is measured separately from statutory homelessness statistics through local authority street counts. Street counts provide us with a useful snapshot of the number of people sleeping on the street on a single night but are best regarded as indicators of trends, rather than exact numbers of homeless men and women who sleep on the streets. In the nineteen thirties there were around seventeen thousand people living in shelters in the country. By the nineteen eighties, around twenty thousand people were living in accommodation for homeless single people in London. Yet, the number of homeless people sleeping on the streets had risen to more than one thousand people, and by two thousand and twelve, five thousand, six hundred, and seventy eight homeless people were counted in London. The first problem concerning homelessness is drug taking and alcohol abuse. Fifty five per cent of homeless people are tackling alcohol or drug use, which were responsible for over a third of all deaths among the homeless