Listening to everyones group present was both interesting and informative. The thing that stood out to me the most was the overlap between all of our material, specifically the recurring theme of societies misguided idea of how people become homeless. People on the street may pass by and ignore people or be unkind because they believe that people in these situations got there through their own doing. It was present in the book I read Down, Out, and Under Arrest with police brutality behaving as if people in this situation are sub-human or deserving of the bad things that come their way when there is a huge range of reasons why people end up in these situations.

Everyday people’s inaccurate perception of people in poverty snowballs the problem; if you don’t look business presentable you will have trouble getting and holding down a job. Doctors and people in stores won’t take you seriously, and police will automatically assume the worst. It deepens the cycle of not being accepted by society, and further dividing the line and understanding between the classes. It makes me wonder what we can do to fix this problem. A clear solution is education, but I think that there are a lot of organizations and groups that speak to this issue and it is not being heard so there may be a different way to effect change. I look forward to doing more readings that focus on policy because it seems likely to me that this is an area that hold a lot of potential progress.