After reading the overview of Jencks: The Homeless, I was reminded of the some of the causes that lead to the numerous homeless people who were discussed in the book group presentations in class. The most interesting for me was concerning marriages, the crack epidemic, social skills and family ties. I never would have thought of marriage as a cause for homelessness and how that affects women more than men. Jencks thoughtfully groups marriage and joblessness together, which makes perfect sense. If the working partner loses their job, in Jencks’s case the husband, that could cause strife in the relationship and leave the couple homeless, especially in this case, the woman who has a smaller probability of getting a job. With social skills and family ties, those are huge factors that would have also never occurred to me. One would think that living alone would be cheaper, yet it is not. And when there are no family ties to keep homeless people from living alone then the end result may be the streets.

However, the most well-known cause out of the ones I mentioned is the one that ends up being centered on the idea of luck. The chapter summary on The Crack Epidemic poses some important questions surrounding what most homeless people are stereotyped with as the cause of their current situation. It is asked “how does luck – bad luck for the homeless, good luck for the affluent – play a role in explaining individual outcomes?” That question right there is exactly what the problem tends to be – luck, or circumstance, not drugs and alcohol. If I have learned one thing from combining all of the book presentations, is that not one thing, especially stereotypic, is the cause of one’s homelessness. For those who believe that our lives are run by luck, then any number of us can end up on the street in a single moment. Some of us are just not as lucky as others. Should a concept as fickle as luck create a barrier between human beings?

Here’s the course site link to the University of Maryland’s Reeve Vanneman’s online summary of Christopher Jencks’ The Homeless.