Although Christopher Jencks’ book, The Homeless, is twenty years old, his ideas still remain constant today. Jencks outlines factors such as personal susceptibility such as alcoholism, tragedy, disability, and mental illness. However, he focuses more on the structural conditions, which include; job market changes, housing loss, hospital closure, lowered social support, and drug epidemics. His main point is to explain how and to what degree have these structural conditions caused a rise in homelessness.

Job market changes are still linked to homelessness today. Minimum wages are low to the point where people cannot afford to live off them. We saw in our Data Exercise #1 that it is almost impossible to live off minimum wage, in conclusion people are becoming homeless. Housing loss also remains as a cause for homelessness. This was very apparent in between 2008 and 2009 when many houses went into foreclosure because people could not afford their houses with their minimum wage jobs and the rise of the housing market. Hospital closure is still apparent today and is linked to the cause of homelessness. Mentally ill people who are at hospitals are often put in a taxi and taken to skid row because there is no one who claims to be responsible for them. We saw evidence of this in a video shown in class of mentally ill hospital patients getting taken to skid row in Los Angeles. Lowered social support is also a consistent cause of homelessness. Public assistance such as health care and welfare is not always implemented with the poor and homeless in mind. When these support programs are lowered the people under the poverty line suffer. In addition, drugs have displayed contributions to homelessness. Especially in 1984 when the crack epidemic broke out, which is what Jencks discusses in his book as a major cause to homelessness. Today, we still see a link between drugs and homelessness.

While Jencks’ book discusses social structures as being the driving force of homelessness twenty years ago, we still see these as major causes today.

http://moodle.redlands.edu/mod/resource/view.php?id=135210

http://nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/employment.html

http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/why.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeGFIL4BD_M