Homelessness is perhaps the most visible form of poverty in the United States. It is nearly impossible to walk through any major city and not pass by a homeless person. Particularly
hard-hit areas are seeing the phenomenon of “tent cities,” where large groups of homeless people gather publicly in makeshift shelters. Due to significant increases in the number of people facing homelessness in recent decades and the insufficiency of many efforts to combat it, the issue is commonly referred to as a crisis. In fact, one writer recently suggested that if the opioid crisis was the problem of the last five years, homelessness is the problem of the next five years.While many interventions have been implemented to ameliorate the crisis, the majority of people believe that America is doing a poor job addressing the problem. And, as one author puts it, “homelessness is not a new social problem. It represents the culmination of many social problems which have not been adequately dealt with over the years by federal, state, local housing and social welfare policies.”