Homelessness in Jamaica, Queens
Although New York City is often touted as the economic capital of the world, the city has a rampant homelessness issue. Despite problems, pertaining to mental health perpetuating this issue, the lack of affordable housing also plays a significant part. Ironically enough, it also actually costs the government more money to strictly provide shelters and temporary services rather than permanent housing and programs to help homeless people instead of just keeping them off the streets.
In order to put the issue of homelessness in Jamaica into perspective, we must understand how homelessness affects aspects of our everyday life. According to the National Library of Medicine (1988). Homelessness, Health and Human Needs. If we ended homelessness today, we could reduce healthcare costs by 59% and decrease emergency room costs by 61%. This translates to lower payments and better care. It does not end there. Ending homelessness is also projected to decrease inpatient hospitalization by 77%. This would make overcrowded emergency rooms become a thing of the past.
This issue is important to me because it stops me from taking pride in my local community. There is an undeniable economic difference between most communities in NYC and the vast majority of Jamaica. The echoes of this issue are heard through the subway cars turned homeless shelters, and park benches turned into mattresses. However, there is a reason homelessness is a long-standing issue: it is incredibly hard to solve. Luckily conversations and suggestions for solutions help propel the process of finding solutions exponentially.
According to https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/, (2023. State of Homelessness in 2023, “..New Yorkers sleeping each night in municipal shelters is now 26 percent higher than it was 10 years ago.” I see it all throughout the city, my neighborhood, and community. It’s displeasing to see people struggling and having to implement proper housing for these people would in turn be a great investment for the future. The streets of loitering would become a lot better. To offer a solution, we should attempt to attack the root cause of the problem, which is the predominant amount of mental health issues in the homeless community. The city’s inability to lessen this issue has caused the homeless rate to increase. If we could allocate more money to building or facilitating centers for rehab, we would see improvements.
Additionally, people’s opinions and point of views matter a lot when it comes to the quality of their lives and how their experiences with a certain issue going on in today’s modern society affect them. Taking that in consideration, I created a very short survey consisting of a few questions about how people feel towards homelessness and what could be causing it.
The results were relatively expected, within the sample of students living in NYC, as they frequently have interactions with homeless people, either on the street, or in public transportation. Around 29.8% of our sample believe homelessness is caused due to financial issues, while 17% believe the root cause is mental health problems. The largest group, 36.2%, believe it’s due to lack of efficient government systems. Realistically, there isn’t one single problem to homelessness. All these issues add up and create a bigger problem, homelessness.
