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the Houston Police Department (HPD) is up to the task. The HPD has to subdue these homeless offenders but also not harm them. We do have a Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) that is looking to train the HPD officers on how to calm mentally-ill homeless without "escalating the situation" (Feltz, par. 7). But the big obstacle standing in the way of curing the homelessness crisis is prevention.

It is a shame that our police department has to intervene because of a "financially strapped mental health system" (Feltz, par. 4). Brandon Moeller, August 23, 2002, reported, "Texas ranks 43rd in the nation on mental health spending, which puts homeless people that rely on public assistance for help in a bad situation" (Feltz, par. 1). After Hurricane Rita and Katrina in 2005, Texas is probably further down the list and homeless people are less likely to receive help.

Even with attempts at prevention, laws preventing the homeless from receiving aid are uprooting in Houston. "There's a new law in Houston, banning offensive odors in libraries...Two council members voted against the ordinance, saying it was a direct attack on the homeless" (TalkLeft, par. 1).

"In Gainesville, the police threatened to arrest University of Florida students for giving food to homeless in a public park. In Milwaukee, a church was declared a 'public nuisance' for giving food and shelter to the homeless. In Santa Barbara, it is illegal to park your motor home on the street in one place for more than 2 hours and illegal to rest against the front of a building or store" (Whitehead, par. 1). These laws obviously target the homeless.

Many differing views toward the causes of homelessness all portray the seriousness behind the crisis. The lack of monetary distribution to the poor is a path that leads straight to homelessness. The shortage of "low-rent housing" in America is one reason we need federal intervention to prevent homelessness (Huttman 84). Along with housing shortages, welfare recipients are not receiving adequate benefits from the government. Data from a survey by the Rice University (The Houston Area Survey 1997) resulted in 51.6 percent of respondents saying Texas welfare recipients did not receive enough money from the government to raise them above the poverty line.

Once homeless, most people that don't bounce back are the mentally unstable. The primary factors for becoming homeless are mental illness and being under the influence of drugs (Feltz, par. 8). With almost 300 million citizens, we

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