by Jimmy Flatbush

Created on: July 12, 2010   Last Updated: July 13, 2010

I rarely succumb to peer pressure, so I was nowhere near a television screen to watch Lebron James announce where he will play basketball next season. Most of my friends are not as strong. One friend in particular wasted no time to discuss his perspective on the most anticipated announcement since the reuniting of the Backstreet Boys. He left me a phone message that said, “I do not know what is worse, Lebron James taking up an hour of prime times television or bums asking me for money.”

My friend was continuing the American tradition of kicking someone when he or she is down. Homeless people are probably the most incorrectly stigmatized class, with labels such as lazy, deranged, and drag on society thrust upon them by uninformed masses. The latest generalization is that all homeless people are drunks and drug addicts. Statistics prove the label may be the most spurious of all.

One sociology text defines homelessness as a person who "lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate night-time residence." Using this definition, the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty estimates between 2.3 and 3.5 million people experienced homelessness in the United States in 2009. The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) estimates on any given January 2010 night, 67,188 people experienced homelessness, with forty-two percent of those people unsheltered.

The United States government predicts the current recession will force an additional 1.5 million people into homelessness over the next two years. In a 2008 report, the U.S. Conference of Mayors cited a major increase in the number of homeless in 19 out of the 25 cities surveyed. On average, cities reported a 12 percent increase of homelessness since 2007. The people driven homeless by the recession are not drunks and drug addicts, but mostly honest people caught in a financially provoked downward spiral.

Therein lays the problem with generalizations. We inherently understand that not all women are mental cases and all men are pigs (unless you watch The View). However, homeless people are the recipients of these outlandish generalizations, notwithstanding public and private organizational studies that prove otherwise. Homelessness can be exacerbated by drugs and alcohol, but living on the streets is not generally caused by substance abuse. Mental illness has an integral role in causing homelessness, but so do other factors that the Lebron James fascinated American public fails to understand.

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