Why is this issue important?
Why are we interested in homelessness?
Homelessness traumatizes children, families, and individuals—it steals people’s potential, threatens their safety and health, and wounds their self-respect.
The latest figures estimate that in the Bay Area more than 35,000 people are homeless and national figures suggest that a little under 40% of those are children—more than 10,000 homeless children.
Homelessness harms entire communities, not just the families and individuals who personally experience it.
Although some homeless people do work (while not earning enough to achieve self-sufficiency), a large percentage of homeless people are unemployed (80-85%). This is a significant loss to the productivity of our economy, and a blow to the self-esteem of homeless people who badly want to work but lack current job skills.
Homeless people often have serious health problems which cause them to use costly emergency care systems—especially the homeless mentally ill, some of whom cycle repeatedly through courts, jails, and hospitals. This is a temporary and expensive ‘solution’, while the underlying factors which result in homelessness are wrongly dismissed as impossible to solve.
The most visible community side-effect is the presence of people panhandling on our streets in order to survive. And even non-aggressive panhandlers are under threat of citation or arrest due to increased criminalization of begging and loitering.
But the question of homelessness does have answers.
Each year, BOSS takes on nearly 2,000 new clients, providing help to around 3,500 people each year, including long-term disabled clients.
Homeless people have different backgrounds, life experiences, abilities, and goals—but they share the common experience of poverty and a lack of resources. They also share a common humanity, and deserve our compassion and respect.
With imagination and commitment, we can provide resources and tools that lift homeless people out of crisis and into new lives—to do so, we must demand solutions from our elected officials and policy makers. Homelessness is solvable: Things do not have to stay as they are.
For 35 years, BOSS has stayed committed to resolving the issue of homelessness because of people like Jimmy whose despair once led him to attempt suicide and who now acts as a group facilitator for the Second Chance organization.
