College Students Research Homelessness Prompted by Herald Coverage of Issue

COURT HOUSE – Cape May County’s homeless, and the situation of the late Timothy McCart, reported here earlier this year, became part of the curriculum for students in Adjunct Instructor Mary McWilliams’ Composition II class at Atlantic Cape Community College. Each chose a facet of the homeless issue as their spring semester project. Final presentations were made May 5 at the Court House Campus.
Having dealt in depth with a segment of the problem the class was so proud of its work that members want to send their work to Congress in the hope that what they researched will turn legislative attention into action that will help the men, women and children who live locally on society’s fringe.
Making presentations that day were:
Ali Amalou, “Homelessness and Children in USA”
Caroline Curcione, “Homeless People and Pets: Who’s to Judge?”
Ryan Meehan, ‘The influence drugs have on homelessness”
Cristian Banos Valencia, “Youth Homelessness in Five Regions of the U.S.”
In Central Park
Amalou, a Morocco native, knows homelessness from personal experience. When a situation involving his occurred in New York City for nine days. He found himself living on the street, sleeping, if that is what it may be termed, in Central Park. “You can’t sleep. How can you sleep? You just get to sleep and some lady on a bike is saying to you ‘Good morning.’ You sleep with one eye open.”
“Homelessness is not prestige, it is not an accident,” he said. Family situation take place when fathers lose their job, mortgage payments cannot be made, and a home is lost to foreclosure. As a result, families with children become homeless.
Amalou found that, lacking proper food and living conditions, ‘You can’t talk. You can’t control your behavior. It affects your memory. Communication is lost. You are not a human being. If you can’t take a shower for three days or shave your face, if a lady can’t wash, nobody likes you there. You have to stay outside the town,” he added.
The situation worsens for children, he noted. While they may be able to attend school, sometimes they may go to the bathroom to sleep.
Amalou noted the nation has always experienced homelessness particularly after wars and during the Great Depression. Homelessness in the Cape May County area is a relatively recent problem, he said.
In dire search of a job, he pressed the manager of a local restaurant with his desire to work, he said. As a result, he has been hired there, is no longer homeless, and is working on improving his education.
Pets and the Homeless
Curcione is passionate about pets. For that reason, she has heard some question the ability of a homeless person to provide for a pet. ‘If they can’t take care of themselves, how can they take care of a pet?” she said. While some homeless shelters allow pets, others do not, she said. Some with low incomes, who have pets, must pay more for housing because they have a pet, she added.
Pets give a sense of structure and reassurance to a homeless person, she said. “When you are on the streets, a pet is there for you no matter what and loves you unconditionally…A pet goes from being something you own to a part of the family,” she added.
Curcione cited health benefits, including one from the American Heart Association that noted owning a pet can lower cholesterol levels which reduces risk of heart disease.
Pet ownership further helps relieve stress and improves a person’s mood, and, in some cases, they are more social. She said homeless people with pets are more likely to be approached by strangers than those without them.
“If you are struggling to find food, you have a companion,” she said.
Drugs Influence on Homelessness
Meehan said that homeless people are more likely to get hooked on narcotics while on the street. Addictive narcotics can push a homeless person to act out of desperation, and cause a person to turn violent.
Meehan cited exploitation of the homeless by two graduates of the University of California at Los Angeles. Their video clips were “controversial for their sick and violent nature,” he said. Those clips showed a homeless man doing a variety of harmful acts for beer.
The featured individual in some of those videos, a veteran, was seen by a man who helped “turn him around” and subsequently hired him to manage his building.
Meehan said the videos targeted a teen audience, because producers expected teens to go along with depictions of violence in their clips.
Homeless Youth by Region
Valencia explored five regions in the nation with an eye on how homeless youth are affected and treated in each.
“About 300,000 young children under the age of 18 spend a period of time homeless,” he said. “This occurs for many reasons; one of the major reasons is due to sexual abuse from a close family member. There is also about 25 percent of the young population that become homeless that were former foster children that leave the system after four years or more.”
“The youth homeless population does not have the proper education, health care or medical care,” he continued.
California has one of the largest homeless youth populations of the five regions he examined.
Valencia said in Montana, “dozens of children attending public schools in certain counties…couch-surf with family friends, but often they sleep in cars or short-term motels.”
“Homeless youth in Nebraska include only those who literally have no safe place to sleep and primarily reside in public parks, bridges, abandoned buildings, or other high-risk areas,” he said. Meanwhile, the state is trying to create more shelter homes for the young population. In Nebraska, the definition of homeless youth covers those from age 12 to 21, “but many studies have included young adults up to age 24.”
New York is where “Youth homelessness is a significant but little understood problem,” Valencia said. Government and non-profit groups cooperate in an attempt to understand and serve the problem by gathering data on characteristics and needs.
In his conclusion Valencia stated causes of youthful homelessness can be placed in three categories, family problems, economic problems, residential instability.
“Some youth may become homeless when their families suffer financial crises resulting from lack of affordable housing, limited employment opportunities, insufficient wages, no medical insurance or inadequate welfare benefits.”