Anton Garrett
ENG-101
October 29, 2015
Cause and Effect Essay
How many times have you passed by people sitting on the street, with a plastic glass or a small cardboard box asking for spare change? Have you ever noticed the amounts of people who have neither a home, nor a job to take care of themselves properly? Maybe you think it is their own fault; you might think if they wanted, they would have it all. “Go find yourself a job” is a regular phrase homeless people hear. However, this advice is pointless, because there are many objective reasons why people lose homes and jobs, and why they cannot return to normal life.
One of the most frequent causes of homelessness is property-destroying disasters of any kind. It can be an earthquake (like in Japan in 2011), a hurricane (like in New Orleans), a flood or tsunami, and so on. At the same time, it can be a disaster or accident of a smaller scale, but still a significant one. Domestic fires, for example, destroy hundreds of residences and neighborhoods on a yearly basis; usually, if a team of firefighters does not manage to arrive on time, people suffer severe material damage. Left without homes, victims of these disasters also often lose their IDs, pieces of property documents, credit cards, cash stashes, and so on. It can take months or even years to obtain that old state of comfortability. And friends and relatives are not always willing or capable of helping a victim during the time he or she recuperates.
Another group of factors leading to homelessness includes unhappy marriages and their outcomes. Divorce and abusive relationships are among the major factors of homelessness according to the Homeless Resource Network. In particular, divorce can often leave one of the spouses homeless. When divorcing, former family members usually try to divide the property they acquired in marriage; in some cases, one of the spouses can find themselves deprived of any property, including a place to live in....