Homelessness causes a lot of problems. For one, it greatly contributes to the poverty cycle because children who grow up homeless will not learn the skills or have the opportunities that they need to avoid poverty as adults. Of course, most people want to avoid homelessness, which means they may need to waste a lot of money on expensive housing.
Affordable housing can help a lot. It helps some people avoid homelessness, and it helps others have more money to spend on other needs.
Nonetheless, I have noticed a major flaw in the way that most affordable housing works: location. Most affordable housing and subsidized housing is located in poor neighborhoods.
It may seem to make sense to put housing for poor people near poor people. However, these people would have a better chance of escaping poverty if they moved away from poverty. Most importantly, poor children will have more of a chance of escaping the poverty trap if they grow up in a more affluent neighborhood.
Affluent neighborhoods have less crime, better schools, better role models, and other factors that incredibly reduce a child’s chance of ending up in poverty.
I would recommend that poverty-fighting organizations that work in the housing sector try to find ways to put as affordable of housing as possible in as affluent of neighborhoods as possible. Then get poor families into that housing, making sure the adults get sufficient employment and the children get quality schooling.
What do you think? Do you agree that putting affordable housing in more affluent neighborhoods would help more? Post your answers to that question and other comments in this thread at the World Hunger and Poverty Forums. We welcome all viewpoints.