Many of them blameless, they were turned out of shelters an hour earlier and now wait for a van that will take them to a variety of menial jobs. His recent assignments from the labor pool have been at a shop assembling casters for office furniture. You get up, you work, you go back to the mission. The problem of homelessness, perhaps most stark in New York and other big cities, is one that strikes communities across America. A portrait of homeless ness in America is really mosaic, cementing together places as diverse as Miami, Sanford, Maine and Portland, Oregon.
Some people are homeless because they choose to do without government or private aid.
Some homeless people are disabled by physical or mental illness, alcoholism, or drug addiction. And a growing number of the homeless, at odds with the stereotype of the beggar who camps out on a park bench, are the working poor, trapped between jobs that pay too little and housing that costs too much. It expects the 1988 figure to be higher. The organization says that in some cities, like San Antonio, more than half the homeless have jobs. As with many aspects of homelessness, this issue is not clear-cut.