Ptelua Dvorak Mistreatment Of Homeless Is Shameful Summary

Many poor people all around the world and U.S. are mistreated in the form of insufficient infrastructure and services, unequal wealth distribution, and the over criminalization of poverty-stricken people.

Ptelua Dvorak shines a light into the lives of the penniless in her article “Mistreatment of homeless is shameful,” exposing Americans to harsh rules and laws that make it nearly illegal to be homeless. For instance, Dvorak speaks of changes that are occurring at her public library where “To enter the library, your bag has to be small enough to fit in [a small] compartment” (Dvorak), seeming more as an inconvenience to the sheltered, but a massive problem for the homeless “who use the library as a daytime shelter and are lugging all their

With little more money than homeless folk, many underprivileged people reside in slums where the streets are broken and the homes are falling apart. Alana Semuels reports in her article that “living in slums is rising at an extraordinary pace”, mostly due to urban sprawling and demands for capital in cities (Semuels). The problem for many of the packed and overcrowded towns is that they are “without sanitary water or basic roads”(Semuels), causing great burdens and peril for citizens. Due to the unkempt resources, birth rates in slums tend to be lower than those in other areas while life expectancy will be shorter. Even with the creation of many government programs, such as those that place people in newly-built affordable housing, the abandoned neighborhoods still require maintenance or a crisis like a poor child “eating lead paint,” because “the building had not been updated since the 60’s”(Semuels). Economists believe that the hardships many poor people face like homelessness or slums are a result of a wealth gap that has been exponentially diverging the rich from the poor since the seventies. Studies show that “over forty