Though many people are against providing free services to the homeless because they see them as an undeserved and unearned handout, the problems of the homeless don’t only effect the homeless. When a homeless person has to use the emergency room for medical care the cost of their visit is passed on to tax payers. The dangers of living on the streets with inadequate food and in all types of weather also mean that homeless people frequently visit the emergency room. They also show up with severs problems because they rarely get preventative care. Not helping the homeless actually can financially hurt a community.

A new post by the From Poverty To Opportunity Campaign outlines the findings from a new study by the Aids Foundation of Chicago that shows, again, that providing housing and intensive case management to the homeless drastically reduces their use of emergency rooms and therefore their financial cost to the community.

The Campaign quotes the study as saying:

Remarkably, homeless people who were housed were admitted to the hospital one-third fewer times than people in the control group. They also spent one-third fewer days in the hospital and went to the emergency room one-fourth fewer times.

For every 100 homeless adults offered the program intervention, there would be 49 fewer hospitalizations, 273 less days spent in the hospital, and 116 fewer emergency department visits.

Back in April I wrote about two similar studies from the Heartland Alliance Mid-America Institute on Poverty and the Journal of the American Medical Association that found the same community benefits to housing the homeless.

Every politician has spent the summer talking about the high costs of health care in America and there are many proposals to help lower those costs. One way is to reduce the number of emergency room visits by homeless people because those visits are paid for by those who have insurance. Multiple studies by different organizations all around the country have shown that providing housing and intensive case management can reduce the burden that the homeless impose on the health care system while drastically improving the health of the homeless.

DeNeen L. Brown of The Washington Post had a long article entitled “Poor? Pay Up.” in Monday’s edition explaining the huge costs that the poor have to pay just because they are poor.

Poverty 101: We’ll start with the basics.

Like food: You don’t have a car to get to a supermarket, much less to Costco or Trader Joe’s, where the middle class goes to save money. You don’t have three hours to take the bus. So you buy groceries at the corner store, where a gallon of milk costs an extra dollar.

A loaf of bread there costs you $2.99 for white. For wheat, it’s $3.79. The clerk behind the counter tells you the gallon of leaking milk in the bottom of the back cooler is $4.99. She holds up four fingers to clarify. The milk is beneath the shelf that holds beef bologna for $3.79. A pound of butter sells for $4.49. In the back of the store are fruits and vegetables. The green peppers are shriveled, the bananas are more brown than yellow, the oranges are picked over.

(At a Safeway on Bradley Boulevard in Bethesda, the wheat bread costs $1.19, and white bread is on sale for $1. A gallon of milk costs $3.49 — $2.99 if you buy two gallons. A pound of butter is $2.49. Beef bologna is on sale, two packages for $5.)

The problem of access to food is especially relevant to the poor on the South Side of Chicago where whole sections of the city are without a large supermarket or any store to buy fresh produce. Instead corner food and liquor stores dot most blocks. Expensive food from grocery stores also encourages eating at unhealthy fast food restaurants. The value menu really is a considerable value when put next to corner store prices. Outside of the immediate higher costs of fast food and corner store food is the long term health effects that come from a poor diet. Obesity, diabetes and high cholesterol are all problems that can stem from a poor diet and can later cause huge medical costs.

Brown goes on to give examples of how time consuming doing laundry is when it isn’t available in your home or apartment building and the exorbitant fees that the poor pay to use check cashing storefronts in place of banks. The neon signs and security cameras of these stores are a fixture in many poor Chicago neighborhoods.

I wrote about some of the practical difficulties of being both poor and homeless when I profiled Andrew Green, a homeless teen in Uptown. He made money by washing the windows of a check cashing storefront in a strip mall on the corner of Lawrence Ave. and Sheridan Rd. What wasn’t in the story was that he also faced some of the high fees for items at corner stores. He spent much of his day at the SL Pantry, a corner store like the ones Brown mentions in her story. Green is a constant smoker and when he gathered up enough money he would buy a single cigarette from the SL pantry for $.50, far more than he would pay per cigarette if he bought a pack.

Many corner stores break down packages of items to be sold individually for much higher prices, but it isn’t necessarily a scheme to make more money off their customers. Many poor customers can’t afford to buy a whole package of diapers so they buy just the one they need, even if it is much more expensive than if they bought in bulk.

Brown also makes a good point that these corner and convenience stores aren’t necessarily trying to rip off customers.

Many of these stores charge more because the cost of doing business in some neighborhoods is higher. “First, they are probably paying more on goods because they don’t get the low wholesale price that bigger stores get,” says Bradley R. Schiller, a professor emeritus at American University and the author of “The Economics of Poverty and Discrimination.”

“The real estate is higher. The fact that volume is low means fewer sales per worker. They make fewer dollars of revenue per square foot of space. They don’t end up making more money. Every corner grocery store wishes they had profits their customers think they have.”

This points out again that things are generally more complicated than they seem when it comes to poverty. Just because a store charges a lot doesn’t mean they are making a lot of money. Just because someone gets a job doesn’t mean they are on their way out of poverty and just because someone is homeless doesn’t mean they are choosing homelessness or are too lazy to get off the street. There are numerous practical hurdles to cover and they are difficult to understand unless you have experienced them.

I recommend you go read the whole article at The Washington Post site.