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In the United States, homeless people have long been the target of negative attitudes and even disdain and contempt from social critics.

Rep. Mike Kelly’s comments on homeless programs (“House Legislators strip homeless trust from bill,” April 12) reveal how shockingly uninformed he chooses to remain about the social policies on which he casts votes.

His criticism of housing programs isn’t that they don’t work; his complaint is that he feels the programs have benefited a part of the population he considers undeserving. Kelly’s distorted view masks facts to the contrary; most families who turn to public assistance are truly needy, and thousands of Alaskan families with children are living in shelters, cars, motels or sleeping on the floors of apartments and homes of relatives and friends.

That families with children are the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population is a reality that has been widely publicized and is difficult for Kelly to have missed.

Detailed findings are reported by multiple agencies and are available free of charge from credible sources, including the National Center on Family Homelessness, National Law Center of Homelessness and Poverty, National Alliance to End Homelessness, National Coalition for the Homeless, United States Interagency Council on Homelessness and the second annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress. All of these are easily found on the Internet.

The United States is embarrassingly unique among industrialized nations because women and children comprise such a large percentage of our country’s homeless population. Although accurate counts of homeless individuals (particularly the unsheltered homeless) are elusive, a 2005 study by the National Alliance to End Homelessness found that about half of the people who experience homelessness are members of homeless families. The typical homeless family is extremely poor, headed by a single mother, usually in her late twenties, with two young preschool-age children.

The National Coalition for the Homeless reports hundreds of thousands of American families become homeless every year, and within these families are 1.3 million children. Children comprise about 40 percent of the homeless population, and most of these children are very young; a little more than 40 percent of them are under the age of 5. Because the trends in Alaska reflect those of the nation, we can feel confident that these children not yet old enough to attend school are also not stocking up on 50-inch televisions or cruising around in any Lexus that Kelly claims he has witnessed being obtained through abuses of homeless programs.

At least 3,500 Alaskans are identified as homeless, based upon point-in-time surveys, and an estimated 14,000 Alaskans experience homelessness at some point each year. During the last two years, the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation Homeless Survey reveals more than one-quarter of the reported sheltered homeless households were families with children. During the 2004–05 school year, the Department of Education and Early Development reported more than three thousand Alaskan children were homeless or residing in inadequate housing at some time during the school term.

National researchers agree both homeless and low-income housed children experience the negative effects of broad poverty-related adversities. Homelessness itself can have additional detrimental impact. Homelessness influences every facet of a child’s life, inhibiting their physical, emotional, cognitive, social and behavioral development. Children born into homelessness are more likely to have low birth weights and are at greater risk of illness and death. Homelessness is particularly harmful for very young children. Homeless children go hungry twice as often as other children, are sick at twice the rate of non-homeless children and are four times as likely to have delayed development. School-age homeless children face barriers to enrolling in and attending school, leaving one out of five homeless children not attending. Those homeless children who do attend have difficulty in school and, by age eight, one in three has major mental health problems.

Increasing family homelessness in the U.S. is devastating for the individuals experiencing it and it negatively impacts our society as a whole. Sadly, children are the vulnerable new face of homelessness. Researchers on homeless children paint a bleak picture of their current and future well-being. In a state with such immense resources as we have here in Alaska, one homeless child is a disgrace. It is even more appalling if a child’s homelessness persists because representatives like Mr. Kelly prefer to base political decisions on their own bigoted preconceptions and insensitivity that only serves to exacerbate the problems for impoverished homeless people.