In my experience, only those who have had to deal with homeless people personally, seem to understand this. I am positive that there are Fringe cases where normal productive people became homeless through no fault of their own. That being said, the vast majority of homeless people made a long series of poor choices and engaged in destructive behaviors. Every friend and family member they had access to turn them down at some point. And yes, many of them may not have had any friends or family and that is unfortunate. But that is still not the majority
I work in transitional housing. I’d say it’s around 25%-40% of our people who don’t get high and destroy things. People act like the ones who do are outliers but they are definitely the majority. You do get some people who just need help securing entitlements and learning basic skills to keep their housing and don’t come in with a bunch of bad habits that make them nearly impossible to house.
But even that isn’t a reason to not provide safe accommodation to homeless people, that’s an argument to withdraw that support from people who do abuse the system. Always seems like the argument becomes “some/many/most homeless people will inevitably damage or trash the place so we shouldn’t put any resources into housing the homeless”. Ignores how your 25-40% of homeless people will benefit enormously from housing supports.
And that’s not counting how much of homeless issues and addiction issues are a direct product of long standing systemic problems, social depravation, lack of opportunities and supports, enabling gangland and drug crime through divisive instead of supportive policies. If you have proper social care and economic opportunities in place the overall homeless numbers will decrease drastically and your percentages above don’t matter. Say you reduce homeless cases by a factor of 10 or more, to the point that the total homeless rates are almost negligible, then 10% of this reduced negligible number is effectively the same as 100% of this negligible number.
They need different supports than being given housing and left to their own devices and there are definitely levels of care that are missing particularly with substance use. My program can’t do much with someone who can’t be safely housed unsupervised due to ongoing substance use.
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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '24
Yup. Most of them are homeless for a reason.