The major cause of homelessness is mental illness.
The major cause of homelessness is mental illness....
Long-term drug abuse fries the brain.
Mental illness followed by drug addiction.
You’re right.
My sister-in-law has lived in a car for years.
She collected about 400K when my mother-in-law died
but ‘cannot find affordable housing’. She refuses to move from the Bay Area. Whack job.
I took a job and went to the DC area for 3.5 years back in 2010. It was the first time I’d ever been in the area, and to be honest, I’d never worked in my life in a metropolitan city. So DC became this shock to me over the homeless situation.
I would generally divide the homeless along four lines:
1. Paranoid Schizophrenic types, who ought to be in a permanent facility, with a fence and security gate.
2. Dopers. This went along two paths....those who are currently on drugs, and those who used cocaine/crack in the 1990s and burned out a bunch of brain cells. Just offering rehab doesn’t really resolve much because the bulk of them will return to the same friends, and same need for daily drug doses.
3. Marginally skilled people who are on the borderline of surviving. If they’d concentrated in their youth on certificates and job-training...they’d have something to fall back upon. They failed miserably, and never got real attention by the ‘system’ to get them a craft.
4. Finally, the debt ‘hole’. People who found success in life and were marginally surviving with $40k a year in salary...because the bulk of this went to debt. Once they lost their job, the life fell apart and they could not out-run the debt issues.
I do agree that roughly 50-percent of the homeless population ought to be permanently quartered in a long-term facility and we just give up on them as ever being potential parts of our society. Just admitting that, and having the judges to sign the paperwork is the big issue.