| In my experience of living in multiple shelters/streets/camps in multiple cities is that there is a lot of truth to this idea. For example, I knew a man that was incredibly ornery, almost always drunk, and prone to occasional violent outbursts. Everybody (including the rest of us in the camp) avoided him. About a year after I left the camp, I ran into his daughter and learned that he had been a normal, successful eletrician that had sustained a severe brain injury at work, and his employer managed to avoid paying for workman's compensation or helping with his medical bills, leaving him permanently disabled and with no safety net. I knew another man that also received a brain injury during a car crash in which he also lost the only extant copy of his masters' thesis in anthropology (the crash occurred in the 80s), and was in a similar position. I knew a man that actually managed to get a section 8 apartment, but lost it because he opted to move back to the riverbottom and let a pregnant homeless woman stay in it in his stead. He was then also cut off from ALL social programs. I saw a man get banned for life from an entire network of shelters spanning a huge chunk of the state for taking three (3!) single-use packets of Tide laundry detergent out of the facility. I have also met a (very) small handful of genuinely odd people that just preferred to live mostly off the grid but still wanted to be near their families/veterinary clinic/spouse's grave/etc. but they are very much the exception and not the rule. I think that for some people with limited experience with the homeless, people that are chronically homeless might appear to all fall into this category. I do 't think this happens all the time, or even to a majority of the population, but it is an idea that I have heard repeated numerous times. From my experience, the details are almost always surprising, and the search for simple explanations or solutions is frustratingly unsatisfying. |