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True for almost any average-to-well paid white collar work, but it's surprisingly easy to end up homeless for anyone already below the poverty level, or even just not making 6+ figures in a high cost of living area. I've known several folks - generally minimum wage adjacent jobs, retail, food service, etc. Landlord decides not to renew their lease, rental housing availability is next to none in a lot of my locality, and family lives out of state. Never made enough money to even have a savings. Suddenly they are without housing. Maybe they can crash at a friend's house, maybe not. If they can't, they're going to be spending time and effort trying to get assistance, maybe have to take a few days off work, because of the nature of those jobs, maybe they get fired. Now they are both homeless and unemployed. I've also know people in similar situations that ended up on a downward drug spiral as well, but only after the fact. I think it's a chicken or the egg problem for some homeless folks. Were they addicts first, leading to a downward spiral that lead to chronic homelessness, or were they just someone living in poverty, trying to scrape by, screwed by the system and turned to drugs later on? Add to it that public transportation sucks in most of the USA outside of urban areas (and even in some urban areas as well), so anyone already without a car has limited job prospects in the event of layoffs or an economic downturn in their local area. So yeah, I don't necessarily abide by the "it can happen to anyone" but there is absolutely a significant subset of the USA's population that is essentially one unfortunate event away from homelessness. |