[EA-3167]

You're assuming that the major challenge is the lack of a home, because the term we choose to use as an umbrella implies that. For some people it's even true, but they tend not to be CHRONICALLY homeless, and that's the population of major concern. Chronically homeless people have extremely high rates of mental illness and substance abuse; depending on how you slice it, a third or more are schizophrenic or something similar.

Those are not people you can just stick into a house and wish them well, they need serious help for many years. In most cases that help isn't there, or comes with strings (no drugs, no alcohol) that they refuse to accept. Homelessness in the US is in many respect a mental health and substance abuse issue, exacerbated in the post-Reagan era when our mental health system was gutted and weakened.

If you want to reach those people and keep them off the streets, you need more than just empty houses.

[itishappy]

Chronically homeless make up about a quarter to a third of the US homeless population.

https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2023-...

[EA-3167]

That's true, but they make up a disproportionate number of the "visible homeless" that people encounter in camps, taking drugs on the street, etc. A lot of homeless people are at a low point in their lives, but use the systems offered to them and dig themselves back out. That's why they aren't CHRONICALLY homeless.

They don't represent the same kind of societal problem that poor students, broke divorcees, and people moving through rough patches do. They also don't represent a single population that needs help they aren't provided with already, unlike the chronically homeless.

[erehweb]

If you're saying that "homeless" means something other than not having a home, that seems unnecessarily confusing. Re strings - I believe there has been some success in providing no-strings housing and then working on the other problems.

[EA-3167]

It's a broad term, just like "Sick" can mean anything from having a seasonal cold, to terminal cancer. The causes vary, the prognoses vary, the treatments vary. Talking about "Sickness" without specifics is profoundly unhelpful.

Same with homelessness.