> healthy and sane people living in the streets for some time and most of the time the justification is indebtness There is a strong selection bias here: homel

> healthy and sane people living in the streets for some time and most of the time the justification is indebtness There is a strong selection bias here: homeless people who are addicts or suffer from mental health issues are significantly less likely to be on a computer writing interesting articles of their experience. I volunteered at a soup kitchen in SF a number of years ago. At the orientation meeting, the director said nearly all homeless fit into one of these categories: 1. Mentally ill 2. Addicted to drugs 3. Veterans (Gulf War, Vietnam) 4. Down-on-their-luck families (debt, sudden medical bills, lost job, eviction, etc.) He said #4 category was the smallest, and these families typically got out of the situation within a year or two at most. A 'Pursuit of Happyness' type situation. The other problems are much less tractable. The distribution of time spent on the streets was strongly bimodal: people were either on the streets for <2 years, or for decades.