Your understanding of homelessness seems to be from curated, indirect sources and your opinions reflect that. For a contrast, I just spent 10 years adjacent to

Your understanding of homelessness seems to be from curated, indirect sources and your opinions reflect that. For a contrast, I just spent 10 years adjacent to a large homeless community and had direct and ongoing interaction the entire time. My wife left our family to join it. I've been homeless myself (30 years ago). Lastly, me and my adult children came scary close to being on the streets 18 mos ago. From the top. It's poverty and mental illness, in that order. Those things don't magically disappear in the absence of drugs. Given that the vast, vast majority of addicts are housed, correlation would tell us that drugs cause housing - if one were keen to make assumptions based on a single instance of correlation. My ex is a stereotypical example of our homeless. She'd been housed for 9 months and was just evicted for behavior during a prolonged delusional state. The park manager was fully clear why she had to go. The drug addicts in the park are remaining housed and nothing indicates that will change. Last year, my family nearly joined the ranks of homeless (with savings in the bank) because our rental was sold. We have zero credit (save, then buy) which bars us from all corp rentals and ~100% of private ones. Past that, every available rental has dozens->hundreds of applicants and bidding wars are common. It's one rental for every 40 households that need one and rental prices are 50%-300% higher than they were in Jan 2020 (our rent is 70% higher, we were lucky). These are the actual numbers facing renters, not curated. Survivor bias is why I can post this info. For a closing note, consider this. News orgs have been reporting on official homeless figures (a direct count plus extrapolation). The numbers are meant to represent actual numbers of homeless. Let's say my county homeless count is N. Schools are also federally mandated to report numbers of homeless students. My county's homeless student population is N x 2.5. Even that is an obvious undercount as it only reflects students in attendance. The news orgs reporting homeless numbers - they're accepting what is given to them, apparently without any attempt at verification. The homeless info that's curated for us doesn't seem like what we want, if what we want is to understand the reality of the situation.