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From what I have been able to learn from several community mental health friends, there are a lot of causes of homelessness. There are certainly nontrivial numb
by MobiusHorizons 2y ago
From what I have been able to learn from several community mental health friends, there are a lot of causes of homelessness. There are certainly nontrivial numbers of people struggling with mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, or combinations of both in public on our streets. This tends to be very visible and off putting. Housing is only one of many challenges these people are facing, but there are also lots of services beyond housing aimed at this population. There are also plenty of people who are dealing with setbacks and just need to get back on their feet and rebuild. This population is much less visible most of the time, because they are much less likely to be inconveniencing people in public spaces. Sometimes they have more of a social network to tap and can stay off of the streets. For this group, cost of housing and availability of work are the primary issues. I don’t have a good sense of the size of this population relative to other populations though.
- andrewla 2y agoI don't think of this in terms of "causes of homelessness". These are different categories. The "visible" homeless, ironically, are extremely difficult to measure. They often don't carry or won't present identification, they often have no family or support structure, they often make little to no attempt to use services. The "invisible" homeless are the opposite, and can be easily measured, because they have all of those things. When you see numbers trying to measure homeless people, it will almost always be the "invisible" homeless. Sending people out with clickers to count the homeless people on the street is nearly impossible, so the best we can do is various sampling approaches with huge margins of error.