First let me say that I don't think I have good answers for most of these questions, but that I think these are exactly the right kinds of questions to be askin

First let me say that I don't think I have good answers for most of these questions, but that I think these are exactly the right kinds of questions to be asking. Regarding how I would use the total resources, I don't know, specifically (which is part of my problem). I think in general the best long-term solution is to get the values of personal responsibility, hard work, honesty, and genuine charity better ingrained into our culture. Again - how do you do that specifically? I don't know. But I think that's ultimately a root cause of a lot of the problems in society. That's where I would like to focus my attention more. As for who it is that becomes homeless. In my experience, it's been pretty evenly split between men and women, and pretty evenly split between "fallen from working class" and "long term hardcore homelessness with ... issues", although I suspect my specific work has been more than usually biased towards the fallen-from-working-class folks. I very rarely see families with children fall from working class, actually. Of all the classes we're discussing - I think that's the most significant pattern. (edit: I can think of several individuals who had children and nearly became homeless - they've always been the most willing to do work that was "below them", accept help, and make the necessary long-term changes. I don't know if this is because they had kids, or related to why they had kids in the first place) I think it's hard to get good data because it's easy for existing political biases to cloud the data (and I'm as guilty of that as anybody), and because so much of the real, underlying issues are very sensitive and / or subjective. Labeling people as lazy, crazy, unlucky, etc. is a very hard thing to do consistently and fairly, if it's even possible. Anyone who tries is likely to be disagreed with no matter what anyway.