Almost everyone has some kind of support network, whether it's extended family or friends, that would offer a spare bed or a couch. Sure, they won't let you stay forever, but it will keep you off the street until you can get yourself together.
People who are living on the street, for the most part, have burned through all the support their family and friends are willing to give. Their addiction or mental illness (or combination) have resulted in their support network turning their back on them. Sure, there are exceptions, but this is true of a significant majority of people living on the street (this is easy to verify if you search for studies of people living on the street and addiction/mental illness).
It's not a coincidence that a large majority of people living on the street are addicted to drugs or suffering from mental illness (and in fact that the majority are suffering from both or self medicating with street drugs).
If you are homeless, but you have no mental illness and no addiction problem there are so many people and services standing by to help. The homelessness crisis is almost entirely a mental health crisis. People aren't living on the street because they can't find a job or affordable housing. Look at undocumented immigrants, they somehow find jobs and housing despite prejudice, language issues and low wages, and still find ways to send money home despite being completely ineligible for public assistance. If millions of people who are still learning the language can find housing and work and save money, then the otherwise physically healthy people living on the street can't be explained by 'income inequality' or 'housing prices', and in fact studies show that addiction and major mental health issues are nearly universal for people living on the street.
Lots of people don't have support networks of people who will lend them housing. Be very careful with the presumption that anyone on the street must have burned through a support network.
Exactly. And for those fortunate enough to have one, it is possible that the entire support network is also homeless, or in prison, or in another country, currently in rehab or a nursing home, or some mix of these.
I agree, but I would add that sometimes addiction is related to people being overwhelmed by life events. If those life events never happened the user never would have gotten this bad.
Yes, I hope it doesn't sound like I am trying to blame people for a situation they are trapped in. I just feel strongly that we need to underline the real issues and not let homeless people be used as a political token to push a political agenda that won't help them.
“People who are living on the street, for the most part, have burned through all the support their family and friends are willing to give.”
I have experienced this with one person. She didn’t become homeless but it had reached a point where the whole family said “enough is enough, we can’t help anymore”. Interestingly this was the turn around. Once nobody was willing to help anymore she pulled herself together and straightened things out. It’s still not perfect but much better. If she hadn’t had the energy or intelligence to get her life in order she would be homeless or dead now.
Clearly the parent is saying that people start out with some sort of support network, and are likely to have transitioned from their own accommodation to sleeping on a couch or in a spare room, and _then_ become homeless. That in that process those with the most extreme problems lose, one way or another, their useful support network.
To counter the parents claim we'd need solid figures of those who went from self-supported accommodation direct to being homeless on the street without any support from family or friends [or others].
Shelter did an indicative, not statistically significant report in which they say
>"Half of the people we spoke to ended up rough sleeping because they had
nowhere else to turn. This could be because they didn’t know anyone who was
able to accommodate them, or they had burned bridges with friends and families
due to drug and/or alcohol misuse." (Ch.3, "Summary report - On the Streets", from [2])
Half isn't quite the large majority the parent claims, but this isn't a statistical survey. I think it gives enough support that one should need to prove them wrong with well supported figures.
This page [1] has some relevant stats which I think largely support the parents position but the question of "did you arrive as a rough sleeper from being hidden homeless" doesn't seem to be well shown in stats I could readily find.
I think if you allow a somewhat close reading your quote supports my point.
>"Half of the people we spoke to ended up rough sleeping because they had nowhere else to turn."
This is a little bit ambiguous, but I think one fair interpretation is that the other half they spoke to had somewhere else to turn. (It is also possible they had no information on half.)
So if half do have a place they could go (possibly with the condition of not using drugs, which is the reason they don't accept the accommodation?) and some number of others had burned bridges "due to drug and/or alcohol misuse", that's already a majority. Again this is a pretty close reading, but what I said is not controversial at all if you dig into some of the data and don't just read press releases which selectively quote the studies, or misleadingly combine statistics about people who have lost a residence (due to foreclosure, health, or other financial hardship) but have shelter with friends or family and people who are sleeping outside without shelter.
From what I have seen for most people addiction or other bad live events ( bad divorce, job loss, health problems) comes first and then homelessness. Only a few people become homeless without some kind of crisis before. Once you are homeless you are in dysfunctional environment where it’s easy to get into other kinds of trouble .
In my view, there's some causation running in both directions going on here. There's not ever going to be a clean "X causes Y" in this model. For some percentage of the population, the fact that they were homeless led to their addiction problem. For some percentage of the rest of the population, their addiction either directly led to or significantly contributed to them becoming homeless. Debating about which one "is the one true cause" misses the point, and won't lead us closer to a solution.
