Homelessness
Tackling the problem requires separating the population into its three main categories: severe mental illness, untreated substance abuse, and poor financial literacy.
The recession of the early 1990s created difficulties for many Americans. The property owner of my father’s fried chicken stand placed the lot for sale, and my parents re-mortgaged the family home to come up with the cash to buy it. Construction projects had slowed for my father’s general contracting business, and losing the lot to a different owner who might tear down the chicken stand and destroy his only other source of income prompted my father to pay an extortionate price for the land. In the end, the chicken stand survived, but my parents were forced to make a distressed sale of the family home that was now under water. There were loud fights in the home. Lots of them. Many years later, my mother told me that all relationships strain when money is tight; either you make it less tight, or it just tears itself into pieces. Through a combination of my father’s efficiency and my mother’s tight-fistedness, our family unit moved into a rental home for a couple of years while my parents regrouped, reorganized, and subsequently became homeowners once again.
There are three basic categories of homeless people
those who are so paralyzed by mental illness that they live in a universe different from our own; although many of these people abuse drugs, their mental illness is the primary problem that clouds their capacity to navigate society
those who are able to navigate society but unfortunately prioritize substance abuse over employment and housing stability due to their drug addiction
those who find themselves without adequate income to cover housing costs; they can successfully navigate resources to find shelters/motels or may live in their car. This last group usually exists as a family unit, wants to find work, but is hampered by medical conditions, lack of childcare, lack of skills education, etc. This last group has also been living for many months in a home under tremendous financial strain until the moment where a lost job finally forces the family unit out of the home.
Why do many military veterans (especially men) experience homelessness?
Over one-fifth of surveyed soldiers stated that they joined the military to escape a negative situation.1 These young men lacked the skills to create a safe, stable environment for themselves in the real world, so they relied on the parental discipline that the military provided. When their military service ended and nobody was there to tell them what to do, they stopped thriving. Although these men may have developed technical skills in the military to complete a task that a future employer may assign to them, they have no independent thinking established to hunt for the job, manage their paycheck, and create a nest for themselves. They left their terrible original nest, moved into a nest built for them by the military, but never learned how to create a nest for themselves.
The three different populations require a three-pronged approach:
A) Severe mental illness: Ronald Reagan was wrong when he cut funding for federal mental health institutions. We have learned from the abuses in the past, and we must institutionalize those homeless people with severe mental illness, treat them compassionately until they make clinical improvements, and then set them up with sustainable outpatient mental health services managed by the individual states.
B) Financially destitute families: These individuals should be provided with a temporary stipend to ensure independence, coupled with aggressive financial literacy teaching and free access to long-acting reversible contraception.
C) Substance abuse: this group will be the hardest to address because they prefer street-living over sober living facilities and are not sufficiently impaired by mental illness to undergo institutionalization. Because the characteristics of this group will vary, states will need to tailor their programs based on local factors.
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR2200/RR2252/RAND_RR2252.pdf