Homelessness Causes Debate

It's not a homeless problem, it's a drug abuse and mental illness problem. Address the correct cause to fix the symptoms.

Claiming there are no fundamental material/economic problems, such as with housing, and pretending homeless people are just a lost cause of mentally ill substance abusers is certainly not going to solve any problems, except maybe putting your conscience at ease. Housing is not the only problem, but there are fundamental material issues which greatly increase the chance of mental illness and substance abuse.

As far as I understand, we do have the physical capability of housing that many people, but a significant number of the homeless are drug addicted, have mental illness, or both, and attempts to provide housing in mass like that leads to many of the houses becoming filthy and/or damaged. And who would want to give up a house for that? Homelessness can't just be solved with a housing band-aid, but needs to be addressed at the source with support for the drug addicted and mentally ill.

You're assuming that the major challenge is the lack of a home, because the term we choose to use as an umbrella implies that. For some people it's even true, but they tend not to be CHRONICALLY homeless, and that's the population of major concern. Chronically homeless people have extremely high rates of mental illness and substance abuse; depending on how you slice it, a third or more are schizophrenic or something similar.Those are not people you can just stick into a house a

If homelessness was a housing problem, housing the homeless would help. The real problem is mental issues and addiction to drugs. When society realizes that and addresses those issues somehow other than offering shelter, homelessness would be mostly resolved.

There is no strong separation between 3/4 of your categories. People freely move from financial misfortune to mental illness to drug abuse. I'm sure you have the empathy to imagine the toll being homeless takes on your mental health, and in turn the difficulty with holding down stable employment when you have mental health problems. Drug addiction is of course a mental health issue, not something to be moralized - it's long past time to leave the war on drugs mindset in the past.

It's not as simple as just throwing money at the problem and managing things differently.I've been homeless before and it's not pretty, a lot of the people who I met on the street during that time would not have been able to just take an apartment and that would be their problem solved.They are on the street for a reason and if the reason was purely financial then perhaps the apartment would help, but a lot of the time the reasons can be associated to mental health, poverty, drugs, alcohol

That's because a large portion of homeless people have drug addiction and/or have mental disease. Just giving them a place to stay doesn't cure the root problem.

Homelessness is not simply a money problem. A lot of homeless people have mental illnesses, drug addictions, and other significant health problems. Many of them are suspicious of shelters and especially of the police and other forms of government authority because of bad past experiences.Even for people who initially became homeless because they couldn't afford housing, a lot of those other factors have become part of what keeps them homeless. Just giving them housing doesn't solve

Source on both mental health being the majority and that generally the homeless will destroy the space they are given?