cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/28140949
this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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Depressing fact: Most of the homeless people you see acting all crazy and talking to themselves all the time behaved normally when they started being homeless. It's spending years in complete isolation, being constantly ignored by everyone around you and having no one to talk to that makes you act like this.
I wouldn’t jump to that though. Most working homeless live out of a car or couch surf, while not doing that.
Having both been homeless for a year (as in, on the streets, migrating from shelter to shelter) and also having worked for a homeless shelter system...
Yeah, most homeless either live in their cars, or couch surf, or jump from motel to motel... until their car gets repo'd, or their hosts kick them out, or they run out of money for motels.
Then, they're on the streets, like I was.
A couple years of that, even if you totally stay away from hard drugs as I did, is more traumatizing than what most soldiers go through, with the exception of an actual, repeated, stop loss style front line combat deployment where they're regularly in actual combat.
You see your friends die in your hands or right in front of you from an OD or a drive by or a mugging, you never know who you can trust, you know you may always, at any time, be assaulted or dispossesed, lose all your ids and bank cards, know that now you're sleeping outside in a blizzard tonight because you can't limp back to th shelter in time to make curfew, can't call for help because your phone was broken or stolen.
All the while, every 'normal' person just thinks you are disgusting, literally will not even look at you, much less speak to you.
I am astoundingly lucky I lasted a year. I have PTSD now, recurring night terrors, and I am still doing PT to recover from getting regularly assaulted and walking about 2000 miles in one year... its a miracle I wasn't stabbed, and I was maybe 100 feet away from eating lead in a drive by.
Took me a solid year of not being homeless to ... just be able to have an in person conversation with anyone, without having an anxiety attack, deescalation strategy and escape route pre planned.
Women on the street have it even worse.
I remember going into a trap house at one point to get one out. I will not explain to you what they had done to her.
To add into that, most homeless are just normal people that fell on hard times, you won't see them cause they don't want to be a bother. You see the crazies because... Well they're crazy. Gigantic assholes like musk assume that since you see crazy homeless people wandering outside, then obviously ALL homeless people are crazy violent lunatics. He is the smartest person in the world after all.
I mean, yeah - it's that AND the meth.
And heroin, and severe mental illness.
People forget that not every homeless person is just someone temporarily down on their luck. Iirc that $20b figure is just housing the homeless, which doesn't fix things for people who are mentally ill, drug addicts, or both, and that's like 60-80% of the chronically homeless.
It's a massively complex issue with no simple fix.
You're right, a 100% fix of the problem is not simple or easy. But there's a whole lot of low-hanging fruit that we can tackle to make huge strides.
While drugs and/or mental illness may be involved in a high percentage of the chronically homeless, the chronically homeless only account for somewhere between 1/5 and 1/3 of all homeless. So housing the other homeless would still take care of the needs of ~80% of all homeless, give or take. Get single-payer healthcare up and running to prevent more people from ending up in those situations, and change from a retributive justice system to one that cares about rehabilitation, and suddenly we've got a society that actually cares about people, and would cost less to run while we're at it.
But, with a functioning safety net, people won't feel like they have no other choice but to work a shit job for shit wages, and the oligarchs can't have that.
i would add that housing-first approaches increase the likelihood that mental health and substance use treatment even work long term.
hard to wanna get sober when you're being harassed by police or other people. hard to stay sane when you're barely surviving and putting drugs on top to cope.
right now, many people experiencing homelessness and severe mental illness/addiction are hospitalized for a few days or a week and then they go back to the street. which doesn't do much except get an individual out of immediate crisis. many will repeat this pattern over and over until incarceration or death.