What is the leading cause of homelessness?

Life.

Shit just happen. And, it sometimes happens to good people.
There are no absolutes that can be corrected.

It is a byproduct of society.

Hoping for a more specific answer….

Schizophrenia, bankruptcy after illness, loss of dwelling due to financial issues are the three main causes.

The leading cause of homelessness is that the free market in real estate cannot create housing at a price that is affordable to individuals in low paying jobs, or even in high paying jobs in certain areas of particularly high real estate prices.

Isn’t it obvious? “Moving away from home.”

@Snarp Your model doesn’t account for subsidized low-income housing, Section Eight and the like. The truth is that untreated schizophrenia is the first cause (or patients who are not compliant with their neuroleptics) then comes displacement due to financial catastrophe caused by major uninsured illness or accident. Last are market forces, even in today’s crash economy.

I would say it is highly dependent on the age group in question.
For a homeless youth the primary cause is abusive families. For older groups, well, I am not sure. There are lots of reasons and I am not sure which is the top cause.

I asked a question about how long it would take for you to be homeless if you lost your job and couldn’t find a new one. The results were kinda scary. It is here.

@dpworkin Section Eight and the like are necessary due to my answer, and they are not sufficiently funded to prevent homelessness among working people. You are absolutely correct that mental illness and the massive de-institutionalization of the mentally ill in the 80s (I know, you didn’t mention that part, but it’s important) play a very large roll in homelessness, particularly in the highly visible aspect of it, but working people are often homeless due to my answer. I will also grant you the importance of financial catastrophe caused by major illness.

I state my answer as I do because most people don’t realize that many homeless people today work for a living, have families, and are not mentally ill. I want people to stop and think about that. These are also the homeless people least likely to be counted in statistics on homelessness, partly because they often do not make use of homeless shelters, so there are likely many more of them than statistics show.

The fact remains that if we could somehow deal with the mentally ill homeless, whether through institutionalization (and I’ll note that this system was scrapped for some very good reason) or through somehow ensuring treatment, and even if we had universal single payer health care, we would still have homelessness.

It is a fact that the free market does not provide enough affordable housing and, particularly in the United States, the programs that are designed to make up for this are woefully underfunded.

Good points @Snarp, and a GA.

a growing shortage of affordable rental housing and a simultaneous increase in poverty are the two trends that are largely responsible for the rise in homelessness. Persons living in poverty are most at risk of becoming homeless.

@dpworkin I took a fantastic graduate level seminar in housing policy. We covered studies of all the major programs in the U.S. as well as some notable examples from Europe. One of the students also worked with a local homeless advocacy group and did a presentation. The whole thing was very eye opening, and a bit depressing.

http://www.ehow.com/about_4587661_what-leading-causes-homelessness.html
http://www.exampleessays.com/viewpaper/76696.html

A cause of homelessness in those who previously owned their homes is a combination of having lived beyond their means, failure to save cash as a buffer against hard times (rainy day fund), loss of employment due to the recession (near depression).

When combined with a shortage of reasonably priced rental housing, families have ended up homeless.

The greed and irresponsibility of banks and other financial institutions permitted by the “laissez faire” deregulation policies favoured by previous Republican administrations set the stage for the financial collapse that has crushed so many hard working people.

Capitalism.

@pat That’s what I said!

“The Man”.

@cheebdragon That’s what I said!

Addiction.

@CaptainHarley While it is a cause for homelessness, it most certainly isn’t the leading one. Plenty of people maintain severe addictions and a seemingly normal life all at the same time. Whether we know it or not, we walk by countless alcoholics, coke heads and gamblers every time we go outside, all with jobs, careers, families.

@Symbeline I’m dealing with a pretty significant Fluther addiction right now.

@CyanoticWasp And I’m not drunk enough yet.

divorce?

Displacement.

Joblessness!

i live close to philly and in big cities like that id say 99% of the homeless people are insane and choose to stay on the streets. There are so many programs around here for the homeless and needy that if they wanted to get off the street they could.

Most people seem to survive a divorce, job loss, and even foreclosure, especially if they have family or friends who can take them in. However, when a person becomes mentally ill, they tend to become alienated from their family and the social supports most people take for granted, and are not able to bounce back and get back into the job or housing markets.

When a mentally ill person gets snared in the criminal justice system, they tend to get sucked into a downward spiral of self-medication, arrest, deterioration, release, and rearrest. So, in this respect, it is not laissez faire capitalism; it’s our collective abandonment of the mentally ill, and those pauperized by AIDS, who make up the hard core of the persistently homeless.

What dismays me is the number of veterans who apparently CHOOSE to be homeless. There are innumerable programs for veterans to recover from all sorts of things like PTSD, minimal brain dysfunction, job loss, and homelessness. The only conclusion I can reach is that they want to be on the street. This saddens me greatly.

@CaptainHarley I don’t think you are taking the hassle factor involved in accessing these programs into account. The vets I have talked to describe a wall of indifference, red tape, denials, and an almost adversarial response to any claim for treatment or benefits—barriers, which, if you have any kind of brain dysfunction at all can be an insurmountable hurdle. Where I live, the waiting list for Section 8 housing is something like 5 years, which is quite a lot of time to ask a homeless person to stay in one place (considering that an arrest during this time can get you sent to the back of the line, or disqualified entirely if it is for drugs).

Second, I don’t think it is a matter of choice so much as a matter of becoming demoralized and resigned to being homeless. It is a sad fact that people can get used to anything, and once people get used to being homeless, they don’t always have a burning desire to overcome the considerable obstacles that society throws in their way. Saying that people want to live on the street is one of those lies you tell yourself (and others) in order to justify our collective abandonment of the homeless.

Foreclosure or umm maybe people’s wife’s or husbands kicked them out.. Maybe. Or umm.. House fires and uh maybe um maybe earthquakes. Like in Haiti

Being laid-off…no money. Debt..bankrupcy…
house gone into flames

@Zuma

I sincerely hope you have overstated your case… but I fear you have not. The idea that thousands of my brothers ( and sisters, for that matter ) are on the street because of indifference ( or worse ) on the part of the very organizations that are suppose to help them is repugnant in the extreme to me. : ((

@CaptainHarley I don’t think I have. But just to be sure, you might want to read this and this and this and this. It is such a scandal.

drug addiction sorry but its true

It’s mostly mental illness. I think something like 50% of the homeless are mentally ill. Or that used to be the case. I hear that there is a lot more economic homelessness these days. Some cities, like NYC and Philadelphia actually have programs where they take the homeless and give them homes. This allows the cities to provide the homeless the services they need to get well and be able to work and support themselves.

Mobility.
Erosion of intergenerational relationships.
Bad parenting and defunct families.
Spiritual voids.
Mind-numbing attention grabbers like trash television.
Widening educational divide.
Industrial automation.
Erosion of social safety networks.
Selfishness and greed.

Ever seen any homeless Amish?

@wundayatta – In most cases mental illness is the result of social decline and homelessness and not the other way round.

@mattbrowne how can you make that assertion? Data, please.

@CyanoticWasp I don’t know if there is anything in the way of statistical data, but it used to be that the mentally ill were cared for by their families with the help of people in the surrounding communities. In San Francisco, for example, there was a fellow who called himself Emperor Norton, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. He had lost his fortune trying to corner the rice market and had gone insane. But everyone rallied around him and played along with his delusion. He issued his own scrip currency to pay for his meals and the local merchants honored it. When he died, 10,000 people turned out for his funeral.

Ever since, San Francisco has been home to flamboyant crazies from Holy Joe, to Jesus Christ-Satan who would wear flowery dresses with a full beard, sometimes with a United Nations flag as a cape. (I saw him one time dancing naked in the park. The cops told him to cover up, so he got a big red handkerchief he had tied around his neck and tied it around his privates, and they left him alone.) San Francisco is, arguably, one of the largest open air mental health clinics in the world.

Anyway, most places do not care for their mentally ill in the community like this, so they tend to deteriorate to a point where they frighten and alienate those who might otherwise care for them. When people aren’t in daily contact with eccentrics, they lose the ability to relate them, so they try to get rid them. This, of course, only increases the social distance and the empathic divide between them causing the “crazies” to descend into a truly frightening level of squalor and degradation so very difficult to help.

I think what @mattbrowne is trying to say is that there is a kind of spiritual deterioration in out society that tends to devalue people and push them to the margins, where we abandon them to their outcast status. Nowhere is this clearer than in the way we sweep mentally ill people into jails and prisons where, essentially, they are punished for being ill. Simplistic portrayals of the mentally ill on TV only seem to reinforce the idea that crazies are dangerous and incomprehensible Others, beyond any help.

We don’t really treat every human being as if they were valuable, nor do we treat them as we would wish to be treated if we were in their place. Industrial automation only adds to the “surplus” population that people end up mental health casualties, whom we resent having to support. People complain bitterly about having to to pay taxes for government programs that might reintegrate these people back into our communities. And even where you can create these remedial and rehabilitative programs, communities don’t necessarily want them in their neighborhoods.

In a community like the Amish, everyone is taken care of. Everyone is loved. Families aren’t split up because people have to move away to find jobs. Everyone is taught that we are all valuable and ought to be cherished. And people aren’t obsessed with accumulating the latest and greatest stuff. Everyone knows everyone else, and it doesn’t occur to them not to look out for one another.

@Zuma that is a moving and powerful essay, but it doesn’t really support the bald assertion that @mattbrowne made that, essentially, ‘social decline’ and homelessness makes people mentally ill. I can be in agreement with all of the things that you said above (and I think that I would enjoy a lot about San Francisco, including most of what you described) but that still doesn’t make a case for causation. If I read it right, it seems that SF has a fair population of people who are already mentally ill, out of touch with reality, or otherwise not quite sane and rational. But not even you made the case that there’s any causation from their being homeless, or SF being an uncaring and unloving place.

Nice essay, though.

@CyanoticWasp The reason San Francisco has so many crazies is because so many other communities drive them off and they come here.

I think there is a kind of chicken and egg problem when trying to nail down the “causes” of mental illness. Some people get depressed for apparently no reason, for others the cause is obvious. But whether people bounce back or whether they deteriorate to a point where they become homeless is, I think, largely a matter of social support. So, if you have an inhospitable, uncaring society that imprisons the mentally ill and makes them worse, you kind of have an engine for the manufacture of pathology. The initial problem may be a matter of the luck of the draw, but whether it becomes a problem is largely a social one. Does that make sense?

Same with Santa Monica. It is the town fathers’ (mothers and fathers?) policy not to harass them, so they show up from everywhere.

@Zuma it makes sense that prison does make people worse; I’ll buy that, based on the little evidence that I’ve seen firsthand… and the recidivism statistics. It certainly doesn’t help anything. (We could start a whole new discussion on ‘crime and punishment’, and the purpose of jails in today’s society.) This is not to say that the mental institutions that we had in the past were much better at doing more than warehousing bodies.

But—correct me if I’m wrong—I also don’t think that we jail people “just” for being ‘crazy’, ‘insane’, ‘eccentric’ or ‘weird’, or even psychotic, for that matter (unless there has been a demonstrated threat, which has to be proven like any other criminal case).

I’m not trying to be a crank here; I just wanted @mattbrowne to make a case for his somewhat startling statement. I don’t see one yet.

The Hartford Courant ran a couple of articles (more than a year apart) on a particular older-middle-aged couple who lived in the woods alongside the Connecticut River (just opposite from me, in fact) for several years. They were perfectly sane, from all accounts; just poor—and not unhappy about it. They shopped in town (rarely) like other folks, but they certainly didn’t drive there! They had no electricity and no permanent structure to call home. They had complaints about the river flooding in the late winter and spring, and lost their tent and most belongings during a particularly bad and quick flood.

By the time the second article appeared a year later, they had even been given an apartment in town after they got tired of that life—but at the end of the final article it wasn’t certain that they’d elect to stay in the apartment; they actually seemed to prefer the relative freedom (even with its extreme discomforts) that they enjoyed at the side of the river.

I realize that’s just one more anecdote, but it was clear enough that this couple was not at all unbalanced; just very different from me—and that’s okay.

@CyanoticWasp

This is what I was referring to about how prison makes mentally ill people worse, particularly when they get caught in a pattern of rapid cycling.

As I was saying earlier, people do get used to anything. I used to know one paranoid schizophrenic who would “prefer” being homeless. He found it exciting, much in the same way he found his madness exciting. He would purposely go without sleep in order to intensify the voices in his head. He liked the “helter skelter,” as he put it. You could say he preferred being crazy.

Okay, I need to clarify my statement above, which was: in most cases mental illness is the result of social decline and homelessness and not the other way round.

This means if a homeless person has a mental illness the overall conditions related to homelessness are part of the cause. This does not mean that every homeless person is mentally ill. I never said that. I wanted to point out that I think in most cases the social decline and deteriorating personal relationships and safety nets came first. Which does not mean there could also be certain genetic preconditions or other environmental factors such as prolonged forms of extreme stress. Sometimes there also might be an overlap, like mild forms of mental problems significantly increase after people become homeless.

I think we should spend more time on changing the root causes, like erosion of intergenerational relationships as well as bad parenting and defunct families.

Thanks @Zuma for your analysis!

not having a house