I mean, you can have people who have huge downs immediately after losing a job, but someone who has just left unemployment compensation would not be considering suicide if they weren't losing everything.

If you don't have money or friends, what group housing would you find?

Why would you move to a different city, away from everyone you know, if you don't have a job to pay bills?

Without housing it is massively more difficult and time-consuming to perform basic maintenance acts like showering, shaving, defecating, or feeding yourself. Think of any camping trip you've gone on. It's easy to start slipping at your job and you're much more likely to be fired. But say you really hustle and actually keep your job, like many unhoused people.

Without a safe place to retreat to & relax, without a quiet place to sleep undisturbed by cars roaring by, you enter a spiral. Your mental health, already not great after years of stress associated with your marginal financial situation, decreases markedly and then drops off a cliff. You become deeply depressed or are unlucky enough to finally trigger more serious mental health disorders that have been lurking, waiting for the chance to rear their heads. It's very easy to stop showing up for your job here, but you still manage to put yourself together and drag yourself over there pretty well. Your coworkers start to complain about the way you smell. Your physical health begins to deteriorate.

At any stage of this process your plunge could have been arrested by a supportive family. And at any stage in this process your plunge could have been massively accelerated by the introduction of drug use. Once mental health starts to go, self-medicating seems more and more appealing. Few joys are left available to you. For most unhoused people, it's only a matter of time.

Once you are addicted to drugs all of the difficulties enumerated above are multiplied. It is extremely difficult to kick drugs in the best of times (how many of us know of some well-off family with a black sheep child who has been to family-funded rehab nearly double-digit times?) and now there is basically no incentive nor ability to do so. Mental health issues are also extremely difficult to heal. Many of us here have been depressed and understand how difficult it is to recover even in good economic circumstances.

The absolute best you can hope for upon escaping all of this is to return to a marginal low-wage high-rent existence doing its best to kick you back down the cycle.

The #1 takeaway here is that people like to talk about homeless people with mental health or drug addiction issues, and it is impossible not to admit the simple truth - their recovery is impossible without being given housing. A safe place to retreat, rest, and convalesce.

I just cannot explain the difficulty. First with working. My mood disorder throws me into instability that is catastrophic. I was an accomplished photographer (published) and was selling photographs locally making some extra money. I had an episode where I destroyed thousands of my black and white negatives. Years of work, gone.

I could move to the middle of nowhere and afford an apartment for say $700/month (if they rent it to me), but then I will not have healthcare. The places I can have healthcare, I cannot even afford a small studio never mind the first, last and despot needed to get the apartment. And many of these apartments have minimum income requirements that I am nowhere close to. And then it means I have to move away from the already meager social support I do have.

Then when I am paying 60% of my income in rent, how doing I afford my car, meds, doctors, heat, etc?

There are just so many roadblocks that people do not appreciate. As I said I had four homeless agencies trying to help me find housing and they could not help me, so it was not a lack of trying.

And renting a room is impossible. How many of you would share a house with someone you did not know who was on disability with a mental illness? I would not want to even put someone through living with my suffering if they did not know what they were getting into.

I have just turned 55 so I am lucky that more option are opening, but there is so much competition for low income housing.

What would happen to you if you became mentally ill and didn't have family or friends to take care of you?

If, for whatever reason, you had no apartment or home to stay in and actually had to sleep in a box without a shower, shave, or change of clothes, would you become dangerous? Or just unshaven and smelly?

Hopefully this opportunity will help those in need.

It could be mental health - if you can’t afford healthcare you may not be able keep a job. Once you don’t have a job you very quickly end up homeless. Now you don’t have a home, how do you possibly get treatment or a job? Eventually you are arrested and go to jail, where you can get treatment but now you’re an excon so can’t get a job so end up homeless without treatment.

You were kicked out of your home when you came out as a teenager - you’re homeless, may not have even finished school, and many jobs these days have minimum age rules. So now you’re stuck unless you’re one of the lucky few who manages to get support and a home before drugs and alcohol become the only “escape”

Same as above but you’re a kid abused by a family member, foster family, ...

Note how all of these paths eventually put you in a position where you cannot escape homelessness. You cannot get healthcare or a job without somewhere to live unless you’re very lucky.

So instead you end up cycling through prison, which in just a small amount of time costs much more than covering the cost of housing in the first place.

This is probably the most easily "treatable" condition.

Basically, you can be smart and motivated, but not have the resources (family, friends, money) to pull yourself together. You may not even have a computer, a car, or a house. You can't shave, let alone get a clean set of clothes or transport to an interview. You can't put together a resume and so on.

This is sad because a few months of housing, internet, food, and basically time support could turn this person's life around.

Of course, people who have mental illness or have paid their due for a crime and so on also deserve help. I am not arguing they don't.

I just mean that it costs so little for so much good in the former case.

Wealth and privilege buy you (and your children) a lot of safety nets and a lot of second chances. People without those advantages are often in an incredibly precarious situation, just one tough break or one bad decision away from total ruin.