Absolutely not. Areas with higher levels of addiction or mental health issues do not have out homelessness problems.
There may be a small causal arrow where homelessness causes some addiction or mental health issues, or a very small arrow where addiction or mental health causes some to be homeless, but the bulk of the problem is high housing costs.
If you redefine "homelessness" to only include those with addiction or mental illness problems, then you might have a point. But that's not a terrible useful definition, and many of those addiction and mental illness problems stem from not having housing and the extreme difficulty of that situation.
Other areas with higher rates of addiction, but cheaper housing, have lower rates of homelessness. Cheaper housing really does allow people to get off the streets.
No, homelessness is not (just) a mental health problem. Your own source indicates less than half of homeless people have a mental health issue and lists depression, anxiety and substance abuse as some of the mental health issues suffered by homeless individuals. All three of those can be caused or worsened by being homeless.
There are many factors that contribute to homelessness. Physical ailments can help lead to homelessness, but so can the high cost of housing:
Research by Zillow Group Inc. last year found that a 5 percent increase in rents in L.A. translates into about 2,000 more homeless people, among the highest correlations in the U.S. The median rent for a one-bedroom in the city was $2,371 in September, up 43 percent from 2010. Similarly, consultant McKinsey & Co. recently concluded that the runup in housing costs was 96 percent correlated with Seattle’s soaring homeless population. Even skeptics have come around to accepting the relationship. “I argued for a long time that the homelessness issue wasn’t due to rents,” says Joel Singer, chief executive officer of the California Association of Realtors. “I can’t argue that anymore.”
No, mental health issues really are not a direct cause of homelessness per se. That narrative is popular because it's a convenient way to paint homelessness as a personal problem that is the fault of the homeless individual. It's a convenient means to wash our collective hands of the responsibility of addressing societal factors, such as national housing policy and how that strangles the availability of low cost housing that works without owning a car.
We say homeless people are all "junkies and crazies" and blame their lack of housing on them. Meanwhile, there are junkie millionaire musicians and actors. We don't use their existence as an excuse to conclude "drug addiction leads to wealth!"
I get told over and over again that housing costs aren't a factor in homelessness at all. In reality, it's a known and proven factor, but it's one that doesn't feed the narrative that homelessness is fundamentally an individual problem rather than a systemic societal problem.
They found that areas with high housing costs are correlated with high levels of homelessness? Well of course! People want to live in desirable places and that both drives up the cost of housing and attracts homeless people at the same time.
Remove that confounding variable and you’re left with addiction and mental health.
That's the way some politicians/media try to spin it, but it's not the whole story.
Many homeless don't have mental health and substance abuse issues, but are just forced out of their homes on debt, etc. And of course some develop mental health (and sometimes substance abuse issues) after living homeless.
Yes, drug & alcohol addiction is widespread in the general non-homeless population and makes it difficult to ensure steady income. When the cost of rent rises dramatically, this means people with those issues are likely to find themselves homeless. Addictions are difficult to kick in the best of times (who among us doesn't know of some rich kid who's been in and out of rehab into their 30s?) and basically impossible when homeless. Not sure what your point is here.
Being homeless can cause mental illness and addiction, as they are illnesses that occur to vulnerable people in tenuous living circumstances such as homelessness.
Mental health / substance can cause homelessness. Homelessness can cause mental health / substance. It’s a shit cycle either way, but the one certainty is we are not addressing either in a meaningful way.
I mean, I suspect it's mostly be people with mental health issues, but I rarely see any evidence for the "who'd been homeless anyway" part. I know plenty of people with mental health issues who aren't homeless. Most of them work productive jobs and support themselves.
Mental health issues are usually manageable if you have the resources to manage them.
If homelessness is increasing, then it seems likely that something's causing the increase. If the cause is mental illness, something's causing that mental illness to be more prevalent or less manageable.
High rent seems like a decent hypothesis of it being less manageable.
Is the mental health issue the cause of the homelessness, or is the homelessness the cause of the mental health issue?
There have been a number of studies that show that poverty has a very real impact on your mental abilities. It wouldn't surprise me at all if homelessness itself causes mental health problems.
But there are absolutely also athletes who have a hard time functioning outside their sports bubble.
What US do you live in? The one I live in definitely associates homelessness with poverty, as well as mental health issues. (The mental health issues are usually exacerbated by being homeless in the first place.)
The working poor are the fastest growing segment of homelessness in my jurisdiction. That doesn't mean they're all living on the street. RVs, cars, shelters, etc.
The causality of homelessness and addiction is more like a negative feedback loop. eg No insurance, get sick or injured, self medicate with alcohol or oxy, loose job, loose housing.
The link between mental illness and homelessness is pretty straight forward.
2. Therefore, the homelessness is caused by drug addiction.
Not exactly sound reasoning. Plenty of people with mental illness and drug addiction still manage to pay rent.
No one disputes the rates of addiction and mental illness among the homeless. California has neither the highest rates for drug addiction/overdoses nor the highest rates of mental illness, yet it has the highest rate of homelessness.
There is no correlation between rates of mental illness and rates of homelessness. There is no correlation between drug addiction rates and homelessness. There is a strong Correlation between rents and homelessness.
Why? Being mentally ill and a drug addict doesn't automatically make you homeless in an area where rent for a room is $400/month.
Read the article, or read the recent UCSF study on homelessness[0]. The data suggest that mental illness and drug addiction are both symptoms of, or exacerbated by, homelessness, not causes of it.
Please don’t argue with me about this here without citing the available data.
This is wrong. Homelessness scales with affordability, not mental illness or addiction rates. This is why San Fransisco and LA have the highest rates in the country. Noah Smith writes about this at length, the data is very clear.
Not at all. I even stated directly that in the recent past most homeless people had mental health issues. Now added to this first group are people that just can't afford the rent and have been evicted or pushed onto the street.
There may be a small causal arrow where homelessness causes some addiction or mental health issues, or a very small arrow where addiction or mental health causes some to be homeless, but the bulk of the problem is high housing costs.
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