I want to defend this article since a lot of people in the comments are bashing it. There are a few facts here that point to housing prices as the primary driver in homelessness rates:
- as an example in the article, King County WA has a homelessness rate 5x of Miami-Dade County.
- Why is that? Florida is obviously not more generous with subsidies or financial help to homeless people, it’s not a climate where people can’t live outside, it doesn’t have way more mental health issues than Seattle
- if you look at the homelessness rates in cities they correspond strongly with rents. Mental illness rates don’t seem to change much between cities.
It’s true that the thing that causes people to become homeless is often a crisis of some kind - adiction or mental health, job loss, etc. What people in the comments here aren’t doing is modeling what happens in a place where housing is cheap vs housing is expensive. In a place where housing is cheap, addiction or mental health issues might mean you can keep living in your shitty apartment and making rent; life is less precarious. Mentally ill people talk to themselves in the comfort of their own home! Obviously there are people who are homeless even in low cost of living areas and they need support to find shelter, but if rich areas built enough housing to lower prices, some amount of the homelessness crisis would be solved “for free.”
It’s true that the thing that causes people to become homeless is often a crisis of some kind - adiction or mental health, job loss, etc. What people in the comments here aren’t doing is modeling what happens in a place where housing is cheap vs housing is expensive. In a place where housing is cheap, addiction or mental health issues might mean you can keep living in your shitty apartment and making rent; life is less precarious. Mentally ill people talk to themselves in the comfort of their own home! Obviously there are people who are homeless even in low cost of living areas and they need support to find shelter, but if rich areas built enough housing to lower prices, some amount of the homelessness crisis would be solved “for free.”