Homelessness Is a Housing Problem
These policy experts need to sit down with social workers, case managers, ER and psychiatric center physicians and staff.<p>The most visible homeless people that are the jarring entropy in American cities are always going to be the low functioning indigent population with mental health and&#x2F;or addiction issues.<p>These people have no choice but to be visible. They obviously can’t succeed in their current state. Where can someone go who has baseline mental health issues, has been low SES for their entire life, and has no real support network? When this type of person is in crisis a shelter isn’t going to be a safe convalescent house to get mental health treatment and stability&#x2F;sobriety.<p>The US is woefully inadequate here. We let our lowest functioning and least supported (as in support network of family and friends) members of society walk the streets panhandling by day and sleeping in the dirt by night.<p>US cities need convalescent facilities and long term psychiatric facilities for the indigents who are mentally unable to tackle their own enormous critical problem and for the ones who are long term addicted and need strong support. (Long term alcohol use and amphetamine use lead to different kinds of psychosis. Wernicke&#x2F;Korsakoff and amphetamine induced psychosis respectively. These people are not sound enough of mind to do this without long term facilities. We don’t have those in the US anymore. Unsupervised public housing is not the answer for these people. Perhaps for the less apparent higher functioning and invisible poor it is.