Homelessness

"What kind of problem might homelessness be, if not a housing problem? One common although profoundly wrong theory can be dismissed at once- the opinion expressed by Ronald Reagan and others that the homeless are homeless by choice. The implication of this viewpoint is that homelessness results from an exercise of personal will, not from mental illness, substance abuse, or an inadequate supply of low-income housing. In this view, homelessness is simply not a problem and the homeless are perceived, perhaps, as romantic vagabonds who have traded the rat race of modern urban civilization for a life uncomplicated by mortgage or rent payments, ringing telephones, surly bosses, nagging spouses, and truculent children.

However widespread such a viewpoint may be, no credible scholar who has studied the problem of homelessness takes it seriously. One does read occasionally about a homeless person with a locker full of cash in the bus station, or about a former Wall Street stockbroker who cashed it all in for the romance of life on the road, but in the overwhelming majority of cases, homeless people live as they do because they lack the means to live in any other way, not because they have positively chosen a life of destitution and degradation over some attainable alternative means of living.


Consider what a homeless person would choose by choosing to be homeless. The rate of AIDS infection among the homeless exceeds that in the general population by a factor of 10; the rate of sexual assault on homeless women exceeds that of women in general by a factor of 20; the rate of tuberculosis among the homeless exceeds that in the population at large by a factor of about 100; and the average age of death for homeless men is somewhere around 53 years old. One does not 'choose' to sleep in the gutters or scavenge food from dumpsters."

-James D. Wright and Beth A. Rubin in Understanding Homelessness: New Policy and Research Perspectives