There’s a saying in Chess, that if you have one weakness, you can probably defend it, but if you have two, you are probably fucked. I dunno, it’s phrased better, but that’s the gist.
Most homeless people are only temporarily homeless. They are the ‘one weakness’ crowd. Something has gone wrong, they are on the ropes, but they are straightening it out. There are times and places I can point to in my life where I could have become a ‘one weakness’ homeless.
A one weakness homeless has fucked up in a royal way (drugs, hit his girl...), and fallen through the cracks, but in a world where Thanos snapped them into a suburban home, they’d be fine. They are a homeowner/taxpayer sort, who just temporarily slipped out of the socket. Pick em up, turn em over twice and put em back in the USB slot, and all is well.
This is most homeless! Most people who are homeless are not homeless long. The majority, the vast majority, are on the come up. Never forget it.
The long term homeless tend to be ‘all weakness’ homeless. These are the protagonists of all of the frustrating stories of people trying to help someone out and suffering for it. The lifers. The people that the stereotype grew from.
Fundamentally, Mr. All Weakness cannot trust himself. He can’t get a job, even the most menial and basic, because the version of him that exists tomorrow doesn’t regard itself as bound by the promises made today. Call this mental illness, maybe it is an addiction to some substance, or simply loose temporal coupling...it doesn’t matter. The point is that, without a future, they live for the present, and such people will be homeless.
Lots of people have trouble sticking to a diet, yeah? We’ve all been there. It’s gonna start tomorrow we think, daily, for years. The second type of homeless are like this with everything.
The basic problem of helping the homeless is that the ones you can help can help themselves. A hand up is useful, sure, but you are accelerating a process already begun. The ones you cannot help, cannot BE helped.
All of the anecdotes, all of the stories people remember, will be about the second type. The people they successfully help will vanish from the streets, just as they were always going to. The ones that take the offered hand and bite it with piss stained teeth stick in the memory, and they are going to be the face of your project.
When OP imagines being homeless, it is a type 1 homelessness. The clerks would suffer nothing from giving up the bathroom code to a homeless version of OP, or, indeed, most homeless. But one experience with an all weakness homeless will teach caution, and if you are in a clerk in a neighborhood with homeless people you will have that experience sooner than later.
I spent two and a half hours (unfucking paid!!) cleaning a gas station bathroom at the end of a double because I was careless with the key. I never made that mistake again.
It’s mostly anecdotal from my experience, I’m afraid. That is, my conviction went the ‘wrong way’. When I was poor, that’s what I saw, then later articles mostly seemed to agree, rather than the data making me believe something and then experience confirming.
I looked up noahpinion’s ‘everything you know about homelessness is wrong’ article, which I remember as basically getting stuff right. There is a citation link for ‘the vast majority of homelessness is temporary and the vast majority of homeless people just need housing’, but it is broken. womp womp.
The first link on searching ‘homelessness is temporary’ on google goes to What Are the Four Types of Homelessness? | Comic Relief US , where they don’t give a hard number beyond saying that most homelessness is temporary. We can get it in reverse, though, in that ‘chronic homelessness’ is described as 17%, which would make non chronic homelessness 83%.
Homing in on ‘chronic homelessness’ seems worthwhile, if that’s the terminology we might find more useful stuff that way.
State of Homelessness: 2023 Edition—endhomelessness.org has the hopeful link ‘homelessness statistics’. They cite 421,392 ‘homeless people’ and 127,768 ‘chronic homeless’.
Endhomelessness.org gives us: Chronically Homeless—National Alliance to End Homelessness where they describe chronic homelessness as about 22% of the homeless population.
Addressing Chronic Homelessness | The Homeless Hub gives us 2-4% of the homeless being chronically homeless in canada, vs 10% in the US.
I tried to google the opposite ‘homelessness is permanent’, ‘homelessness is not temporary’, etc, but the verbiage doesn’t work that way. I couldn’t find any results for most homeless being forever homeless, but even in a reality where that was true, I’m not sure I would.