There’s a couple of things I’d like to mention. First, when I was 19, I was making $14,200 a year, and I rented a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco for $350 a month. Nowadays, I doubt that same position I held in a reinsurance brokerage pays a whole lot more than it did then – but that same apartment probably costs five times as much.
Second, there’s something almost no one seems to know about homeless people, but I know it’s true because I was homeless myself on and off for quite awhile, and I have many friends who were or are homeless too:
Being able to get up at the same time every day, and go to the same place, and do the same thing, is a separate skill that not everyone has. It is nothing to do with laziness. Many of my homeless friends work much harder than the average person just keeping themselves fed and safe and warm at night. They will walk all over creation collecting recyclables, or jump through ridiculous hoops just to use somebody’s shower, or build themselves an invisible camp someplace where there’s some trees and have to go through all kinds of motions to avoid being detected. They don’t steal, and they pay sales tax when they buy things just like everyone else. Many of them get no government assistance at all. What they have is a constitutional inability to regiment themselves to a sufficient degree to hold down a regular job. Is that a mental illness? I don’t know; but I’ll bet if you ask those “homeless by choice” folks, you would find that some of them would love to be indoors somewhere, but they know themselves well enough to know that they just can’t do the 9-5 thing. Probably the only reason I’ve been housed for more than 10 years now is that I found a job where my hours are very, very flexible.
Remember that, like so many aspects of our modern lives, living by the clock and dull, repetitive labor (i.e., low-paying type jobs) are relatively recent additions. (Subsistence farming, which most humans have done throughout most of our history, may be repetitive, but it’s not dull.) Interpersonal politics, like getting along with the jerks at work, and trying to blend in with people who really are not like you , are also things that not everyone can do. Sure, you may have been getting up every weekday at 6am for 20 years with no problem, but that doesn’t mean it’s a basic human skill like tying your shoes.
In any society where you pretty much are forced to accept a narrow selection of lifestyle options, there will always be a certain percentage who just don’t fit. It’s not their fault, and they’re not doing it on purpose.
I don’t mean to say that this is true of all homeless people. I will say that I think it’s a much bigger factor than anyone has noticed.