Asking “why are homeless people homeless” is like asking “why are violent people violent”. There are a lot of stories out there, and while certainly there are some commonalities there is not a “one size fits all” explanation.
I’ve been homeless.
In 1984, I had a job, low-paying but sufficient for me to pay the rent on my little apartment in New Mexico and buy food and gasoline, etc. I was also at that time 25 years old, a chronic misfit socially, had only a High School diploma (having dropped out or been pushed out of college on two attempts at a university education), and I had a history of having major problems finding and keeping a job, current job beside the point. Some of the getting / keeping jobs problem was interwoven with the being-a-misfit problem. Oh, and the being-a-misfit problem was manifested, among other ways, by me having a psychiatric track record.
In the late summer of that year, the boss started having me clock out early; and then saying “you dont need to come in tomorrow, things are light”; so my hours were shrinking. I did the math and realized if I paid next month’s rent it would probably be the last month I’d be able to afford to do so. Coincidentally, my tax refund came in so I had a one-shot-deal check to add to my net worth, and so I gave notice and took my money and converted it to traveler’s checks and stuffed clothes and other things into a backpack and emigrated to New York City. When you don’t fit in, a big city is attractive because you’ll be able to find others like yourself, maybe entire side of town populated with them.
I had some contact people who had said “if you ever come to New York look me up” but by and large I did not “land” well; I had my backpack stolen, and although I got my travelers’ checks replaced, I set out each day to find an unfurnished room to rent but New York was having a low-income housing crisis and I had not done my homework and therefore night after night had nowhere to sleep. Applied to jobs frenetically, and there were employment agencies all along 14th street back then and I was sent to a couple of stay-away institutions to work either in the kitchen as kitchen help or as an aide / attendant to seniors, but it kept going awry. I lost one job my first day at a snooty boys’ boarding school via opening a door in search of a wastebasket into which to toss a used tissue, and walked in on a board meeting. Lost one job on about the third day when the operator of a senior center’s treatment of some low-paying 86 etc year old residents put some contemptuous expression on my face which he caught.
Eventually the money ran out and I moved from “job-seeking / room-seeking guy with money in pocket who just happens to have no home yet” to no-kidding homeless person.
Ask someone else who has been there and you’ll hear a different story. Don’t try to attribute it all to ‘mental illness’, or for that matter to the scarcity of low-income housing or the outsourcing of jobs or lack of initiative to get out or insufficient educational opportunities, or any other single cause. There are some large-scale factors that are major contributors to the phenomenon, but it’s often a confluence of circumstances.
As you can see, my situation could be blithely categorized & dismissed as “another homeless mentally ill person”. But sweeping me up and shooting me up with Prolixin would not have been a solution to my problem. (School was. I got into college, and, via opting for the college dorms, out of the homeless-shelter system, and got my BA and MA and MSW and eventually became a tax-paying self-sufficient formerly homeless gainfully employed schizophrenic dude. Of course I am now jobless as many of us are and am therefore on a trajectory that could land me on the streets once again).