Quote:
Originally Posted by Chef
Part of the problem with discussions of homelessness in the US is that the stereotype of the homeless as out of control addicts and the mentally ill is not necessarily accurate. Some of the homeless are those people but at the same time a lot of regular low income workers become homeless. For example 14% of Kroger supermarket employees in Colorado, southern California and the Seattle area report being homeless last year:
https://www.newsweek.com/homeless-sk...itions-1669137
The stereotype of the homeless as a bunch of crazy addicts just serves as an excuse to do nothing about it. |
To make any kind of meaningful headway in discussing this topic, it's probably best to stop speaking of "the homeless" as a monolithic group.
There are street people (aka the visible homeless) and they are the ones most often dealing with the most severe mental illness/addiction issues.
Then there are the working poor homeless (aka the invisible homeless) and they tend to have the wherewithall and limited resources/social contacts to sleep in cars and/or couch surf when they find themselves in periods of not having permanent shelter of their own.
Now, any given individual can certainly slide down from the latter to the former, or claw their way back in the other direction, but it's still helpful to have the general dichotomy noted because street people are the group of homeless that the vast majority of people have casual and regular contact with, but they are FAR from the whole story, as you pointed out.