Many homeless people don’t lack a work ethic; they simply don’t earn enough to rent an apartment.
Homeless villages under highway overpasses and tent camps in other public spaces create the appearance of a new epidemic, but historically, homelessness has been endemic to urban America.
Through the 1960s, these same big cities offered decent-paying, low-skilled employment and affordable housing. Since then, economic forces including automation, urban renewal and gentrification, along with finance, creative industries and technology activities, displaced manufacturing in major cities and drove up rents relative to low-skilled wages. Nowadays, 70% of America’s extremely low-income households spend more than half of their incomes on rent.
In addition, most homeless don’t suffer from debilitating mental health problems or drug addiction. Those problems are more concentrated among street people, but merely getting folks into detoxification and cleaned-up to take a job won’t solve homelessness. President Joe Biden’s all-government strategy to lower homelessness by 25% by 2025 focuses on making available to the unsheltered a larger share of already scarce affordable housing and mental-health resources, and addressing discrimination — homelessness is particularly visited on minorities and LGBTQI+.