Homelessness, Hunger, and Hubris: How Politicians keep people struggling
To understand homelessness in America, you need to follow the money, and the zoning laws. For decades, the nation has failed to build enough affordable housing to keep up with demand. The combination of exclusionary zoning and financial speculation has turned housing from a necessity into a commodity for profit. The result? A rental market that is increasingly hostile to anyone not backed by ridiculous wealth.
Across metropolitan areas, median rent has risen dramatically while wages have stagnated, and even people working multiple jobs often can’t afford a one-bedroom apartment without sacrificing food, healthcare, or childcare. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of affordable units have been demolished, converted into luxury condos, or snapped up by investment firms searching for high returns rather than stable communities.
Housing advocates have repeatedly pointed out that the majority of people experiencing homelessness were priced out of their communities long before they ever found themselves sleeping on sidewalks or in shelters. The equation is simple: when rent outpaces income, people lose their homes. When the federal government underfunds housing programs and cities block new construction, entire populations lose their only safety nets. When eviction becomes a profit model, homelessness becomes inevitable.
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| https://inthesetimes.com/article/affordable-housing-crisis-rising-rent-homebuyers-market |
Layered on top of housing instability is another crisis, Drug addiction. Many drugs, particularly opioids, have swept through cities, suburbs, and rural communities alike. What began with aggressive pharmaceutical marketing campaigns and fraudulent claims about the safety of prescription opioids has mutated into a deadly epidemic fueled by fentanyl and adulterated street drugs. However, the real scandal lies not in the existence of addiction, but in our nation’s response to it.
Instead of investing in harm reduction, treatment programs, and long-term care for these struggling people, policymakers have too often defaulted to criminalization and moral judgment. The result is a public health catastrophe playing out in encampments under overpasses and in makeshift shelters all across the country.
Many people experiencing homelessness turn to drugs as a form of self-medication, an attempt to cope with or numb the trauma, instability, and violence of living without housing. Others lose their homes because addiction costs them their jobs, their relationships, and, eventually, their ability to function within rigid economic systems. But regardless of which came first, either the addiction or the homelessness, the reality is the same: without stable housing and accessible treatment, recovery is a near-impossible uphill climb.
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| https://www.voanews.com/a/fentanyl-s-scourge-visible-on-streets-of-los-angeles-/6855331.html |
Communities that have adopted progressive harm-reduction strategies, safe consumption sites, medication-assisted treatment, and supportive housing have seen dramatic improvements, yet these solutions remain politically unpopular, often labeled as "soft on crime" or enabling. As a result, thousands continue to slip through the cracks, their addiction treated as a personal failing rather than the predictable result of systemic neglect.
The third pillar of America’s homelessness crisis is its broken mental health system, or more accurately, the absence of one. Since the mass deinstitutionalization of psychiatric hospitals in the mid-twentieth century, the United States has failed to build the robust infrastructure that experts long promised would replace them. What emerged instead was a patchwork of underfunded clinics, inconsistent services, and impossible waitlists.
Today, individuals living with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, PTSD, and other serious mental health conditions often receive the least support precisely when they need it most. Without stable housing and or funds, medication management becomes chaotic or even impossible. Appointments are missed. Crises escalate. Encounters with law enforcement become more likely than encounters with trained clinicians.
The data tells the story plainly: a significant proportion of people experiencing chronic homelessness are living with fully untreated or undertreated mental health disorders. Critics argue that mental illness alone does not cause homelessness, and while they are right, what causes homelessness is the combination of mental illness and the absence of a safety net capable of catching people before they fall. In countries with strong community mental health systems and guaranteed housing, individuals with psychiatric conditions do not end up sleeping on the street. Only in the U.S. does the failure of one system guarantee the failure of another. The housing crisis, addiction, and mental health challenges do not operate independently. They intersect and compound, creating a feedback loop that traps individuals in cycles of instability
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| https://www.tac.org/reports_publications/serious-mental-illness-and-homelessness/ |
A person who loses housing due to rising rent may turn to substances to cope. Addiction may lead to job loss, further eviction, and health complications. Untreated mental illness may prevent someone from securing stable employment or maintaining relationships. And once homelessness begins, it exacerbates every underlying condition. Stress, trauma, exposure to violence, and lack of medical care all make recovery infinitely more difficult. Meanwhile, society’s punitive approach, sweeping encampments, the criminalization of loitering, and the issuing of citations people cannot pay ensures that escaping homelessness is not just hard, but structurally discouraged. The system is not broken, It is working exactly as designed.
Ending homelessness in America is not impossible. It is a matter of political will. Solutions exist, and many have been proven effective: housing-first models, universal mental healthcare, comprehensive addiction treatment, and policy reforms that treat housing as a right rather than an investment opportunity. However, these solutions require confronting uncomfortable truths about how we allocate resources, and whose lives we deem worth stabilizing. They require reimagining public policy not as triage but as prevention. And they require acknowledging that homelessness is not a failure of individuals, but instead a failure of systems.
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| https://www.dailynews.com/2020/06/12/advocates-demand-overhaul-of-governments-response-to-homeless-issue/ |
Within the past decade, homelessness was on the decline. Targeted investments in deeply affordable housing, voluntary wraparound health services, and income support contributed to large reductions in veteran homelessness, demonstrating how policies and programs can end homelessness among all groups. However, today, the housing crisis, drugs invading our communities, and the increasing prevalence of mental illness all sharply increase our homeless population. There is a way to stop this rapidly growing crisis, but our politicians and lawmakers need to step up and do their part before anything will change. If America ever hopes to end this crisis, it must first accept responsibility for creating it. Only then can we begin to build a nation where homes are not privileges, treatment is not a luxury, and human dignity is not optional.
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