As an anecdote, two people in my family have been or are homeless (don't know their current situation) entirely because they are incapable of continually making basic, smart financial decisions. At the level of "I decided to just not show up to work today" or "I spent my entire week's pay on a new toy". They both received enormous financial and social support from various people in the family, but always eventually just end up spending all their money somehow, or they get fired, or even just quit their job(!). Both eventually ran away from the responsibilities they built up into a different state.

I don't know if we should call this inability to make basic, smart financial decisions a mental illness or not, but it's something. And these 2 people aren't/weren't even what I would consider visibly homeless. At least as long as you didn't see them living in their car behind a convenience store.

Starting with the framing that housing is just too expensive makes the problem simple. You build more housing, or you subsidize housing for these people, or somehow just inject money into services for them so they can get back on their feet. But if that's not the core issue for some or many of these people, how do you actually help these people? How does a society help people who are incapable of handling their own finances? That's where the hard questions begin.

Most homeless people aren't mentally ill. But those "huddling in the rain" mostly are, or are at least addicts.

Non-mentally I'll homeless people are rarely "street people". They live in a car or with friends or in a shelter. Plenty of them have jobs.

There is a difference between "most homeless" (your comment) and "most visibly homeless" (comment you're replying to).

IIRC, most people who obtain "homeless" status only keep it for a short time, and don't live on the streets during that time.

You'll get very different statistics if you count transitions into (or out of) homelessness over some window, vs systematic point-in-time counts of current homeless status, vs point-in-time counts of people camping on the street, vs trying to measure QALYs.

This meta-analysis puts it at 67%: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...

What data have you seen which doesn't support it?

One of the challenges here as an ex-paramedic in the PNW who has certainly seen their fair share of homeless is that several of the more prominent studies use HUD's definition of "severe mental illness" that is far more conservative than you or I would expect...

"Requiring hospitalization more than once a month, on multiple occasions in a year".

And that number, per HUD, is 22%.

If you want to look at "untreated mental illness" in the homeless, now you're above 50%.

[dead]

Good thing that GP didn't say that most homeless are severely mentally ill.

They specifically said visibly homeless.

I hear a lot of accounts of relatively-normal people who talk about one member of their family who is homeless and living on the streets because they stopped letting that family member live with them because they did things like violently attack children in their home, or steal money in order to buy drugs. So this makes me think that a lot of visibly homeless people were in fact dysfunctional before they became homeless.

And this is relevant for any institution at all that tries to house such people, including the state. If the state provides some kind of basic housing with electricity, what happens when the people living there rip wires out of the wall so they can sell the scrap for drug money (a major reason why most landlords don't want to rent to really poor people)? Will someone prevent them from doing that (i.e. institutionalization), or will the state itself evict that person from their housing and allow them to live as a homeless street person?

It's hard to find anyone that doesn't have some motivation in this problem. I won't claim any percentages because I do not know them and I would not trust them even if I did.

That said, my experience in a urban area on the west coast has given me many examples that support this notion that it's not just a housing problem. Indeed many of the local governments own attempts to house the unhoused fail in no small part because the unhoused create conditions incompatible with staying housed.

Furthermore there is a steady drip of examples in regional news that raise serious questions about the efficacy if not motivations of the judiciary, politicians, law enforcement and local beuracracies charged with addressing the problem.

I do believe that housing costs are a major part of the problem but I also believe that treating the population as if they have no obligations to society is a major and fatal mistake to the whole enterprise. For one the policy approach has invited contagion by not addressing the population of unhoused that cannot or will not uphold the most basic aspects of the social contract. For two, it turns away a large number of people that would otherwise be sympathetic to the cause.

Aren't there cities bigger than that though? What causes the capacity limit you are taking about?