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The Road to Homelessness

This chapter examines what “causes” homelessness. It is not easy to parse out the specific interaction of personal, social, and structural factors that brings anyone's life to homelessness. In the stories of homeless people, one sees contributing individual circumstances and personal decisions, but there is also poverty, rent inflation, educational inequity, a low minimum wage, racism, homophobia, predatory lending, domestic abuse, an unaddressed national drug problem, and an uneven legal system. Beyond the multiple factors seen openly in the narratives are underpinnings, more deeply embedded in American life. These include structural changes in the U.S. economy that shipped factory jobs overseas; transformations in the national housing market; the lack of relative expansion in the government “safety net”; and, significantly, the pervasiveness of sociopolitical norms and attitudes that stigmatize the homeless in the policy sphere. The chapter then looks at the connection between mental illness and homelessness.