There's probably a significant percentage of homeless people who are homeless because they have untreated mental illnesses. They'd likely be homeless even if they weren't monetarily impoverished.
I don't think it's all that clear cut. Living on the street likely promotes a range of mental health problems. Though, most of this is temporary. One out of 50 children or 1.5 million children in America will be homeless each year.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta...
And what if they could afford health care (or rather the state stepped in) to help with that addiction/mental illness?
A study just done about a year ago in the City I live in, housed a fairly large number of the non-temporary homeless people (between 20 and 50 I want to say, the numbers escape me) in an apartment complex that provided basic social services and access to health care. They found that in actuality, this helped solve many of the long term problems (even if it did not solve all the problems for all the people), as these people now had access to health care, _AND_ it saved money, because these people were no longer ending up in the emergency room or the local jail (and a few other cost saving measures as well)
I'm pretty sure you don't know what you're talking about.
Okay. I'm sorry to have gotten on you. There so many comments in this thread I found to be so completely wrong, and/or unsympathetic, it had really bothered me, and I took it out on you. Thank you for admitting that you may not fully understand what is a very serious situation for many. And sadly, at least in the US, we do a rather poor job of solving the problem, not because we don't have the resources, but because a large amount of people (and their leaders) simply ignore or don't wish to fix the problem. It's frustrating, and all the more frustrating when you read comments about it on HN, which again, tend to lack sympathy for their fellow human beings. And again, I apologize.
