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The academic journal literature on homelessness is vast, but during the past decade oversimplification has ruled. The Obama administration made “Housing First!” the official U.S. policy, with homeless people to be given their own apartments. Programs that emphasized “Clean and Sober first” became ineligible for federal aid, and mental health issues became secondary. Typical academic analyses of homelessness found — surprise! — that “Housing First!” is great. A lot of scholarly research up to 2009, though, revealed homelessness complexities. Here are four examples:  Key insights:Homeless adults who are alcoholics have “unusually high levels of mental health symptomatology…. Adults with alcohol problems are so debilitated that they readily become homeless (as compared to being domiciled under very trying circumstances) when also Read More ›

Julius Caesar began his Commentaries on the Gallic Wars with a sentence that Latin students once memorized: Translated literally into English, it reads, “Gaul is a whole divided into three parts.” When delving into homelessness causes, it’s useful to keep in mind that homelessness is both a whole and a hole into which people fall for three main reasons: mental illness, alcoholism/addiction, and housing costs. Many journalists emphasize housing costs, partly because many live in expensive coastal cities. Off the coast, with the exception of a few cities like Austin, it’s different. As I learned in Flint and Pontiac, Michigan — columns to come — apartment cost is not a big factor in many cities that have lost population in Read More ›