zlacker

If drugs are strongly intertwined I wonder if an opportunity to voluntarily seperate from familiar drug triggers and sources might provide some balancing to the downsides.

>>ty6853+(OP)
Drugs & alcohol is the majority of why they are homeless from San Francisco to Grand Junction, CO (drove through & saw they have an unofficial homeless park) to Portland to Seattle to Calgary, etc, etc.

>>paul79+p4
No, it isn’t. If that was true you’d see a much stronger correlation between drug and alcohol use and homelessness.

>>lazyas+hr
You do when you subset the homeless population from couch surfers and people living in their car to the people actually finding a wink of sleep under some tarps under a noisy overpass

>>kjkjad+Ix1
Then maybe the easy solution to this whole issue is to just give the homeless free cars.

>>lazyas+hr
"A survey by the United States Conference of Mayors found that 68 percent of cities reported that substance abuse was the largest cause of homelessness for single adults."

https://endhomelessness.org/resource/opioid-abuse-and-homele...

i do not have any idea how to solve housed people turning to drugs/alcohol to try and solve internal emotional pain...maybe more & more education.

>>paul79+6R1
That’s not actually what you want to ask: Drug use is an additional risk factor for becoming homeless, which tells you that the people who are homeless are likely to be drug users - but that really just sorts out who is likely to become homeless, not how many people. If drug use caused homelessness then places with higher substance abuse rates would have higher homelessness rates. But they don’t! The rate of homelessness is driven most clearly by the difference between area income and area housing cost, and does not correlate well to any measures of drug use in the area.

A nice pair of contrasting data points here is WA and West Virginia. Drug usage and addiction, as well as mental health problems, in West Virginia far outstrips Washington - see https://www.kff.org/statedata/mental-health-and-substance-us... However homelessness in Washington is far, far worse than in West Virginia. West Virginia had almost the lowest rate of homelessness in the country.

https://mountainstatespotlight.org/2024/07/16/wv-new-data-ho...

https://247wallst.com/state/how-the-homelessness-problem-in-...

>>kjkjad+Ix1
No you don’t. If 50% of society uses drugs, 5% of society is homeless, and 100% of homeless people uses drugs - then you’d see that all homeless people use drugs, but most drug users are not homeless, so it’s not well correlated at all.