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Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl
Untrue, at least in the USA. While many homeless do suffer from disabilities and/or mental illness, they usually receive assistance when they enter jail for the first time, at least in the larger municipalities, so they usually transition to a more stable circumstance. In the USA, the majority of the homeless do not suffer from crippling disabilities and/or mental illness. They are either individuals who are the working homeless, families who are homeless, veterans, or unaccompanied youths.
In fact, the chronic homeless only make up a sixth of the homeless population, with the vast majority of the homeless just being people who temporarily ran out of luck. In a dystopian cyberpunk setting, I would imagine that the temporary homeless would be even more common compared to the chronic homeless, as automation would drive people out of work and society would not care.
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My experience with the homeless does include several strong experiences in a developing country where I lived for a year, so that may be coloring things.
So doing some digging, it looks like your statement about chronic vs. non-chronic homelessness is correct. But its also a bit misleading, because the chronically homeless consume a lot more resources and are a lot more difficult to help. In canada at least, the chronically homeless consume over half of the resources for helping the homeless despite being less than 10% of the homeless population. They are also more visible. A quarter to a third of them suffer from mental illness, and many others are addicted to substances, or have never had a stable home.
Your statement that the majority of homeless people don't have mental illness is absolutely correct. I should have referred explicitly to the chronically homeless, it appears, and I emphasize that "many" does not mean "most". My (adjusted) statement is many (but not most) of chronically homeless have mental illness, and form a visible population that could be blended into with minimum cultural knowledge.