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Comment by leonroy | Hacker News Reader

Years ago I read about an excellent effort in Italy to reduce the homeless problems there. They examined what made folk homeless and what kept them there.

A big focus was on re-employment and having a fixed postal address. Those who lost their jobs and then their homes with no fixed address were unable to obtain another job and hence fell into a spiral of chronic homelessness.

One of the big takeaways from Italian policy was to firstly provide temporary housing. The second was to create a 'virtual' postal address for anyone affected by homelessness. This apparently helped a lot in enabling people to climb out of homelessness and back onto the career ladder.

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How much does mental illness play into homelessness in Italy? Seems to be a common issues here in the US.

From what I've seen, this feeling might be due to the fact that mentally ill people are overly "visible" because they make way more "disturbance" if I may say.

The seriously mentally ill are definitely a large proportion of homeless people. This is the National Coalition for the Homeless writing:

"According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 20 to 25% of the homeless population in the United States suffers from some form of severe mental illness. In comparison, only 6% of Americans are severely mentally ill"

A HUD Report has 26% of people in shelters having a serious mental illness [2] (Search "serious mental illness").

When I researched this a few years ago I regularly saw 200,000 people as the number with serious mental illness who were homeless and about an equal amount in prison (with people regularly cycling in and out of prison because of their mental illness).

[1] http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/Mental_Illness.pd... [2] https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/2010Homeles...

Another study found that a large number of homeless people have suffered a traumatic brain injury at some point in their lives:

"Researchers at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto surveyed 111 homeless men and found that 45 percent of them had suffered at least one traumatic brain injury (or TBI) in their life, and 87 percent of those injuries occurred before they were homeless. Among the general population, TBI rates are estimated to be 12 percent, according to a 2013 meta-analysis of studies from developed countries."

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/5227637

It also shows how bureaucracy intersects public and private spaces and how powerful it is at determining economic relationships.

I'm originally from Italy, and I now live and work in SF.

I am curious about what you are mentioning: any way for you to retrieve more info so I can look it up?

I read about it in a UK magazine called 'The Big Issue' probably about a decade ago. A quick Google turns up nothing unfortunately but IIRC the policy was practised in just a single region, not nationwide so perhaps they discontinued the practise (or I could have misrememebered the country the policy was implemented in!).

I always felt P.O. boxes should be free for those that are homeless. If said box goes unused it is put back into general use.

Verification could be supplied by the county.

> I always felt P.O. boxes should be free for those that are homeless. If said box goes unused it is put back into general use.

They (basically) already are. USPS provides free mailing service for people who don't have a fixed address, and you can use that as your street address (unlike PO boxes, which are invalid for use in circumstances that require a street address). They'll hold onto any mail addressed to you for 30 days.

Also, many USPS locations allow you to use the address of the building and to append the P.O. Box similar to an apartment number.

> unlike PO boxes, which are invalid for use in circumstances that require a street address

If you, heaven forbid, ever become homeless:

If anybody ever insists that you provide a 'real address', lie. List your PO address as "123 Street Name, Apt #PONUMBER".

Nobody will ever be assed enough to check that it's not a real apartment. Nobody.

I believe you're referring to general delivery, known in the rest of the world as poste restante. (Fixed addresses are a fairly modern invention; poste restante used to be the norm before individually delivered mail became the norm.)

What's really rude is you can't get a USPS PO BOX without a permanent address. I got the run around with a USPS employee about why I couldn't provide that information. I told them I was essentially transient (coming back from a long trip, no family), and they told me, "tough".

There are private PO boxes you can rent out, instead.

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