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Comment by 9wzYQbTYsAIc | Hacker News Reader

So your argument is that people become homeless because either they take too much medicine or too little medicine?

If you define taking pain pills to get high as “taking too much medicine” and then making bad decisions while withdrawing is “too little medicine”, then yes that is a very significant minority of people ending up homeless.

But it doesn’t account for people addicted to meth, or alcohol, or people suffering from schizophrenia, etc.

By too little medicine I mean to imply people with untreated or mistreated mental illness.

So, taking what I stated (with the clarification of “too little”) as your argument, what exactly are you proposing as avenues towards home-havingness?

I have not gone so far to make a proposal, which would depend on the hypothetical resources available to execute a plan.

I am just providing context for how to think about the problem in a way that (much) more closely maps to reality than low-earners getting displaced due to gentrification and wage stagnation.

I take issue with the fact that your map of reality is precisely what causes people to slip through the cracks into homelessness. Thinking about the issue as a sickness is actually just an avoidance of the problem. You are trying to reduce and abstract it away to the domain of medicine rather than to address it head on as a complex system of systems.

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