I have noticed lately that people have been asking me—because I’m a psychologist—what I think about “the homeless problem.” The question is almost always followed by a sidebar like, “It’s a lot of mental illness stuff, right?”
Depending on who is asking, I’ll sometimes give what I call the simple answer: “Not as much as you’d think.” But sometimes (including yesterday) I’ll offer a fuller and, as this person put it, more nuanced answer. That nuanced answer usually begins with something like, “The occurrence of significant mental illness in the U.S. is about 10%…” I probably say 10% because I like easy math. But since I’m writing something I want to publish on my blog, I’m going to be more granular—and more accurate.
Of course, I used my favorite research assistant, ChatGPT, to gather some of the facts and figures, and for editing, but all of the writing is pure SoulDoc.
According to available data, the occurrence of significant mental illness (SMI) has increased by roughly 3 percentage points over the past 55 years—from about 3.5% in 1970 to roughly 6% in 2025.
Homelessness was not measured nationally until 1984. Prior to that, the issue was often described in terms of “skid row” problems, but no national population was tabulated.
Starting in 1984, a HUD study estimated the homeless population to be between 250,000 and 350,000 nationwide. In 2025, the population of people experiencing homelessness (now more often referred to as “unhoused”) is still only estimated, but it’s around 775,000.
If the lower number from 1984 (250,000) is used that’s an increase of about 525,000 individuals—or roughly 244% growth. That means the relatively small increase in SMI cannot possibly account for the large increase in homelessness.
I intuitively knew this, and maybe you did too, but I didn’t have the figures until a few minutes ago.
Here’s what I told the person who asked me:
Homelessness is not primarily a mental-health problem; it is a political–economic problem. Right now, only a portion of the country’s homeless population has anywhere to go to get off the street. According to that same HUD survey, only about 64% can find a place to sleep off the street. That leaves almost 275,000 people sleeping outside—roughly the same number of people estimated to be homeless in 1984.
With nowhere to go, people do whatever they can to survive. That means the average person is going to see them—either in person or in news and internet coverage.
This is why it appears to be a bigger issue than it actually is; people see it.
What makes this an economic issue is that roughly 42% of U.S. households—about 139 million people—are living below the ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) threshold. That means nearly half the country is living so close to the edge that one missed paycheck or one emergency could push them into homelessness. And in this country there are very few social safety nets available for people who suddenly find themselves without housing.
What makes this a political issue is that those numbers imply something uncomfortable: about half the country lives this close to the edge, and the other half either doesn’t care or is not willing to spend the money to change it.
Think about that for a second.
Half the country does not give a shit about the other half.
That’s the problem—but it’s not the one we talk about, is it?
No. What we talk about is that “this group” or “that group” is here and causing all of our problems, and that we have to “go get em before they destroy everything.
Funding for social support systems has been essentially stagnant since the 1980s, when the problem first began to be addressed. If we set aside the COVID-era spending—which was mostly designed to prevent already-housed people from being evicted because they couldn’t work during the shutdowns (and which, in my opinion, would have been better spent going directly to people instead of setting up programs that wealthier people seemed to benefit from most)—we have not substantially increased spending to match the growth of the problem.
So we have a problem that has grown by roughly 244% over the past 40–50 years, but we are not spending more money to solve it.
Name one problem that gets solved by not funding it—or worse, by cutting funding.
College education is a good example. It used to be essentially free in this country if you went to a public institution like UC Davis (where I went), because they were considered public goods. But in the 1960s, a lot of college students were getting draft deferments (which the government didn’t like) and protesting the war in Vietnam (which the government really didn’t like). This was so unpopular that the Reagan administration—when Reagan was governor of California, not president—changed how colleges received funding, forcing them to raise tuition and making it harder for people to attend.
For those who are curious: Ronald Reagan’s economic adviser Roger A. Freeman famously said in 1970, during a discussion about why higher education institutions should be more selective, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat.” The proletariat is the working class (most of the population reading this page I’d guess). Educating the working class, he argued, makes them harder to control.
So yes, the Republican Party is concerned about public education—but not for the reasons they say.
The example I used with the person who asked me was a car.
Imagine your car needs gas. Your car is no longer functioning—or is in danger of not functioning—because it needs resources. It needs funding, in the form of gasoline.
If you tried to solve this resource problem by telling your car to “pull itself up by its bootstraps,” or to “eat less avocado toast,” or to “drive farther on the gas it already has,” that would not solve the problem, would it?
If you tried to solve the problem by draining the oil—that is, by cutting the funding that is already insufficient—that also would not solve the problem.
You could, I suppose, hitch a horse to your car or get a bunch of people to push it around. That might “work” in a clumsy way, but only if horses or people were free and the’re not free, are they?
Now think about any other issue or institution in the country—health care, education, the VA, roads, farming, manufacturing or anything. Have any of these improved when we cut funding?
No, they have not. And that’s the political issue. To go back to everyone’s favorite president, Ronald Reagan, who famously said, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” He said this because his stated economic plan was to reduce the size of the federal government as well as reduce the amount of spending the remaining and smaller government made and thereby force the market to solve the issues created by, well, the market.
And he wasn’t the only one. Bill Clinton, the last U.S. president to have a balanced budget and a surplus, said in his 1996 State of the Union address, “The era of big government is over.” Mostly I believe because he thought all the revenue being generated by the then new internet industry was never going to end. A lot of investors believed this same thing and both the government and those investors lost a lot of money when the dotcom era came to a screeching holt in 2001.
Of course George W. Bush came along and solved the “problem” of a budget surplus by cutting taxes and issuing rebate checks to families with children. It was wildly popular with higher-income earners—and, let’s be honest, with me. I don’t remember exactly how much the rebate was, but I remember it was a per-child thing, and I have three children. What got left out of the messaging was that the check represented an early income-tax refund and had to be declared. I wonder how many tax returns and family budgets were messed up by that bit of political theater.
To conclude this little tirade—assuming you’re still reading—the issue of homelessness, like most issues in this country, is not a single-cause problem. It is nuanced, multifaceted, and growing much faster than anyone in power seems willing to discuss.
I only mentioned two factors here. Homelessness is also affected by the fact that we haven’t built enough housing in this country to keep up with population growth for decades; that the minimum wage is nowhere near what it should be; that a huge amount of farmland is dedicated to corn and soybeans that cannot be eaten in the form they’re grown (have you ever tried to eat field corn? Shoe leather is probably easier and maybe more nutritious); that health care costs here are the highest in the world; that the Department of Defense gets about 13 cents of every federal dollar and has never been able to fully account for how it is spent; and that only about 60% of the federal budget comes from taxes.
On and on and on and on it goes.
Until we care more about each other—and less about profit and having the biggest stick—we will never solve problems like homelessness.
