While I like the idea of a Basic Income, and have actually come to support it heartily, (if you don't, take a look at some of the economists who have, and why they do) you are being naive to think that "self-inflicted cases" are somehow anything other than a vast majority.
Almost all homeless have mental illness and/or substance abuse issues. That's why they are unable to act on one of the endless options that exist at the moment that can get them even the most basic of accommodations and employment. The people your solution truly helps are the non-homeless poor. To be honest this is a much easier issue to address given some willpower. Then again, as a Canadian, I find basic medical care to be a no brainier as well, which seems to be something the US struggles with quite a bit.
You can't simply suggest that addiction/mental illness is "self inflicted", give them $10K and say "You're on your own, bud." That isn't solving anything. Solving homeless is the same as solving mental illness and/or addiction, and those are massively hard problems to address.
41% of the population will experience a diagnosable mental illness, and 26% have one in any given year. Clearly there is more to the issue than just blaming mental illness or there would be far more homeless people than there are right now.
Discovering what support structures work and making those more easily accessible seems like a great place for a disruptive start up, except that health care is so incredibly messed up no one wants to touch it with a ten foot poll.
You need to be careful when talking about the demographics of mental illness. Much mental illness leaves you still able to function and contribute socially to a fair degree.
> You can't simply suggest that addiction/mental illness is "self inflicted", give them $10K and say "You're on your own, bud." That isn't solving anything. Solving homeless is the same as solving mental illness and/or addiction, and those are massively hard problems to address.
Not true. You know how you can solve homelessness without solving mental illness and addiction EVEN IF (let's accept for the sake of argument) most homelessness is caused by mental illness and addiction?
It's really quite simple. You just give housing to mentally ill and addicted people. They are still mentally ill and/or addicted, but now they're not homeless, because you gave them a place to live.
correction: Nearly all chronic homeless have mental illness and/or substance abuse; the chronic homeless make up only about 1/8 of the homeless at any given time.
Unless you have a citation that says otherwise, anything I've seen seems to suggest that there is little difference in the high percentage of mentally ill/substance abusers between chronic/non-chronic homeless.
Just about every article I can find talking about substance abuse and mental illness in homeless specifically focuses on the chronic homeless so I inferred from that. A bit of googling turned up this non-scholarly article though that compares the overall rate of mental illness among homeless to that of the chronically homeless and found ~3x difference
Almost all homeless have mental illness and/or substance abuse issues. That's why they are unable to act on one of the endless options that exist at the moment that can get them even the most basic of accommodations and employment. The people your solution truly helps are the non-homeless poor. To be honest this is a much easier issue to address given some willpower. Then again, as a Canadian, I find basic medical care to be a no brainier as well, which seems to be something the US struggles with quite a bit.
You can't simply suggest that addiction/mental illness is "self inflicted", give them $10K and say "You're on your own, bud." That isn't solving anything. Solving homeless is the same as solving mental illness and/or addiction, and those are massively hard problems to address.