Understanding and Fixing Homelessness - Nations Agenda
   
       

How can you find yourself when you've been cast out?

Understanding and Fixing Homelessness in 2025

Finding Yourself series

One percent of the US population loses itself each year. They are individuals and families who lose a job or face what is, to them, a major life catastrophe, such as a sudden car repair or a major medical expense.

They work, but they don't make enough money to survive these catastrophes. Their sense of who they are as a competent person, one who is able to "fend for themselves" in our world, comes to an end. We need to be prepared to survive.

This "Finding Yourself" series explores the internal, spiritual journey of voluntarily "stripping away the meaningless" to discover what is real and who you are underneath. This article explores the involuntary side of that journey, asking: Are you only your job? Are you a failure when your job no longer needs you? Are the economic realities of today's world who you are?

This raises an equally important question: What is our responsibility to those in this crisis, even when it isn't affecting us directly ... at least not today? This article will explore both issues: the personal, unseen injury of losing one's self, and the practical, public solutions we must build to solve it.

The inhumane problem of homelessness

We turn a blind eye to problems we can’t resolve to preserve our sanity. We have to or we'll feel less human, lacking compassion and goodwill. But sometimes we need to take a look with fresh eyes because there are solutions.

Homelessness is a problem of human suffering, it’s devastating, and part of it is brought on by our economic system. There are three different types of homeless populations:  chronic, transitional, and economic. They may have found some type of shelter, or may be on the street. These include families with children. 

Those chronically homeless, a record high of 152,585 in 2025, are usually those with some type of disability. This number reflects individuals who have been homeless for at least one year. But now contributing factors to this increase include the shortage of affordable housing, the end of eviction moratoriums, and other issues like natural disasters. 

When I lived in L.A., I would buy an extra hamburger and leave it near a park where I knew they stayed. It didn’t cure homelessness but at least it was one thing I could do with the little money I had to help one person for the day. We can all do this, and we can all do much more through organized efforts.

It Can Happen to Anyone or Any Family

Who and How Many—the cold facts according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which conducts an annual Point-in-Time (PIT) count. This is a "snapshot" of everyone experiencing homelessness on a single night in January. Around 3.5 million people in the US experience homelessness each year. This is an insane 1% of our population. 

Sheltered vs. Unsheltered

While 60% of people find shelter in emergency shelters and transitional housing, 40% end up staying in tents, cars, parks, or on the street. Thirty percent are permanently on the streets. 

One solution is, in our area there are several motels that have been converted to shelter homeless people while they find a job. They are mostly families. One meal a day is free and usually provided by local churches. They are given bicycles to get to local work. Or they have cars and can share rides. Once they have established a living wage, they leave. 

What we are increasingly seeing is communities simply preventing them from staying in cars, parks, tents on the street, etc., as if this eliminates the problem. No! It just makes it some other areas problem! L.A. is a special case because housing is unaffordable and even nurses sometimes live in tents. Nursing wages may not be high enough to afford lodging in L.A. There is no cure for landlord greed. But there are cures for lack of affordable housing. 

This tendency in the US to solve problems simply by making problem people go elsewhere is, in my opinion, against the Christianity we believe we embrace. We should be helping people, not chasing them away.

We look at homelessness as an intractable problem because it's hard to solve. The solutions can be controversial so politicians would rather ignore them than embroil themselves in office ending controversies. 

There are workable solutions if we just apply ourselves. It’s the “right thing, compassionate thing, neighborly thing to do.” This article explores why we should help, the causes, and the working solutions. 

Homeless and job insecurity are haveing a profound effect on our society. Do you know that most of Gen. Z has seen the devastation and would prefer to be entrepreneurs and work for themselves in this service economy rather than work for companies. Since the year 2000 they’ve seen the dot com bust, the Great Recession, and the Covid economic devastation. They’ve seen endless people go homeless with their children due to layoffs and company mergers. They’ve seen the middle economic class hollowed out so that now the average age of leaving home is age 27, and the average age of first home ownership is 40. They’ve seen college become unaffordable. 

All of these problems have economic components that vary from Wall Street gambling, to consumer spending impact, to inflation. They understand the workplace isn’t safe. Homelessness is a major component in that thinking and for that alone we need to fix it.

But most of the injury is devastating and unseen by those not affected. Let’s talk about what is really happening to the homeless. 

Why We Should Help—The Unseen Injury

Going homeless has a much deeper, devestating, psychological impact. The psychological toll includes the human cost, the trauma, and the loss of self-worth. When I studied psychology, it was emphasized that losing a job is about equal in its emotional devastation to losing a loved one. 

My college days were during a time when company loyalty to employees was high. But today it’s more common for people to change careers often and for people to realize there is no company loyalty. So the shock isn’t quite as bad, but it still takes a devastating toll. 

Why losing a job is so emotionally devastating

One in five people experience a lower quality of life for up to five years after dismissal. And the grieving process for being let go is still similar to losing a loved one. 

The psychological impact is not a side effect; it's one of the most debilitating and systemic parts of the problem. It's a cascade of trauma that begins long before a person spends a single night on the street.

The Psychological impact of job loss and homelessness

For most people, a job is not just a source of income. It is a core part of their identity, their daily structure, and their social community.

The Initial Wound: The Job Loss

The Trauma of Homelessness: The Individual and Family

This is the psychological "meat" of the problem, and it's built on the loss of safety. According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, if a person's basic safety is not met, they are physiologically incapable of focusing on higher-level goals like "finding a job" or "managing their health."

Impact on the Individual

The state of homelessness puts the human brain into a constant "fight or flight" (sympathetic nervous system) mode. This and accompanying conditions cause:

This state causes conditions that are often mistaken for the reason for homelessness. People don't just "become" depressed or anxious; the experience is a trauma-inducing event, and these conditions are a normal human response to it.

On the Family

For a family, the trauma is often magnified and multiplied.

The Social Devaluation: "Teaching People Their Value"

People teach you your value by how they treat you.

How does our society treat people who are experiencing homelessness?

They are treated as invisible, as a nuisance, as "other," as a "problem" to be "cleaned up," or as something to be feared. Only a person with an extremely mature sense of self and self-value can withstand this kind of treatment. 

This is where psychological theories help us understand what happens:

This is the final, debilitating psychological barrier. It's not just that they lack a house; the system has convinced them that they don't deserve one.

A successful solution doesn't just provide a roof; it must intentionally restore a person's dignity and "teach" them that they have value once again. This is why "Housing First" models, mentioned later, provide a door with a key. This key is a symbol of dignity and control that is very powerful.

This reveals a profound paradox: our sense of self is vulnerable to how others treat us, but it is also built on values that we, and we alone, control.

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. His wife and family were killed. He had lost his profession, family, dignity, control over his life, and just about everything that can be removed. But what they couldn't take away was his freedom to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.

Having researched and worked a lot with meaning and purpose, I'll add to Frankl's statement that others also can't remove our values or our competence. They can try to remove our job, but our identity is who we have become, not just what we are doing. Our values—honesty, compassion, respect, responsibility, love of others, a sense of gratitude, all are integral to that identity. Competence, which is on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, is also part of it. Competence is gained from doing. Others can remove our job, but they cannot remove our competence.

In times when we feel our identity attacked, we need to hold onto these basic things. We aren't our jobs. Losing a job often has more to do with the economy than our skills and is not a reflection of our competence. While our jobs and family help give us meaning, our purpose when we lose a job is to find a new one for ourselves and our family. It's easy to despair, but it's more important to keep a sense of who we really are: our competence, our values, and our attitude.

Defining the Nuances (The "Why")

To solve this, we must stop lumping everyone together. The solutions are different for each group. 

1. Transitional (or Episodic) Homelessness

This is the largest group of people, which is the families who lose a job and are unhoused for a few months.

2. Chronic Homelessness (~30%)

This is the most visible and most vulnerable group. This group accounts for roughly 30% of the total snapshot (PIT count).

3. Economic Homelessness 

This is the fastest-growing group. Los Angeles is typical because of the high cost of housing.

Part 3: What Works (The "How")

Decades of research have shown us what works.

The Overarching Philosophy: "Housing First"

This is the single most important, evidence-based model.

This model works because it recognizes that housing is a healthcare platform. You can't manage medication, attend therapy, or show up for a job interview when you're focused on surviving the night. It's amazing (not) what treating people humanely can achieve.

The Solutions (Matching the Problem)

You must match the solution to the population.

1. Solution for Chronic Homelessness: Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH)

2. Solution for Transitional Homelessness: Rapid Re-Housing (RRH)

3. Solution for Economic Homelessness: Prevention & Supply

Conclusion

There are effective solutions, so why throw money away fighting problems caused by homelessness when we can end the problem by taking a more compassionate route? Why put people through the inhumane treatment of homelessness causing them and their families to be debilitated for years?

Being cast out is a hazard of our economic system. I've found, as have others, that most people want to do a good job and they do.

Losing a job isn't something we should take personally. We don't "find ourselves" in a job loss. Rather, we find a weakness—not in us, but in an economic system that treats people inhumanely. The greatest tragedy is when we allow this systemic failure to paint us in a negative light.

We are more than our jobs. We're human beings and deserving of better treatment.

Something to think about: We should build sports stadiums that cost a billion dollars even though their economic benefit is dubious. But these are often built in areas where poverty and homelessness reign and the public finds that parking their cars near a sports stadium may result in a break in. This illustrates the problems we have and ignore. We should focus more money on ending homelessness. It will help civic pride just as much or even more than a sports stadium. 

Helping those in need and active community engagement generally create a more lasting, deep, and broadly shared sense of civic pride than a professional sports stadium alone, as told in the article How to Fortify Healthy Civic Culture.