Soubirous Housing/Homelessness Q1
Some believe homelessness is someone living without a home. Statistically, most living on our streets are there because they are drug or alcohol addicted. Their chronic addictive lifestyle keeps them from a job, a house or even adequately taking care of themselves. Until the addicted homeless person seeks help will be unable to maintain any form of normalcy, let alone be responsible for a house. Affordable housing is an inventory of lower cost housing available to those at a point of being “priced out” of the current mainstream housing market for a given location. These people have the ability to pay for housing, provided the costs match their ability to pay. This of course is relative to their personal spending habits, lifestyle “wants” and other monetary obligations.
Housing First is a program that provides subsidized (taxpayer) funded housing for homeless people. The Housing First plan assumes that if a chronic homeless person, usually drug/alcohol addicted, were to be offered free housing with “no strings” attached, that person would get off the street and would eventually be willing to accept offered recovery services. This idea may have evolved to cope with court decisions resulting from lawsuits claiming homeless persons cannot be forced off the streets if housing is not available to them. Some believe addicted people living on our streets became that way because of job, housing or car loss, and once forced onto the street, took up drug or alcohol use to cope. Those who believe this need to spend time talking with chronic drunk/drugged homeless people. They will quickly learn there is a serious underlying problem that started the person down the destructive path of self-medicating with drug or alcohol. From there, the affected person was unable to maintain a productive lifestyle.
