Yet a study that involved giving homeless people money without strings attached showed that most spent it on things to improve their future, like buying a used car, paying off debt, pursuing education, starting a business and getting a home. There were no adverse outcomes for any of the participants.
But still our society will judge the homeless and make out they’re all feckless addicts who can’t be trusted with help.
Besides the general class bias, a lot of this stems from people not understanding how invisible homelessness is. People see the homeless as just the dirty, disheveled ones muttering to themselves incoherently on street corners where it’s easy to attribute it to being a tweaker.
But a lot of homeless people don’t outwardly look homeless. A lot of them even have jobs, they present as “normal” and find ways to obscure their housing insecurity.
I had a full time job the entire time I was couch hopping. But in 2008, there was alot of uncertainty about keeping that job. Getting treated differently by police when they saw the very large back pack on my back was definitely an eye opener.