The Reality of Homelessness, How People Might Lose Their Homes
Homelessness can happen for many reasons, including poverty, eviction, family breakdown, incarceration, and displacement. This blog explores the different pathways into homelessness while challenging common misconceptions about why people lose their homes.
Katherine Al-Zanoun
9/18/20266 min read
Disclaimer: There are a multitude of ways that one might become unhoused and this article only outlines a few causes. These reasons for homelessness do not apply to everyone, only the most statistically common factors. Homelessness can happen to anyone for any reason.
When people think about homelessness, they often imagine a single story: someone loses their job, cannot afford rent, and ends up on the street. But homelessness rarely has one simple cause. People can become unhoused for many different reasons, and often, it happens after a series of circumstances that are completely outside of their control.
Homelessness can happen to people leaving the foster care system, people being released from jail or the hospital, survivors fleeing domestic violence, families facing eviction, or people whose homes have been destroyed by climate-related disasters. Poverty can make each of these situations even harder to escape.
Understanding these pathways is important because it challenges the idea that homelessness is something that only happens to certain kinds of people. In reality, losing a home can happen much more easily than many of us realize. The following reasons have been outlined with the help of ‘Street Dr. Jill’ on Instagram (1).
Aging Out of Foster Care
For children in the foster care system, turning 18 or 19 can mean more than simply becoming an adult. It can mean losing the support system that they have depended on for years.
When young people age out of foster care, they may no longer have a stable home to return to or family members who can provide financial and emotional support. At the same time, they are expected to navigate adulthood: finding work, paying rent, continuing their education, and managing their finances.
For someone who has already experienced instability throughout childhood, being expected to become completely independent overnight can be overwhelming. Without adequate transitional support, some young people can end up without anywhere to live.
This is not simply a story about a young person "failing" to become independent. It raises a larger question about what happens when the systems responsible for protecting children stop supporting them the moment they become adults.
Jail and the Difficulty of Coming Home
Incarceration can also be connected to homelessness in ways that are easy to overlook.
Some people may already be experiencing homelessness before they enter jail. Others may lose their housing while incarcerated. They may lose a job, fall behind on rent, lose their belongings, or become unable to return to the place where they previously lived.
When someone is released, finding housing can be extremely difficult, particularly when someone has a criminal record. Without a stable place to live, it becomes harder to find employment, access services, maintain relationships, and meet other requirements that can be part of their efforts to reintegrate into society.
This can create a cycle: a person leaves jail without stable housing, struggles to rebuild their life, and faces barriers that make it even harder to secure a home.
Being Discharged From the Hospital
A hospital is supposed to be a place where people receive care and recover. But for someone who does not have stable housing, being discharged can create another serious problem: where do they go afterward?
A person may leave the hospital with medical needs that have not disappeared simply because their hospital stay has ended. Yet hospitals do not necessarily have to ensure that every patient has a permanent home to return to.
Someone could be discharged to a shelter, an encampment, or another unstable living situation. For a person who is still recovering, this can make their health and overall circumstances even more difficult. It is difficult to recover from an illness or injury when you do not have a safe place to sleep, access to basic necessities, or somewhere to properly store medication and personal belongings.
Relationship Breakups and Fleeing Domestic Violence
A home is not always a safe place.
For people experiencing domestic violence, leaving can be a matter of survival. But escaping an abusive relationship can also mean leaving behind the home, income, possessions, and financial stability that a person depended on.
Someone may have nowhere else to go. They may not have enough money for a new apartment, or they may have to leave quickly without being able to make long-term arrangements.
Even relationships that do not involve violence can lead to housing instability after a breakup. Two people who once shared the cost of rent may suddenly have to afford housing on their own. If one person cannot afford the full rent, losing the shared home can become a real possibility.
Poverty
At the center of many of these situations is poverty.
Housing costs continue to take up a significant portion of many people's incomes, leaving little room for unexpected expenses. When someone is living paycheque to paycheque, a relatively small disruption can have major consequences. The difference between having a home and not having one can sometimes be one missed paycheque, one unexpected bill, or one emergency.
And once someone becomes unhoused, poverty can become even harder to escape. Without an address, reliable transportation, stable internet, a safe place to sleep, or somewhere to keep personal belongings, finding and maintaining employment can become more difficult.
Homelessness can therefore create the very conditions that make it harder for someone to get out of poverty.
Climate Change Is Creating New Housing Displacement
Climate change is another factor that is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
Floods, wildfires, storms, and other climate-related disasters can destroy homes and force people to leave their communities. While some people are able to rebuild or find another place to live, others do not have the financial resources to do so.
Losing a home in a disaster does not automatically mean that someone has the resources to replace it. For people who were already struggling financially, the loss of a home, employment, possessions, and community support can make recovery particularly difficult. Climate disasters can therefore push vulnerable people deeper into poverty and housing insecurity.
As climate-related disasters become more frequent and severe, the connection between environmental crises and homelessness is likely to become even more important.
Homelessness and Drug Use Are Not the Same Thing
One of the most common assumptions about homelessness is that people become homeless because they use drugs.
This is an important misconception to challenge.
Drug use and homelessness can exist together, but that does not mean that drug use is always the reason someone became homeless.
For some unhoused people, substance use can instead become a way of coping with the conditions they are living in. Living without a safe place to sleep, being exposed to extreme weather, experiencing violence, dealing with constant uncertainty, and facing social isolation can take an enormous toll on a person.
This does not mean that substance use is harmless or that addiction does not require support. It means that we need to understand the circumstances surrounding it instead of treating it as a simple explanation for why someone is homeless. Also, we as a society should offer more resources to ensure that if a person were to use, they would be able to do so safely.
The Human Cost of Homelessness
The consequences of homelessness extend far beyond not having a place to sleep.
People experiencing homelessness face increased exposure to extreme weather, violence, illness, hunger, and unsafe living conditions. They can also face significant barriers when trying to access healthcare, employment, identification, transportation, and permanent housing.
In British Columbia, Chief Coroner Dr. Jatinder Baidwan has reported rising deaths among people experiencing homelessness, with the death rate increasing for five consecutive years. This should force us to ask a difficult question: what happens when people are left without the support they need for long enough (2)?
Why This Matters to Everyone?
It can be easy to look at homelessness from a distance and assume that it could never happen to us. That distance can make it easier to ignore.
Many people who are housed have never had to consider what would happen if they suddenly lost their income, could no longer afford their rent, had to escape an unsafe relationship, were released from the hospital without somewhere stable to go, or lost their home in a disaster.
The reality is that housing insecurity exists on a spectrum. A person does not necessarily go directly from having a stable home to sleeping on the street. There can be months of struggling to pay rent, couch hopping between friends and family, moving between temporary places, living in unsafe conditions, or relying on shelters before someone becomes visibly unhoused.
This is why homelessness should not be treated as someone else's problem.
When governments, communities, and individuals fail to provide adequate support, people can fall through the gaps between systems. Once they do, getting back into stable housing can become much harder.
Homelessness is not an inevitable part of society. It is a problem that can be addressed through housing, social services, healthcare, prevention, and meaningful support for people before they reach a crisis point.
Most importantly, it requires empathy.
People experiencing homelessness are not statistics, stereotypes, or cautionary tales. They are people who have experienced circumstances that many of us hope we will never have to face.
The question should not be, "What did they do to become homeless?".
It should be, "What happened to them, and what can we do to make sure they are not left there?"