I've posted this before; I really need to bookmark it.
The media uses statistics to lie about homelessness. There are different classes of homelessness, and they're virtually unrelated. For example, when I got my first job out of college, I slept on a friend's couch until my first paycheck came in so I could go rent a place myself. For those three weeks, I was, by federal definitions, "homeless." This is called "transitional homelessness," and it's what most "homelessness" in America is.
An itinerant worker who lives in a place for 3 months at a crack before going to the next farm/ranch/oil field/whatever is "episodically homeless." This also covers morons who keep getting evicted from places because they miss rent payments or get the cops called on them.
Then you have "chronically sheltered homeless," which are people who are homeless, but residing at a homeless shelter (usually). These people are often ex-cons, but they usually get out of this situation after 1-2 years. An important thing about them is they aren't addicts, because shelters don't allow drugs in the building.
The "unsheltered homeless" are vagrants living under bridges, sleeping on grates, etc. These people are nearly all addicts because, as I mentioned, shelters don't let you in with drugs and booze. They can't get Section 8 housing, either, because if you use your Section 8 residence to deal drugs (drug use is tolerated) or engage in prostitution, you lose access to the program. These are the worst of the worst degenerates, unfixable zombies whose lives are completely over in all but name because their nervous systems have been fried by drugs and mental illness.
The latter group is tiny compared to the first three groups. The reason the word "homeless" is used for all of them is because homeless advocates know that the average person thinks only of vagrants when you say "the homeless," and then they can use deceptive statistics like, "87% of homeless persons don't use drugs" or "92% of homeless persons are only temporarily in that state" so that you'll think that filthy wino under the bridge is just a few gibs away from a steady job and an apartment.
It's nothing more than a verbal bait-and-switch. They gather statistics based mainly on people like my recent-graduate self sleeping on a friend's couch and trick you into thinking those apply to disgusting, criminal addicts by using rhetorical sleight of hand.
TL; DR - the homeless, I mean uh, "chronically unsheltered unhoused persons," are garbage.
