One of the most damaging claims in the homelessness debate is that nobody chooses to live on the streets. We hear it from politicians, academics, journalists, nonprofit executives, and advocates: Nobody chooses homelessness. It sounds compassionate. It sounds logical. Why would anyone voluntarily sleep under a bridge, in a tent, or on a sidewalk when housing might be available? After nearly thirty years
working in social services, including years doing homeless outreach, and after interviewing more than 10,000 homeless people across the United States, I can tell you the reality is far more complicated. Some people absolutely do choose to live outside.
That does not mean everyone does. Housing costs, poverty, domestic violence, disability, trauma, mental illness, eviction, and addiction all play major roles in homelessness. But reducing millions of complicated human beings to one explanation they simply lack housing is dangerously simplistic. Based on my own outreach work and interviews, I believe a significant share of chronically homeless people either
actively choose outdoor living or repeatedly reject opportunities to move indoors. In the populations I encounter most often, my field estimate has been roughly half. That is not a national statistical estimate. It is what I have repeatedly seen on the street. Pretending this group does not exist makes effective policy almost impossible.
Housing First became increasingly dominant in federal homelessness policy during the Obama administration, although the model began years earlier. Its basic premise is simple: move people into permanent housing as quickly as possible without first requiring sobriety, employment, psychiatric treatment, or completion of a transitional program. The theory has obvious appeal. It is difficult to stay sober, maintain psychiatric medication, find work, or recover from trauma while sleeping outside. Housing can provide stability. But one important distinction is often lost: housing can end someone’s literal homelessness without fixing the problems that caused or sustained it.
For someone priced out of an apartment, housing assistance may be exactly what they need. For someone experiencing severe fentanyl addiction, untreated psychosis, debilitating trauma, or profound instability, an apartment alone may do little to address the underlying crisis. And for someone who simply does not want to live indoors, building another apartment does not answer the most important question: Why won’t they accept it?
I have heard variations of the same phrase countless times: “The streets are addictive.” Some people describe street life almost like another world. There is constant movement, danger, friendship, drugs, conflict, survival, and very little conventional responsibility. After years outside, normal indoor life can feel foreign. Some do not want leases, bills, appointments, neighbors, or rules. Some refuse to leave partners, pets, possessions, or street communities behind. Some fear losing access to drugs. Some have simply lived outside so long that survival mode feels normal.
One man I knew, Zach, illustrated this better than almost anyone. I first met him during a terrible winter storm. Over the years, I repeatedly encouraged him to come inside. At first he told me he liked living on the streets. Eventually he told me he loved it and had no intention of changing. I kept trying. He wouldn’t. Tragically, Zach later died from an overdose. I had seen him only days earlier, and he told me he was happier than he had ever been. His death still bothers me because it illustrates the gap between what outsiders assume someone should want and what that person may actually choose. Calling every homeless person an unwilling victim of circumstance may sound compassionate, but sometimes it prevents us from confronting the behavior that is killing them.
In 2022, Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern published Homelessness Is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns. Their argument has been influential: cities with expensive and constrained housing markets tend to experience higher rates of homelessness, and factors such as addiction or poverty
alone cannot explain why homelessness varies so dramatically from one city to another. That is an argument worth taking seriously. But there is an enormous difference between explaining why one city has more homelessness than another and explaining why a particular person remains homeless for five, ten, or twenty years.
Population-level statistics and individual behavior are not the same thing. Housing costs may help explain why one metropolitan area has more homelessness than another. They do not necessarily explain why the person sitting in front of me refuses a shelter bed, declines treatment, leaves supportive housing, or tells me directly that he prefers sleeping outside. You can study rents, vacancy rates, housing construction, and poverty and uncover meaningful patterns. But eventually someone has to walk into the camp and ask: “If I can get you inside, will you go?”
For years, one of my greatest challenges as an outreach worker was not finding possible housing opportunities. It was persuading people to accept them. That reality rarely fits neatly into academic models.
The larger mistake is believing one homelessness model should apply to everyone. A recovery-oriented approach assumes homelessness is often intertwined with addiction, untreated mental illness, trauma, unemployment, behavioral problems, and loss of basic life skills. Housing First begins with housing and then offers treatment, counseling, psychiatric care, addiction services, and case management, generally on a voluntary basis. Both approaches contain truth. Someone priced out of housing may
need housing. Someone addicted to fentanyl may need treatment. Someone experiencing uncontrolled psychosis may need intensive psychiatric care. Someone fleeing abuse may need safety. Someone unable to care for themselves may need long-term supported care. Someone repeatedly refusing every reasonable offer may need persistent outreach, expectations, incentives, and sometimes consequences.
There is also a basic psychological mistake behind the claim that nobody chooses homelessness. We tend to assume other people share our values and preferences: I would never choose to sleep under a bridge, therefore nobody would. But human beings make decisions every day that outsiders find irrational. People return to drugs after surviving overdoses. People refuse medical treatment. People remain in destructive situations. People make choices that hurt themselves. Someone may not have chosen the circumstances that first made them homeless while later making decisions that keep them there. Those are different questions. Recognizing that distinction is not blaming homeless people. It is recognizing their agency.
That is why I am concerned when leaders in the homelessness industry speak in absolutes. In a recent episode of Unsheltered Conversations, Amy Schwabenlender, the CEO of a homeless nonprofit in Phoenix, joined Scott Larson, CEO of HomeAid America, and stated that nobody wants to be homeless and nobody chooses homelessness. The problem is not that everyone chooses homelessness; they clearly do not. The problem is the word nobody. How can anyone confidently declare that nobody chooses homelessness when homeless people themselves sometimes say they do?
The same problem appears in public messaging from homelessness organizations. A Seattle YWCA webpage cites a Count Us In survey saying 98 percent of respondents would accept safe, affordable housing if it were available. But that question is not the same as asking whether someone currently chooses to live outdoors or whether they would accept the specific shelter, treatment program, or housing placement being offered to them. A person can truthfully say, “Yes, I would accept safe, affordable housing,” while rejecting a shelter, supportive-housing placement, sober program, apartment in a particular location, or housing with rules they do not want to follow. Those answers are not necessarily contradictory. They show why homelessness cannot be reduced to a simplistic yes-or-no question.
I understand why advocates resist discussing choice. They fear it will be used as an excuse to cut services or abandon people. I reject that conclusion. If someone with schizophrenia chooses to sleep outside during a snowstorm, society should not simply walk away. If someone addicted to fentanyl repeatedly refuses treatment, we should not stop trying. If someone has lived outside so long that they cannot imagine living differently, that does not mean we give up. It means the intervention has to match the actual reason that person remains homeless. That may require housing, treatment, psychiatric care, recovery housing, employment, persistent outreach, or some combination of them. And in some cases, it may require society to establish limits on what behavior it is willing to tolerate in public spaces.
For too long we have treated homeless people as though they have no agency at all. We talk endlessly about systems, budgets, housing markets, and programs while sometimes ignoring the human being standing directly in front of us. People make choices. Sometimes terrible ones. Sometimes irrational ones. Sometimes choices shaped by trauma, addiction, mental illness, fear, or years of living outside. And sometimes they make those choices because they genuinely prefer a lifestyle the rest of us cannot imagine wanting.
Until we are willing to acknowledge that, we will keep designing homeless policy for the person we imagine exists instead of the person actually sleeping on the sidewalk. You cannot solve homelessness if you refuse to tell the truth about why some people remain homeless.
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