A lot of homeless are not drug addicts, but that is a convenient label. Truth is that many hard workers know deep down they may wake up one day looking for a bush to sleep.
I staved off homelessness, into success, by being incredibly clever. The average family though is less than intelligent.
Some older folks just run out of jobs & money. Two years later, no job, is hard to recover from. Society is set up to favor bankrupting you.
And that makes people uncomfortable. So we call them vagrants.
I agree with your assessment. One major factor is socialism has made average life in the U.S. exponentially more expensive recently by stealthily devaluing the dollar and placing an increased burden on the productive middle class. Add in undermining wages by importing millions of 3rd world low wage workers and visualize the result.
If the average family is less intelligent that you are, then why is the average family NOT homeless?
Some older folks just run out of jobs & money.
Absolutely true. Those who run out of money have a couple of reasons. One is large unforeseen medical bills - one of the main sources of bankruptcy in the US - obviously NOT their fault unless you say well they should have carried more insurance. The other for a lot of older people is either poor financial planning or absolutely no financial planning at all. People finance lifestyles they can not afford with debt (a second large reason for bankruptcy) or they put all of their earnings into lifestyle and don't save anything relying on social security.
Social security pays a max of about $3600/month which isn't enough to do much on especially with the ever increasing property taxes that most local governments charge you just for living in their jurisdiction - for example when I bought my house in 1978 my property tax was $620/year. It is now $4400/year. If it were just due to inflation it would be $2282. Fidelity says that the largest expense that you will incur in your retirement years ISN'T medical, but rather housing.
Living below your means is something that very few do anymore. Talked to a friend who uses a financial planner. He said that the planner told him that most of the couples who came to him in their late 50's and wanted to retire in the next few years had less than $60,000 in the bank. He had the sad task of telling them that they couldn't afford to retire.