I spent a good amount of my youth trying to help the homeless and destitute. While there is a large proportion of mentally ill ( something like 30%), the rest is basically a behavioural set of problems. Some of them got into the situation because of sexual abuse, substance abuse and various situations like that, however, if one managed to live long enough to have experience building businesses and organizations, training people, hiring/firing, sales and the whole ecosystem of behaviours associated with WINNING, the whole thing boils down to this: * These people decided to become losers at some point in time and this behavioural bias became the de-facto set of nerological pathways that dominate their behaviour. for 60%of the people on the street, re-training and rebiasing the mental pathways from loser to winner behaviour is totally doable. Each person can be trained to become a winner to one degree or another. Most of them will not be able to become super performers because that requires a lifetime of training and biasing for the set of neurological pathways to set and become dominant, but they can be gotten off of the street. 20% to 30% are hard cases that probably cannot be helped and in between are people that will fall between the cracks. A couple of caveats: * White people can only help white people. The other human species have unique requirements, they need to be with their people to find solutions. * Only a genetically homogenous civlization can build an ecosystem of values and safety nets to help their people never get on the street in the first place. It isn't perfectly true, but, a multiethnic society cannot every have a cohesive value system because you cannot mix different species of human. That has been my experience.