In my twenties, I worked nights as a security guard at a men’s homeless shelter in Pittsburgh. The job was simple: search bags for contraband, screen incoming residents for intoxication, and, if violence broke out, intervene to keep the social workers safe but call the police. The job was largely uneventful, aside from a scabies infection I contracted from sleeping on one of the mats reserved for the men, a break-in of my car, and the death threats I’d receive on the rare occasions when I had to defend staff from a resident.
The experience didn’t alter my view of human nature—I grew up in the projects, where desperation and violence were common. But it did challenge many popular conceptions about homelessness.
The widely held view of homeless men is that they are veterans or severely mentally ill (or both). That was not what I saw. Over six months, I watched roughly 500 men go through the intake interview before being admitted. Only a few were mentally ill, and even fewer had served in the military. The overwhelming majority were ex-convicts.
National statistics bear this out. While 60 to 70 percent of the homeless have some diagnosable mental health condition, the proportion suffering from severe mental illness—truly disabling conditions like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder—is closer to 15 percent. And while the image of the homeless man as a broken soldier persists, veterans make up just 5 percent of America’s homeless population.
The proportion of the homeless who were previously incarcerated, however, is much larger. Recent studies estimate that up to 47 percent of shelter residents are former inmates. Previously incarcerated people are about ten times likelier to be homeless than the general public. These are people—typically men—whose prison records, broken family ties, and lack of employable skills have locked them out of housing and work long after their sentences ended.
Many of the men at the shelter fit this description. They had served long prison sentences and returned to find their families had moved on and their felony records now barred them from steady work or stable housing. With no support system, the shelter became their only refuge—one that increased their odds of returning to crime and, eventually, prison.
But not everyone was a former inmate. Other residents had become homeless because of financial fragility. I saw men who had been evicted just weeks after losing a job, who had no savings and were forced onto the streets. Their situation may sound extreme, but for some Americans a car repair, a medical bill, or a missed rent payment is enough to tip them into homelessness.
Still others used the shelter strategically. Two long-haul truckers chose it rather than paying for an apartment that they would rarely occupy. And not every story ended in despair: I met two 18-year-olds from rural West Virginia who arrived with nothing, stayed for three weeks, and left with jobs, community college enrollment, and an apartment.
The lesson is not that homelessness is simple, but that it is not what the public imagines. The men I encountered were less often casualties of war or madness than of failed reentry, economic fragility, and fractured families.
Homelessness will not be solved by adding more cots or subsidies. Policy reform can help, but the real solutions are ultimately personal: family stability, financial discipline, and responsibility. When those collapse, the shelter is not a way station—it is the last stop.
Ed Latimore
