06/02/2026
Words by Ryan Dowd.
Gary did not become homeless all at once.
First, he got a divorce.
Paying for an apartment by himself was expensive, but Gary managed to squeak by each month.
Until his car broke down and he could not afford to fix it.
Unable to get to work reliably, he got fired.
Without a job, Gary got evicted.
Afraid to stay at a shelter, Gary tried to find places outside to sleep at night. It was summer, so he wouldn’t freeze, at least.
One night Gary got jumped by a couple of guys. In the melee, he got hit in the head with a baseball bat. Lying unconscious, his attackers rifled through his pockets and found nothing worth taking.
Gary woke up in a hospital bed with blurry vision, the worst headache of his life and a few stitches.
Gary also had something that made all of his prior problems look small: a traumatic brain injury.
That injury changed what Gary could do. A hit to the frontal lobe can make memory, judgment, impulse control and social filters much harder. Gary started saying things he never would have said before (“disinhibition”) because he didn’t know they were offensive. He also struggled remembering anything but the simplest instructions.
Those two things made steady work impossible.
Gary has not been able to hold down a job for more than a few days since his injury.
Gary will never get back on his feet again without intensive support… EVER.
Homelessness has Patterns
Homelessness has many patterns that shape it.
One is what I’ll call the “Domino Effect.”
The basic idea is simple: One bad thing does not guarantee the next bad thing, but it does increase the odds.
Most people who get a divorce will not end up homeless, but it increases the risk.
Studies have shown that it is one of the leading drivers of homelessness.
Most people who become homeless will not take a baseball bat to the head, but it makes it more likely.
When someone becomes homeless the risk of violence against them is increased by a factor of 9,000. (No, you’re not reading that wrong).
Not surprisingly, 53% of individuals who have been homeless for over a year have a traumatic brain injury. (No, you’re not reading that wrong either.)
The Domino Effect takes people who could have been helped cheaply and turns their lives into something much more harder, much more expensive, to repair.
A few hundred dollars would have fixed Gary’s car.
Now he will either be homeless or need a fully subsidized apartment for the rest of his life.
So, what do we do?
There a few lessons in here:
1) Small problems ignored early, cause big problems later.
One-by-one, the people living on your streets are becoming permanently unemployable if your community doesn’t have adequate shelter and services.
2) Once a person reaches a certain point, there is no coming back.
Someone with a bad enough brain injury is unemployable. Calling them lazy and threatening to take away their subsidized housing if they don’t get a job doesn’t change that.
3) Homelessness is not as hopeless as it seems.
We need to stop treating homelessness like a random collection of bad choices.
It has patterns… and patterns can be interrupted.
The “Science of Homelessness” is a new endeavor, but in a few decades we have already learned a lot, and we learn more every day.
Have a great week!
Peace,
Ryan
Ryan Dowd is a leading expert on homelessness, author, and trainer who specializes in empathy-driven conflict prevention and public service training.
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