No Fixed Address: Why America Can't House Its People — and Who Finally Is
Why does the richest country on earth have more than 770,000 people sleeping outside on a single night — and why is it five times worse in California than in West Virginia? No Fixed Address is an 11-part ReThink History series that tests one stubborn question: is homelessness driven by the economy or by mental illness? The measured answer is both, but at different levels — rent and housing supply set the scale of the crisis, while mental illness, trauma, and addiction shape who falls through and who ends up on the street. The series opens in a 1981 courtroom, where a young doctor watched a judge free a gravely disabled man living under a freeway bridge because he could, technically, seek shelter. From there it traces the whole arc: the emptying of the asylums, the housing-cost research that reframed the field, the hard truth about addiction and mental illness, the law of the 72-hour hold, and the solutions that are actually working — Housing First, Houston's 63% drop, Finland's near-elimination and its 2025 reversal, Japan's hidden homeless, and the 2024 Grants Pass ruling that turned the country toward the sweep. It ends on the first national decrease in nearly a decade, the veterans who prove it can be done, and what it would take to give that man under the bridge a different ending. Steelmanned on every side. A measured, sourced deep dive, narrated by AI voices from human-reviewed research. © 2026 Selway Solutions LLC · <a href="https://history.selwaysolutions.io/index.html#license">Educational & Institutional Use License</a> · <a href="mailto:nick@selwaysolutions.io">Contact</a>
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Episodes
Can We End Homelessness? What Actually Works
Can we actually end homelessness — and would the man under the bridge have a different ending today? The finale returns to where the series began.
Grants Pass, Encampment Sweeps, and the Right to Shelter
Can a city punish people for sleeping outside when there's nowhere for them to go? In 2024 the Supreme Court said yes in City of Grants Pass v.
Japan's Hidden Homeless and the Problem With Counting
Japan reports almost no homelessness — just a few thousand people, down roughly 90% since 2003.
How Finland Nearly Ended Homelessness — and Why It's Rising Again
Finland almost eliminated homelessness by treating a home as a right — converting nearly all its emergency shelters into permanent apartments, adopting national Housing First, and driving homelessness down for eleven straight years.
How Houston Cut Homelessness by 63%
How did Houston cut homelessness by nearly two-thirds while California's crisis kept growing? Since 2011, greater Houston has reduced homelessness about 63% and housed more than 32,000 people through The Way Home — one coordinated system aligning roughly 100 nonprofits behind a single by-name list, built on faithful Housing First.
Housing First: Does Giving People Homes Actually Work?
Should people have to earn housing by getting sober and treated first — or does giving them a home first work better? We trace Housing First from Sam Tsemberis and Pathways to Housing in early-1990s New York to its gold-standard proof: Canada's At Home/Chez Soi randomized trial of some 2,500 people with mental illness.
The 72-Hour Hold: When Can the State Commit Someone?
When can the state hold someone against their will for their own good — and should it? Opening on a 1981 case, we walk California's Lanterman-Petris-Short Act: the 5150 72-hour hold, the 5250 certification, the strict meaning of 'gravely disabled,' and the 'able to seek shelter' exception that freed one young man to a life under a bridge.
Mental Illness, Addiction, and Homelessness: Cause or Consequence?
How much do mental illness and addiction really drive homelessness — and is the street a cause of them or a consequence? Roughly a third to a half of homeless people have a serious mental illness or substance-use disorder, concentrated among the chronically and unsheltered, but much of that illness and addiction is downstream of the trauma of homelessness.
Why Rent — Not Addiction — Drives Homelessness
Why is homelessness roughly five times higher in California than in West Virginia when addiction and mental illness rates are similar? The structural case at the population level.
How Emptying the Asylums Created Modern Homelessness
How did a country that once confined the mentally ill in vast institutions end up with them on the sidewalks? The history of deinstitutionalization — from the 1955 peak of 558,922 state-hospital patients, through the antipsychotic revolution and Kennedy's 1963 Community Mental Health Act, to California's 1967 Lanterman-Petris-Short Act and a census that fell more than 90%.
Homelessness in America: Is It Housing or Mental Illness?
No Fixed Address opens with a 1981 courtroom scene and the question that drives the whole series.