Finally. The Washington Post confirmed today what I have been telling people for several years now. That the five most popular conceptions people have about the homeless are myths.

Those myths:

1) That homelessness is a long-term condition. It’s not long-term. Most homeless average a few days to less than 30 days as homeless.

2) That most of the homeless are mentally ill. Nope, only 13-15% the Post writer concludes.

3) That homeless people don’t work. Again, the Post notes, “According to a 2002 national study by the Urban Institute, about 45 percent of homeless adults had worked in the past 30 days — only 14 percentage points lower than the employment rate for the general population last month.”

4) That shelters are a humane solution to the homeless problem. As any of us who have stayed in one can attest - shelters are demeaning, dehumanizing and demoralizing - and those are the “good ones”.

5) The poor you will always have with you. Not, Obama’s new plan claims, if we can get them off the streets, into housing and re-employed.

I’m surprised how relieved I felt reading this article. If the media is finally catching on, it means we may really be moving forward as a country. It won’t happen overnight, but we’re moving. What has frustrated me as well as many of the long-term volunteers, shelter administrators and churches I’ve spoken to is that 20 percent of the homeless consume up to 80% or at least the majority of resources and services available for all homeless people. The Post says:

“Nearly all of the long-term homeless have tenuous family ties and some kind of disability, whether it is a drug or alcohol addiction, a mental illness, or a physical handicap. While they make up a small share of the homeless population, they are disproportionately costly to society: They consume nearly 60 percent of the resources spent on emergency and transitional shelter for adults, and they occupy hospitals and jails at high rates.”

This means the solutions being implemented for the homeless in general are failing the populations they are trying to serve. My point has been and will always be that homelessness is not a social problem as much as it is a business problem. When we start looking at homelessness as numbers and solutions and see housing, feeding, employing and engaging those individuals without a house or housing as a business decision, not a social ill to cure, we will all but eradicate homelessness as we know it.

Example? When emergency medical services respond to a traffic accident the scene is treated as a business problem - time, resources, response, medical triage, security, removal of the vehicles and so on. People respond, do their job, secure the scene, treat victims, and follow a procedure and protocol designed to be the most effective, efficient way to take care of the greatest number of issues. If they responded to the event as a social services problem, like most agencies and the government currently does homelessness the response would be more like:

“We don’t have enough volunteers to respond to another accident. Don’t they have friends or family to take care of them? Oh, he was drinking. Well, he can’t get in our ambulance. He’ll have to get some other agency to deal with him. We don’t take addicts.” Or, “We can pick him up if he’s a Christian. If he’s not he’ll have to listen to a sermon before we can get him into surgery.” Or, “He was driving a Chevy. We only help Ford, Nissan, Toyota and VW owners.”

What the government is finally beginning to realize is that by housing, feeding and working with the homeless rather than criminalizing them they’ll not only save themselves money, but come closer to eradicating homelessness all together.