ReThink History: No Fixed Address

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-el