There are also multiple kinds of homelessness. For example, the permanent homeless are generally the mentally ill or addicted, and if you manage to address their issues you can oftentimes get them back on their feet... the problem being that you need to proactively work with them over time to *keep* them on their feet because it is very easy for them to fall back down.
Then you have the transient homeless. Some of the stories I could tell...
Take, for example, one woman I've worked with. No names. She is actually not on any sort of drugs, has a fairly solid resume for property management work. She was headhunted by an apartment complex here in Scottsdale on the premise of move into the complex, we'll employ you to run property management at said complex and as part of your compensation comp you the cost (2500 a month, high end luxury apartment complex).
So she signed on the dotted line, left her old position, moved into the new complex... but no sooner was the ink dry on the contract than the complex decided to instead hire a 3rd party property management company and terminated her employment contract... but they refused to let her out of the rental contract on the apartment.
So now she's unemployed. OK, find another job... oh wait, non-compete clause in her contract which here in AZ is enforceable. Plus the people who run that complex? One of the biggest players in the field here in the state. So now she's out of work, can't get a new job in the field, can't get out of her rental contract for at least a year... then they decided that for people in the one-bedroom rental units that they'd no longer get free utilities, so add in a utility bill that we have since discovered had part of the common utilities folded into it (so she was paying part of the electric bill for the parking lot lights and such)... Needless to say, it drove her to bankruptcy, and she wound up homeless for a period.
Luckily in this case SVdP's legal aid group was able to successfully sue the management company, get her out of the lease, recover the money she'd been ripped off of, and forced them to void the non-compete. She was able to secure a new property-management position with that company's biggest competitor and is now back on her feet.
So was it her fault that she spent a few months homeless? I'd say no, not at all. According to what I heard the whole reason they pulled that shit on her in the first place was that initial sales in that new complex were too soft and the executives had egg on their face, so they decided to pull a fast one so they'd have higher occupancy numbers for when the higher ups checked the books. So in order for an executive to secure their personal bonus, they tried to completely ruin a woman.