Homelessness as a Neurobiological Failure: Why Social Policy Models Collapse Without Cortical Capacity

This accepted manuscript is structurally governed by THE META-INDEX (Zenodo DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18169167)

Homelessness is predominantly addressed through sociological, psychological, and economic frameworks that emphasize social exclusion, trauma, and substance dependency. While descriptively informative, these approaches systematically fail to explain or resolve chronic homelessness characterized by repeated intervention breakdown and long-term street exposure. This failure arises from an implicit and biologically invalid assumption: that individuals experiencing chronic homelessness retain intact cortical executive capacity and rational agency once resources are made available.

This work argues that persistent homelessness should be understood primarily as a neurobiological condition involving impaired prefrontal cortical regulation. Prolonged exposure to trauma, chronic stress, sleep disruption, and substance use converge to suppress executive functions responsible for future-oriented planning, trust formation, behavioral consistency, and delayed gratification. Psychological symptoms and addictive behaviors are therefore reframed not as primary causes, but as secondary manifestations of neural dysregulation.

Social policy models that presuppose intact executive function consequently operate on an incorrect biological model of the human subject. Such policies fail not due to insufficient funding or compassion, but because they target behavioral outcomes without restoring the neural capacities required to sustain them.

Using the Boko Dual Gravity (BDG) framework as an ontological and heuristic lens rather than an empirical neuroscientific model, homelessness is conceptualized as a transition from cortical governance toward limbic–reptilian survival dominance. Within this state, short-term threat avoidance overrides structural engagement, rendering conventional interventions neurologically inaccessible. The work concludes by proposing a Neuro-First paradigm, in which cortical restoration is treated as the foundational prerequisite for any sustainable homelessness intervention.