$10,000 a person is a lie unless maybe if you moved all the homeless from the West Coast to the middle of nowhere in Midwest, but then you would have homeless activists and Midwest NIMBY activists saying that the government is shipping people out to solve the problem.
The activists have politicized every direction of this issue to the point where it's easier to just forget about the homeless rather than try to solve the problem. Most homeless need mental health care and should be forced into mental wards but then you have mental health activists that will protest against this. Other activists would complain that they are gentrifying SF and kicking out all the poor people.
Basically anyone who tries to solve this problem politically can't win because there will be some activist that protests against it to make a name for themselves and it turns into a hotbed issue by the media.
And that's how it becomes an unsolvable problem. Activists with agendas.
Because conservatives destroyed mental health care in this country.
Not that it was ever good, but it used to exist, until it was systematically dismantled in the 1980s and all the patients were sent out to become … take a guess … that's right … our current chronic homeless population!
Start by (re)building an actual mental health care system if you want to go that route.
I'd also argue, that having feds in this business would even worsen the situation: now locals could be taken completely out of the loop for decisions like where to place shelters. Like, "oh you don't like shelter in this neighborhood? take a walk - it's a federal decision, live with it."
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-05-21/ending...
Key graf:
> About 3.5 million Americans will experience homelessness at some point in time, but only about a half-million are homeless at any given time, and roughly 87,000 of these are chronically homeless. By some estimates, housing a homeless person and providing them with a caseworker to see to their needs costs about $10,000 a year. That means for less than a billion dollars a year, chronic homelessness could be ended in the U.S. If temporarily homeless people were housed in temporary housing, and if each temporary residence were occupied half the time, homelessness of all kinds could be eliminated for about $10 billion a year. That’s less than a seventh of what the government spends on food stamps.