First let's dig more shallow. Op asked why we don't do anything if everyone involved wants something done. The answer is we vote for it and we do do something. It just so happens the severity of the homeless problem is in equilibrium with political will. Now to dig deeper.

>You’ll find plenty of dirt poor rural people that would benefit from entitlement programs just as much.

The big difference is in an urban area even the non homeless want to solve homelessness because it's a public nuisance that directly affects them. See any thread here complaining about sf. In rural areas poverty is a much more private problem.

As for Vermont, you're cherry picking. By and large it is undeniable that the Republican/Democrat divide follows an urban rural line. The exceptions are parts of the deep South (where the racial divide is more prominent), and parts of the coasts where liberalism is so dominant even the rural areas are blue. I don't know the mechanism for the latter, but if I had to guess I'd say a big part of the rural population in those areas aren't farmers but retired professionals living in mcmansions. I know people like that but let's not get into anecdotes.

I'm going to double down here. It's not just attitudes on entitlement programs that are influenced by rational interest among urban and rural residents. Literally every hot button political issue can be understood in these terms.

Take guns for instance. Guns in cities are synonymous with gun crime. Owning one is deeply impractical and police response times are fast enough that you don't need one. In a rural area guns are still practical and police response times are slow.

Take endowments for the arts. Guess where the all the state subsidized art ends up. Hint: it's not Topeka Kansas.

Want me to keep going?

So it sounds like a more distributed government is a good idea. Metropolitan areas living as city-states, with rural areas having their own rules and laws. Both having separate budgets for local issues.

Speaking of which - if cities and their urban populations want to solve homelessness, why can they not do it on a city-by-city case, locally? A tragedy of the commons type issue, where a city that takes care of the homeless better will have more homeless people heading there?

This is a great idea! Maybe restructure the nation as some sort of constitutional republic where the federal government holds limited power (foreign trade, interstate commerce, defence) and the states are left to run day to day matters themselves. We should form a party we could call ourselves Republicans.

I kid but this has been a known problem for two thousand years. The solutions are continually rediscovered, reimplemented and then ignored by later generations that "know better".

"Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms."

- Aristotle

You could do what the EU does, and make the upper house consist of the state governors. That way, for the upper house to approve an increase in federal authority, they actually have to vote to move power from themselves, as individuals, to the lower house (this is a part of why the EU is relatively unimportant compared to the constituent EU nations).

That's the way the Senate was (essentially) until we explicitly changed it with the 17th Amendment.

Except that senators were not popularly elected, but elected by the state legislature (so corruption was easier). Sending the governors themselves to DC would shift powers back to the state (a good thing, imo), but governors wouldn't have much time left for governance.

I think we could improve upon on current system by adding a vice-governor to the governor's ticket, and subjecting the ticket to the popular vote. Then the governor could send the vice-governor, his popularly elected subordinate, to Congress, which would help shift power back to the states. As it currently stands, senators do not feel a need to pay heed to their states' governors.

I'd say the power to leave is also a nice feature, it forces the larger government to provide some sort of value and not step on too many toes or risk being disbanded.

Imagine if California was free to regulate all of healthcare for itself. They could write whatever socialized medicine program the voters desired all while not burdening the people of Texas with the cost who perhaps prefer a free market solution of some kind. As different states implement different programs people would be able to vote with their feet as to what was the better deal, causing states to compete with one another to offer the best deals to its population.

States are too small to effectively implement what they want? That isn't a problem as they can contract with each other and if that goes south look to the federal government to resolve the dispute.

Still wrong. Maricopa county voted for Trump in 2016 and barely went Blue in 2018 despite being a massive city and not being in the colloquial “racist South” to which you refer.

You’re too shallow in your assumption that everyone wants free stuff from the government and only votes against it when they don’t benefit.

>Take guns for instance. Guns in cities are synonymous with gun crime.

Boring trope. Owning a gun in any Texas city isn’t a problem at all, including Austin, which isn’t exactly a conservative stronghold.