'Just give them housing' seems to work pretty well. https://nationswell.com/one-state-track-become-first-end-hom...

"It’s time to come clean. The unrealistic narrative that Utah has ended homelessness by giving out homes is not helping."

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/think-utah-solved-homeles_b_9...

IIRC that actually hasn't worked too well for Utah in recent years.

Tragedy of the commons is a major factor here. Any city that looks 'homeless friendly' will get people shipped to it from other cities, sometimes as part of explicit 'bus ticket' programs.

Really solving this will take work at the national level. There's more than enough wealth around to fund it, given how much goes into the pockets of opioid manufacturers alone.

Homeless people are also fairly mobile, it doesn’t take that much to come up with a $50 bus ticket even if they don’t bother hopping freight cars anymore. Hell, many can even scrounge up enough for one way tickets to Hawaii (...and Hawaii will often take care of the ticket back).

Maybe.... give them a place to stay...

OFF the street?

Of course all urban centers are so starved of entry level housing that anything good enough to minimally get a homeless person off the street (bathroom, place to sleep, maybe kitchenette) would also be swamped by everyone from the poor and working, college students, immigrants, etc.

Suppressing this housing is all done in the name of maintaining and increasing housing values for the affluent. If you increase the supply of housing, the value of housing drops, and white people don't want that.

> Of course all urban centers are so starved of entry level housing that anything good enough to minimally get a homeless person off the street (bathroom, place to sleep, maybe kitchenette) would also be swamped by everyone from the poor and working, college students, immigrants, etc.

I doubt it; one of the reasons that homelessness is a difficult problem is that some homeless people are very unpleasant to live with, which means other homeless people prefer to remain on the street rather than share housing with them.

I'm talking about basically a 10x10 room for privacy for each, uh, non-inmate. It sounds like prison though.

It’s also done to keep people who can only afford lower priced housing out.

Certainly encampments are a bigger eyesore/property value killer than making some habitable closets for them?

Does one really need to be incentivized to stop living on the street? I would think the incentives are obvious. The problem is the means.

This is not always the case. Some of these people cannot function in regular society and actually find living on the streets to be easier.