I've worked on getting some individual people into assisted living situations, etc. The problem has never been lack of beds. It has been the individual involved.

There are a few good books on all of this. It's not a resource problem in the Western world. It's a mental illness and drug problem.

EDIT: I should say rather, the major problem has never been lack of beds. Sometimes I've had to wait a few days, etc., or choose a different place. Nobody has infinite money. But it has never been a major or insurmountable problem.

Assuming your limited interface is representative, and there in fact always are more usable beds available than homeless people (I doubt this, but only have anecdotal evidence to the contrary from working with homeless people) - how does that translate into 'homelessness is elective'? I've seen a multitude of reasons that destroy peoples lives, and makes them unable to be a productive, rent-paying, law-abiding citizen.

Also, bed availability aside - I've heard many who are scared of the available shelters, due to threats, drug dealing or harassment from other ill-fortuned inhabitants.

Maybe we just define 'elective' differently.

I urge anybody who is worried about homelessness in their area, to try and dig deeper into possible root-causes for wide-spread homelessness. Maybe each and every individual homeless person have made bad or even catastrophic decisions that led them to their calamity, but if that really is the case (just for arguments sake - my experience says otherwise for most cases), why are so many making these bad decisions? Let's treat systemic problems as such, and make sure that we don't only focus on relieving symptoms, and maybe we find homelessness to be a solvable problem.

> I've heard many who are scared of the available shelters, due to threats, drug dealing or harassment from other ill-fortuned inhabitants.

And so they move to a tent encampment? This makes no sense.

The problem isn't even the bad and catastrophic decisions that homeless people made to get them into the situation -- would that it were -- for the permanent homeless, it is the bad and catastrophic decisions they make on a daily basis to keep themselves in it.

How to treat this? Involuntary mental health incarceration. Police ticketing and other harsh actions to break up the cycle and keep people from being comfortable with their homeless situation. Destroy the social anti-patterns that are keeping people trapped.

Do you know anyway with a child in this situation? Ask them how their offers of money and help went, and what happened when that help was delivered. You may have an interesting conversation.

I struggle to understand what points you are making. Are you saying that since these people are making life difficult for themselves, there can be no external causes behind that behavior? It sounds a lot like "their own fault, not my problem" to be honest.

No, I'm not saying that. Can you point to the exact sentence that confused you?