Isn't a random homeless person part of their community?

No.

Unless you redefine community to mean 'anyone within a particular geographic area' which renders the concept meaningless.

I get that they are not necessarily a part of their community, but the responses to my comment have been that he is necessarily not a part of that person's community just because one is homeless. What about the area in between? Like couldn't a person befriend a "random homeless person", and then that person becomes very much a part of their community?

they're part of the homeless community, but that doesn't help much. Homeless people do try to look out for each other, but lack of resources and personal demons make that hard. Community is far more than physical proximty; it's often the opposite where living near each other is a symptom of the underlying values, beliefs and shared traits. There are lots of communities in the same physical area.

I've often wondered, don't the people who are homeless have family who are not homeless? And if so, why isn't their family taking care of them?

Sadly, they do. And often times this is the help their family ended up at.

If you stroll into homeless communities you'll see a pretty common thread: Addiction. When someone ends up homeless due to drug/alcohol abuse, there's often very little a family can do to (productively) help short of an ultimatum "Get Help or Get Out". Whether it's effective/right or not, many of those families feel they are taking care of them by giving them the choice of continuing to live the life they've chosen or accept help ... with a myriad of conditions attached.

There's degrees of homelessness. At first you're sleeping on a friend's couch or something. By the time someone is actually living on the street or in a shelter they have burned those relationships.

Source: have had a friend slide into homelessness. It was horrible for all friends and family, and probably worst of all for the one becoming homeless.

Honestly, I decided to go straight to homelessness because I didn't want to strain my personal relationships any further. I tried talking to friends about needing a place to stay. But being in San Francisco, everyone's house was tiny & expensive. They simply didn't have a place for me. I talked with my parents about moving home, and they would have let me stay there, but they also said they weren't thrilled at the idea of having a broke, depressed adult dependent living in their house & asking for money/food/everything. I would have gone home if I REALLY had to, but I managed to get myself to stability before needing to do that.

Good point about burning those relationships. As I mentioned previously about "addiction", if you've ever had a family member who's an addict, you can see real quickly how those relationships get burned.

After you've elected to trust that individual one more time only to find the last remaining valuables you owned have been pawned for a fix.

There's a lot of homelessness in queer youth because they've been disowned by their families.

People in poverty have difficulty accessing health care, and birth control goes along with that. Depending where you live, there might be a holy war being waged on free birth control. If your parents are homeless, you might be put in a foster home until you're old enough to be a homeless adult.

I enjoyed watching Pose, which touches on this topic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pose_(TV_series)

> Americans will take care of their family and their community.

Given the numbers of homeless, obviously many do not. Not even for vets who risked their lives and gave their physical and mental health for their country.