In my city in the states, easy homelessness cases are easy to treat so they get treated, and plucked from the pool of visible homeless rather quickly as they obtain and maintain transitional housing. That leaves behind a lot of chronic cases that aren’t easy to just throw some resources at, the ones where drugs and mental illness are involved.

Also, the more successful anyone city treats its problem, the worse it becomes if the larger context it exists in doesn’t treat it as well. For example, I read a story about an ex-con who is released from a prison in Texas, is given a bus ticket to go anywhere, and picks Seattle (not having ever been there) because they hear that is the place to be right now (they might have picked LA before). So the problem is influenced by regional and National governments as well, one city or even metro can’t work alone its way out of the problem.

I imagine it’s similar in the UK, just maybe on a smaller case (our problem over here has exploded in the last decade).