In London, they used shipping container homes to house homeless people on unused local government-owned land. Pretty much instantly stories were in the media about how the conditions were "inhuman" (bizarrely, from people who had chosen to illegally immigrate to the UK from France, and complained that they had a nice house in Sudan or wherever).

So I think the reality of these schemes is often...difficult because they are a non-ideal solution to a non-ideal problem (and unf, the alternative in the UK is sheltered housing with huge levels of crime, B&B which cost taxpayers £150-200/day, or council housing that is worth £500k-1m...again, there are no real solutions here).

EDIT: btw, I should add...I have actually lived in a shipping container, I went to a boarding school and part of the school was being re-developed so a small number of proportion of the group had to spend a term in converted containers...no issue. It was totally fine. These kind of housing solutions are used pretty extensively in mining/oil and gas, and they are quite comfortable.

Indeed! there are all kinds of advances being made in everything from container homes, modular homes, "tiny homes", yurts, and more.

Although they are obviously not spacious mansions, they can be highly functional and comfortable, and obviously WAAAY better than nothing.

If I were in a situation where it was that or nothing, I'd be grateful for a small spot to call home (but then I decided to live for one summer job in a tent in a secluded spot outside of town instead of getting an apartment, and it was very enjoyable and functional).

The main problem with homeless people is not a lack of housing, but that the vast majority of them want to be homeless. That this is even a controversial statement to many is the real tragedy holding back "solving" the homeless problem. In this area the only time there are shelter problems are when it gets too cold for them to realistically stay outside. And yes, the shelters do provide them with networking opportunities, fixed addresses, services to ensure they are clean and have good clothes for job interviews, etc. The majority are not interested. For a wide variety of reasons (and no, not all of them are healthy reasons) they like being independent and not tied to anyone or anything.

Simply providing someone a home and trying to stuff them in there is only a minuscule part of the overall issue.

Sure, though some of that relies on your city having large parcels of empty land to situate them on. And these are much bigger and nicer than the ones we recently rolled out here in Portland[1] but cost almost 10X more, so you'd hope they are.

1: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/tiny-home-pods-help-p...