Be out of luck for a while and chances are high, that you develope mental disorders as well as drug addictions.
69% are reporting being disabled in some way that’s preventing them from being housed (read: addiction, mental illness, health issues resulting from these, etc). 42% are self reporting current addiction, 39% have self reported current psychiatric/emotional disorder of some kind, and 37% with PTSD (apparently getting separately reported from the prior stat). These numbers are likely higher in reality.
Of course there are some that lost their job, don’t make enough, etc. That’s the population that you could expect to make a come back with support. But a very significant portion are beyond tractable. Drive thru the tenderloin and tell me what you see is rehabilitatable.
Seems to me the easier story would be preventing homelessness in the first place, which would involve making our society kinder for all, not just the homeless. It got significantly worse after Regan defunded the mental health wards. Many progressives support this cause of holding people against their will — I’m not sure being homeless and mentally ill is more humane. At some point it’s easier to centralize long term care than to ad hoc beds and social services.
EDIT: In order to avoid deepening the thread, may you restate your point so that I can understand what you mean?
Also I’m not sure how to evaluate “a large fraction of the homeless are just down in their luck.” Those are the easy cases that are more likely to get effective help already, even in more dysfunctional American cities. And if they aren’t, we have a much better chance of doing a better job there, since their problems are much easier to solve than those of the more chronic homeless.
In fact, our first priority should be to prevent “down in their luck” homeless cases from becoming chronic “substance abuse/mental illness” homeless cases.