Back in the mid 1980s, the Village Voice[0] ran a feature article entitled "What do homeless people want?"
The author helpfully provided an answer in the first sentence of the article: "Homes, mostly."
Given the very visible homeless population in New York City[1] at the time, and that more and more of those folks were families with children, it seemed a reasonable question to ask, with a readily available answer.
And in 2000, there was a piece in the San Jose Mercury News[2] about full-time school teachers working in the San Jose public schools who were living in homeless shelters because they couldn't afford housing on their salaries in the South Bay.
And yet, 30+ years later the problem is getting worse -- due to the lack of affordable housing stock, increasing economic insecurity and inequality, among other, lesser, issues.
So let's not continue to believe the Grimm-esque fairy tale that poor people are poor because they're lazy or stupid. And that all homeless people are drug-addicted, mentally impaired losers.
So what is it that homeless people want? Homes, mostly.
Yet our zoning and housing policies make increasing housing stock to meet demand and effectively difficult, if not impossible.
Yes, homelessness is a serious issue. And something I experienced back in those fabled 1980's. And I did have a drug (cocaine) problem while I was homeless. Then again, I didn't start using those drugs until I was already homeless. Hmmm. Correlation isn't causation, but...
[0] https://www.villagevoice.com/
[1] https://citylimits.org/2013/03/11/a-brief-history-of-homeles...
Also, substance abuse can be an outcome, not just a cause. People go homeless after getting addicted, yes, but people also get addicted in order to numb the experience of being homeless too. Using drugs is a reasonable response to a loss of hope; I’m sure every single person here has some experience with increased alcohol consumption as a response to stress. It’s perfectly human, and most of us wouldn’t do any better if we were homeless tomorrow.
Also, this attitude is never applied to the rich and powerful addicted to things like cocaine. Which is kind of curious. It makes you wonder if the issue isn’t drugs at all..
This group has generated so much negative goodwill with the general public that any “logical” solution that requires public $ is going to have a difficult time prevailing.
The easiest and intuitively cheapest solution in the minds of most people is: make them go somewhere else.
I get that it's not popular with the public, that's why we have these debates, because the public needs to figure out whether it really wants to solve the issue by partially getting over itself or it doesn't and prefers to live in the bad situation that current exists.
EDIT: usually these arguments from the progressives appeals to morality or whatever, but in this case, it's literally an effectiveness argument. It works, regardless how one feels so it should be done.
Now, if one argues "well, it might not work here," that to me is a more interesting and worthwhile discussion. But if one's point is "well, I don't dispute whether it works or not or whether it won't work here, I just hate the homeless so much I don't want to do the thing that would actually fix it," leads me to question whether one hates it enough to actually address the issue or not.
Not really true at all. If you are a Midwestern city with a homeless "problem", giving them a one-way ticket to San Francisco (or somewhere else that is hospitable to homeless) seems to be a good way to get rid of them for good.
If one is able to look at this situation objectively, this is a really interesting and complex problem to consider at the level of the municipality. Different cities will have different strategies.
...and like in my example above, a change in one city's strategies might actually change your strategy. If San Francisco starts cracking down on tent cities and tries to prohibit panhandling, open drug use, etc. then those Midwestern cities may have to start sending their homeless to another place, or just deal with them in-place.
The equilibrium that this game reaches may be the place that has the most reasonable, humane and probably expensive solution to homelessness actually increases the number of homeless they have to accommodate as they become a permanent draw.