You can still have reporting that digs into things, perhaps not detailed sob stories about particular homeless, but do the digging and track why they're homeless, what they have done (and what has been done to them), look at program projections and program results, and so on. Compare cities to Houston [1]. Are the homeless in CA the same as the homeless a year ago? Five years ago? Obviously, since the numbers have gone up, some aren't, but there's tons of data (and governments are probably already tracking major portions of it).

Simplistic articles that go "money in, homeless out" don't help inform, which more and more seems intentional, because everything is political.

17 billion divided by 250,000 would be 68,000 condos (rough numbers). There are obvious problems with "give every homeless person a condo" but the numbers are huge and something's not working.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...