Those are the homeless that attack the elderly. Those are the homeless that shit on the street. Those are the homeless that lie naked sprawled across the sidewalk or at the end of a BART escalator.
Whatever the cause, these homeless do have mental health and substance abuse issues, often are voluntarily homeless (and will resist help.) They're not all of the homeless problem, but they are a major part of it.
Getting rid of hard drug dealers would solve a large part of the issue. Making it illegal to be on hard drugs (and enforcing it) would be as well.
Some people want to fix homeless because of empathy while others want to fix it because of selfishness. Your comment reveals that you are in the latter group. You don't actually want to get homeless people into homes because you empathize with how horrible their lives must be without one. You just want to the minority of homeless people who are a nuisance to stop bothering you and people you actually do empathize with. All those other homeless people who aren't attacking the elderly or shitting on the street can keep on living the same invisible life of suffering because their suffering is not actually a problem in your eyes.
And what the hell, how is caring about elderly people being attacked "selfish"?
Fixing part of the problem is a good thing. Different strategies might solve different parts of the problem. Objecting to progress isn't helpful and isn't compassionate, it's the way we got our current harm-maximization policies.
I certainly didn’t.
> Where did I even imply one was a higher priority than the other?
Because your counter to the idea of the invisible homeless population was to complain about the nuisance homeless population.
> And what the hell, how is caring about elderly people being attacked "selfish"?
Because you are the one prioritizing the suffering of one group over another.
But I'm just going to say: I've lived in San Francisco. I currently live in Vancouver, not far from the epicentre of unhoused and addicted people.
Vancouver has many of the same problems and for the same reasons.
I have never, not once, feared for my safety around poor or addicted homeless people in Vancouver. Nor did I even feel like they hated me, specifically. I remember walking out of a doorway in Gastown where there was a woman smoking a crack pipe, and she was very apologetic and moved her stuff. It seemed oddly Canadian to me, even at the time.
In San Francisco I often felt sheer rage from unhoused people, or even just poor people. Acting out aggressively at the slightest provocation. Screaming for apparently no reason.
If you've lived your whole life in America it may be hard to imagine that these things aren't universal. But they aren't. If you think about it there really isn't any reason why being poor has to be the same as being dangerous.
I have no evidence as to exactly what the difference is. I think maybe Canadian policies are a little more generous and a little more available. Canadians were just as racist, but maybe American chattel slavery really went over the top in causing such social rifts. I don't really know.
Bribed? You seem to think that the homeless actively use their immoderation as some kind of protection racket.
Alternately, we could say the Americans have decided to make the lives of poor and addicted people as bad as can be achieved without actually killing them.
Also not saying that it isn't a problem which should be solved, because it absolutely is. But if you did solve it, and you told people that homelessness was down by 90%, they would look at you like you were crazy, because it's only the other 10% they were complaining about in the first place.
You're right that people who have several physical or mental health issues would be hard to help, in any system.
But the number one cause of homelessness isn't addiction; it's poverty.
And for that matter, the overwhelming majority of people who are substance-addicted don't become homeless. Lots of the people you work with are addicted to something.
There are so many steps before people literally have to sleep on the streets. They stay out of sight. You surely have noticed all the camper vans on some streets in SF. I'd bet that for every person actually on the street there are 10 who are effectively homeless but managing it in a way you can't see. Living at their place of work or study, living in a vehicle, couch-surfing, illegal sublets, and things I'm happy to never have to imagine.
The article the OP posted details many stories of people who are competent to hold down a job, even multiple jobs, but cannot find anywhere to live.