Homeless people are generally not allowed to cross borders pretty much anywhere in the world, except under special conditions (e.g. being considered a refugee fleeing a warzone or failed state.)

This is why most countries' border services will ask short-term visitors the address of the place they'll be staying while they're there: no country, no matter how open its borders, wants you to visit with the goal of becoming a beggar on their streets.

(And this is also a large part of why particular passports only let you visit particular places without a visa. The EU has internally-open borders for EU citizens, because they have mostly equalized levels of social-welfare "pressure" between countries. But no EU country will let you in from a non-EU developing country that has high levels of homelessness, if you can't prove income; and that's something the EU enforces on its member states, so that no country becomes the de-facto homeless ingress point for the whole of the EU.)

Because of these measures, each country (or open-bordered region of equal-welfare countries) is mostly just dealing with its own homeless problem, not with other countries'/regions' homeless problems.

Agreed about the "attractor country" comment; however, at least we have some restrictions on borders. I agree with the parent comment that this issue needs to be addressed by the federal gov't. I wonder if some states could even be incentivized to support such systems by creating rehabilitation communities which would bring jobs (and yes homeless) but still more $ in general. FL and AZ sort of does this with old people and some states seem to do it for addiction treatment centers.

X% of the population will always need some gov't help and Y% will need gov't help at some point. I think we need to stop negatively viewing these groups as sponges on society. Ability is a spectrum, and we don't criticize someone w Down's Syndrome, and so I don't think we should be so harsh on people who are homeless / have trouble holding down a job / low-ish IQ / and even those who fried their brain w drugs / etc.

Yes, we want to avoid perverse incentives and incentivize people to be productive members of society, but we also need to recognize that some people will always need some help, and as a society, I think we should help them, striving for a future with little to no involuntary poverty.