The article is clearly about the minority of homeless who are long term drug abusing street dwellers. Different problem, different solution.
Very high profile efforts to put the latter in free housing have failed.
On the other hand I have a friend (who is incidentally also a drug user but not so far gone that she couldn't stop when forced to wear a drug detecting patch to get her kid back) who became homeless. She immediately got into a shelter and now months later is moving into an apartment with her rent (I think) paid at least partly by the city. So anecdotally (and from some reading) the former group already has working solutions
Read the book, and look at the evidence rather than trying to reason from random feelings.
Sure if we can indefinitely add huge amounts of housing everywhere year over year we will have "solved" this problem, as the evidence shows! However, I can't imagine this is the best use of our time and resources. I'd rather look for more sustainable solutions.
There’s a naive, common view that homelessness is primarily about “mental illness” and “drugs” and other potential contributors to homelessness; while those factors exist, the lower the cost of housing, the easier it is for someone on the margin of being housed or being homeless to stay housed. The lower the cost, the easier it is for family, SSDI, Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV, formerly called Section 8), and other income supports to keep a person housed. Intuitively, this makes sense: it’s easier to cover $750 in rent than $2,000 in rent, even for someone with mental illness and drug problems. As the cost of housing goes up, the number of people who fall from the margins of being “housed” to being “homeless” goes concomitantly up. While mental illness and drug abuse are factors, they’re secondary to housing costs, and they’re really red herrings relative to overall housing costs and ongoing housing shortages across America.
The homelessness problem is intractable without zoning reform and the removal of barriers to new housing construction, whether those barriers are height maximums, parking space minimums, or “neighborhood input” or “community input.”