Being able to simultaneously look at the absurd rent prices in SF, and then interpret the homelessness problem as a 'choice' is some serious obliviousness, if not an all-out exercise in orwellian double-think. I know it's a bit of a popular 'thing' amongst a certain subculture in the Haight (hell some of my friends have done that), but that's been around for ages, and I'd hardly call that culture a majority...
The original article pretty much got it right: people here like living in bubbles.
Yes, there are a few people who prefer to be homeless. They're very rare. The idea that they're "most" is laughable.
As Paul Graham said on a different thread yesterday, if you have a choice between two explanations and one justifies you being lazy, choose the other one.
I'll agree, "most" is probably way off. It is greater than 0, but it could well be a negligible amount.
By "offer", do you mean for free? Well, duh. What the GP most likely meant is that some people prefer to be homeless rather than having to get and hold down a job to afford a place to live.
Besides the challenge of actually finding a job, a minimum wage job won't cover rent in SF and certainly not with money left over for things like food, transportation or phone service. Have you seen the installation art piece about the minimum wage? It's a box with a crank on it that spits out a penny every 4.97 seconds: http://disinfo.com/2012/12/the-mininum-wage-machine/ That's what working is like to most people, except often more dangerous and demeaning.
That is perhaps the most ignorant sentence I have ever read on HN. Most homeless people don't have a choice. If they do have a choice, the fact that they choose to live on the streets likely speaks to the horrific situation they would face at their home. I can assure you that no one wants to be homeless.