You are just making unsupported assertions. I think you are repeating the usual 'facts' used to support the homeless by well meaning but not necessarily well i

You are just making unsupported assertions. I think you are repeating the usual 'facts' used to support the homeless by well meaning but not necessarily well informed people. I think to analyze this you have to break down what we mean by 'homeless'. There are people who are temporarily homeless, in that they don't have their name on a lease somewhere. This spans everything from living in their car to couch surfing or staying with relatives, all the way to staying in a battered woman's home or other form of homeless shelter. Homeless advocacy groups love to intentionally misrepresent things and highlight this group, which is a tiny minority of the homeless population living 'on the street', and who mostly have proper shelter, just not a permanent place to live. I'm all for helping these people in every possible way to make it easier for them and help them maintain stability while they figure out a long term living arrangement, especially if children are involved. They may have had some bad luck or more likely have a bad situation they are running away from, but fundamentally they are capable of taking care of themselves and holding a job once they get passed their current difficulties. If you look at the huge homeless encampments all across California you will find approximately 0 people fitting this description in any of them. While people who are temporarily homeless make up most of the overall 'homeless' population, they are mostly living inside some form of shelter since they are stable enough to seek and accept help. Again, these are not the people you see crapping on the sidewalk, although they do need our help and we should provide anything which would help them. Then there are chronically homeless people, people that live in these large encampments. These are the people we are actually debating. Sleeping on buses at night, panhandling, living on the street long term, and almost universally suffering from severe mental illness or addiction. It's convenient when someone points at the people who are chronically homeless and causing a lot of problems in cities to defend them by pretending people who are temporarily homeless due to some situation are somehow the same group as the people living in these tents by the side of the freeway, but this just isn't true. If you look at the statistics, over 80% of people who are chronically homeless have serious long term substance abusers, and over 60% have serious long term mental health problems (close to 100% are suffering from one or the other). https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/66286/310291-Homelessness-Programs-and-the-People-They-Serve-Findings-of-the-National-Survey-of-Homeless-Assistance-Providers-and-Clients.PDF https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/66286/... look around page 48