It's not a simple problem, as many of the posts in this thread indicate. If it were simple, it would be easy to solve. But there's a lot of factors at play. One

It's not a simple problem, as many of the posts in this thread indicate. If it were simple, it would be easy to solve. But there's a lot of factors at play. One of them is that the United States is big, really big. If you've never visited, you'll be amazed at how big it really is. And it's a lot more atomized than it used to be 30 years ago. Add to that the fact that rural areas are drying up, and more and more people are moving to urban centres. Another is zoning and NIMBYism. Others here have explained this in detail far better than I could. But to put it simply, most of the public services that homeless and mentally ill people depend on are located in urban areas. When people say things like, "there's plenty of cheap housing in ____" they don't understand that no matter how much oversupply of affordable housing there is in that place, these people can't live there because they don't drive, there's no public transportation, and there's no clinics there.