> As a civilian, it's impossible for me to tell what situation a person is in; are they potentially violent, do they live in the same world as me, are they ment

> As a civilian, it's impossible for me to tell what situation a person is in; are they potentially violent, do they live in the same world as me, are they mentally and physically capable but undergoing hard times? They are all people, and they should all be helped, but help for one person isn't like help for another; and just lumping people together and parking them doesn't help anyone. I think you're conflating separate questions: how to act around a given homeless person, and what kind of system is needed to help them at scale. As for helping them, while there will be nuances to any group of people, I don't think it's a waste of time to make general statements about what solutions might look like. There may be complicating circumstances, but the fundamental barrier is the same: our society (unfortunately) requires you to make some amount of money and to have a place to live if you're going to participate in it and have much hope of upward mobility. And there's a circular effect, where if you don't have those things, it's incredibly hard to "bootstrap" your way into it. This core mechanism applies to nearly all homeless people. So anything that tries to solve that bootstrapping problem will apply to a whole lots of people, even if it needs to be combined with other things like addiction help, mental healthcare, etc on a case-by-case basis. For anyone else here in Austin, this is a great organization that works on this problem: https://www.caritasofaustin.org/ https://www.caritasofaustin.org/