Voting alone gives you very little meaningful power in most liberal democracies. In order to have a meaningful influence on policy, you need to have either a lo

Voting alone gives you very little meaningful power in most liberal democracies. In order to have a meaningful influence on policy, you need to have either a lot of money (the easier way) or a lot of time and focused energy to organize constituencies (the hard way). Very poor people tend to have neither. Obviously they don't have money, but they also tend to be overwhelmed with the daily struggle to stay alive, or emotionally beaten down by dealing with various kinds of trauma. That means even when homeless people manage to vote individually, they aren't likely to find politicians who cater to their needs directly. Instead the best they can hope for is a politician who caters to middle-class and wealthy people who care about the abstract concept of homelessness and have their own ideas about how to address it.