I mean a place to live doesn't mean anything if there's nowhere for them to work to earn a living to afford it, not to mention being able to commute in a rural

I mean a place to live doesn't mean anything if there's nowhere for them to work to earn a living to afford it, not to mention being able to commute in a rural area basically requires a car of some sort. Homeless congregate to cities because they can get the widest exposure to panhandle on. This isn't complicated. If you have no income apart from what's given to you, you need to be in places where a lot of people are a lot of the time to maximize your income. I'm sure plenty of them would happily move to a different area, if they're given the tools and resources to build a life there. But we don't do that. We just sick the cops on them and burn whatever they've managed to cobble together and tell them to go somewhere else. They might, MIGHT, get a bus ticket. But that's it and that solves none of their problems, it just makes them a problem for a different metro.