Has anyone studied why homeless people refuse help? It's usually because the "help" isn't help. E.g. "you can sleep here but only if you haven't used drugs in the last week, so we'll test your blood before we let you in"

This is along the lines I mean. Or when shared households break up, and some stay, some leave, which one should you send to the asylum forever and why not both? Or to jail for the fights they both participated in? What of the deaths by a thousand cuts and no one at fault for the murder?

But the idea that jails are an unadulterated societal good, or that they are the natural only option to police, is a crazy religion. Why on earth do we have no timely resolutions but through handcuffs and jail? There is expediency, and then there is externalizing the whole of the troubles to the smallest number of people, who could never overturn a majority, even if they had the vote.

I suggest the ability to put certain people in a metal box, at least partially for losing their grasp of a better role in the world, is a big, boldface moral hazard, and self-perpetuating, but with leering cheerleaders.

Some people are wild and out of control sometimes. Treating them all as permanent bad apples is just as animalistic.

You could also have "zero homeless" if you had a certain amount of cheap housing that even drug addicts and mentally ill people could afford. Or where the cost of helping them is not too much.

Like some housing that was built to be closer to "indestructible" than "nice" and was small, like 200 - 300 sq ft.

>I’m guessing there’s a bit of breathing room at the lower end of the system - there will be people who become drug addicts or have major mental health breaks and lose everything

So? Why can't a 21st century country provide them with some at-least pod-like homes, so they are not fucking homeless?

Honestly this isn't the right conversation to be having at all.

In the United States, ~40% of the homeless are employed. A deeply non-trivial percent either are kids or have kids. Everyone should volunteer at a support center for homeless youth some time.

Sure, there may be some kind of Pareto principal in play for the hardest 20% of cases to crack. Who cares? Let's eliminate 80% of the existing problem and worry about the rest when we get there.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the median HN reader has very little appreciation of the human reality of homelessness in the United States, and primarily see it through the lens of people at the extreme, visible margins. I know I used to until I got involved.

edit: I mean all of this in a very boring, matter of fact way, not some kind of holier-than-thou virtue signaling way. The 80% problem of homelessness is a tractable economic problem. While it's true that the United States has an almost dizzying level of propaganda demonizing poor people, it's also true that real homelessness is hard to spot because people have a natural instinct to preserve their and their family's dignity. The first time I came to terms with this was coaching debate in highschool. I had a varsity debater who couldn't afford pants to meet the dress code. Incredibly bright, academically successful kid. His father was an unemployed teacher working menial jobs, his mother was taking care of three kids. They lived in a tent at campsites. I had absolutely no idea. We obviously bought him pants and paid all his travel/etc. fees (he'd been making excuses to not go to events requiring travel). That's a very boring, normal case.

That family should have had a free or nearly free housing option. They did not. They still wouldn't.