The solution is Land Value Tax. Just that will jettison the NYMBY attitude into anti-regulation, as opposed to pro-regulation, and then buildings will lower rents, which are the main cause and cost of homelessness.
Just because I can't afford a mansion in Beverly Hills, I don't choose to be homeless on someone's doorstep. I live more modestly somewhere else more affordable.
In Los Angeles or the Bay Area the more affordable places get gentrified (Boyle Heights) and then the people living there who were just getting by financially may have nowhere to go, depending on their living and work circumstances, and the price of renting in other areas (which can be extreme).
My imho / two-cents theory.
The reason it was depressing wasn't what you'd expect, I had expected to feel sorry for them but in turned out that the vast vast majority of them were perfectly happy to be homeless they had no want for a better life, they just wanted handouts and felt entitled to them, it was really a strange experience that stuck with me.
I suspect a lot of that is just pride. It's very common for people to say that they'd rather be doing what they're doing than something else, even when that's not the case.
I've been close to the edge in the past, a few different turns of luck and I could have easily been on the street. Fighting off thoughts of self-imposed euthanasia was one of several Bad Things I went through.
At any point during my worst struggles I would have happily checked myself into a competently run mental facility for long term, inpatient care. There is no such place.
Folks in these situations, without intervention, end up either dead or on the streets. Once they realize they can actually continue existing without being trapped in a constantly uncomfortable dystopia, they might find they are able to smile when offered a free meal, and relax into the generosity of others for a few minutes. After they've spent countless hours fearing for their safety and exposed without shelter while getting dirty looks from hordes of strangers, I think that's probably a little bit okay.
As for moving some place else: if you're for some reason financially in ruins, that option might not be really available to you. You cannot buy a home with bad credit, and landlords will more often than not check your credit scores and not take you on as a renter. Just moving to a cheaper area won't help.
Granted, you need the mental and physical capacity to earn money from the get go to even have a chance. I have seen people who had bad injuries, others who were extremely grief-stricken after losing a loved one, who at first could not hold a job. Once they recovered, they'd been homeless for "too long" (even if it had been just a few months) to get back into society, essentially, with nobody wanting to hire the "tramp" and nobody wanting to rent to that "tramp"; and you will only find a place if you're employed, and you'll only find employment if you have an address.
To reinforce this with my own life experience, I lived in Houston for five years, and it was possible for me to buy a two bedroom condo in the core urban area for 100k. There were run down neighborhoods in some of the more industrial areas where you could buy a house for less than that, in some cases as low as 30-40k for run down housing. These neighborhoods had transit access and basic public services. There was essentially zero homelessness.
Those neighborhoods aren’t glamorous, and I’m not trying to idealize them. People got out when they could. Crime was not extreme but it was higher than the rest of the city.
But it turns out that even most people with mental problems could find a way to live with a roof over their head when the cost may be in the low hundreds per month. And just having a home makes the rest of the problems you’re struggling with a lot easier to tackle.
Houston isn’t a beautiful city, I moved there not because I wanted to but when the recession hit because it was the only place I had a job offer. But it gets an unfair bad wrap. It turned out to be quite a nice place to live, with tons of diversity and arts and culture, and the best food scene you can imagine.
It’s not the unregulated Wild West that people like to pretend it is, but in general the building codes are very simple and predictable, and for whatever reason the culture there is strongly anti-nimby (relative to the rest of the US). An extremely common pattern while I lived there was for old bungalows from the 1930’s to be bought up, demolished, and replaced by two modern townhomes.
People complained that they really liked the bungalows and that the townhomes weren’t as pretty. That was probably true. But the people buying those homes were ordinary folks, teachers and firefighters and mechanics and whatnot who could afford to raise a family in the nicer more walkable parts of the city without praying for a public housing assistance lottery or anything like that.
It’s bittersweet, but Houston being willing to let the cute old neighborhoods incrementally turns over into denser more modern neighborhoods is what made it a place that anyone could afford to live, and I think not coinicidentally there was a huge culture of entrepreneurship and loads of opportunity and upward mobility in the local economy.