Sure they could. Just pay for housing for all homeless SF residents. The only reason it doesn't happen is because people with money and power don't care enough to make the material sacrifices required to solve the problem.
We need to dramatically improve availability of affordable housing. That would get a lot of retirees and the like off the street.
But the ones who would, say, burn the house down while you weren't looking need a lot more than a free place to live.
If you care deeply about this issue, work on affordable housing. But please stop acting like homeless people are all puppies that need to be adopted by some well-meaning stranger. It's incredibly dehumanizing and tends to compound the problem.
* https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-pove...
There used to be an article online called "Diseases of the mind." One thing it talked about: When antibiotics were invented, thousands of people in asylums were successfully treated for syphilis and then set free. Another point it made: Mental illness tends to occur in demographic clusters exactly like infectious disease, which implies it might actually be due to infectious disease.
Let me suggest this for a little related reading:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140867
Edit: This is what I am working on:
Being homeless and helpless is crazy-making. I want to help people start making money, setting goals, etc while still homeless, like I did.
Video from The Loneliness Project:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYc85A8f2CM
It's aimed at the issue if isolation in the elderly. Homeless people also suffer from social isolation.
It's late. I'm tired. I will add that not all personal problems are about being crazy. Some people have learning disabilities or other barriers to regular employment.
I feel like this answer really sucks because of the framing of the problem in this subthread. I have tried to answer your actual question, which is a legitimate question, but I think the problem is more complicated than that.
:/
It's not just about availability of work, it's also about the availability of infrastructure, opportunities to make connections, in short, ensuring a decent quality if life.
If the current trend continues, this will probably push larger parts of the population to increasingly low-quality living spaces. This isn't even a problem restricted to homelessness.
A homeless person wanting to live only in SF is just like a starving person wanting only caviar; it's a luxury good that they're not going to realistically get because so many others want it as well.
If you want better availability of infrastructure, better opportunities to make connections, and a better quality of life, then the question is how to improve the quality of life at locations which currently have low cost real estate - and decoupling income from jobs is one way that can happen; for many of these places the living environment actually is quite good (mainly because you can afford much more space), but the main (only?) problem is the lack of local jobs; if the local people wouldn't be forced to move to where the jobs are, there's nothing wrong with the infrastructure.
Homeless people gravitate towards big cities because that's where the concentration of services tend to be. It is why I went to San Diego: there are enough soup kitchens there to eat every day, even if you have no money or benefits at all. I left San Diego after I got food stamps and had dealt with a few things where I felt I could cope without daily access to homeless services.
It's inhumane to suggest shipping people elsewhere and actively evicting them from a particular city because they are poor. This is a mentality similar to the one that was behind removing Native kids from their families, sending them to boarding schools, forbidding them from speaking their own language, etc.
I have a collection of websites I run. I actively encourage people to do things like develop portable income and move someplace cheaper. That is exactly how I got back into housing.
But one woman I spoke with couldn't move because she was currently a college student. She had huge student loans that would immediately come due if she dropped out of her program. She needed to complete her degree in order to have any hope of making her life work.
Other people have children and shared custody with the other parent, or they can't leave because they are on parole and are required to remain in the area or any number of other reasons.
Homeless people are still people. They still have many things going on in their lives that can give them ties to a particular place.
Homelessness arises out of complex, multifaceted problems. One-size-fits-all solutions do not work and tend to make things worse, not better.
Yes, but the scarcity of real estate hasn't changed - there haven't been any holes suddenly opening up in the ground and decreasing the amount if available space. Nevertheless, housing prices have skyrocketed (and so have the number of homeless from what I've read).
So to stay in your frame of discussion, it seems the definition of what is "non-luxury" living space has shifted considerably.
I am willing to actively encourage poor people to develop portable income and move someplace cheaper.
I am not willing to agree that we should ship people with boatloads of problems to the middle of fuck nowhere with no services, no shopping etc because burned out hell holes have nominally cheap housing.
That's potentially an even emptier life than they currently have.