I find it very frustrating to keep running into comments like this on HN. I was willing to go almost anywhere in the Western US to get off the street. There are damn few places that aren't senior housing, aren't trailers, aren't the absolute muddle of nowhere where it would be along drive to even get groceries (thereby adding to the expense of living there because you need a car, etc) and can be had for under $500 per month.
Even small towns aren't that cheap.
I would like to actively foster the development of online incomes in small towns and rural areas. The internet savvy people are also mostly in the big cities and many rural places lack high speed internet.
If we could somehow supply good internet to such areas and help people earn money online so that the lack of good jobs isn't an issue, now you are talking about a real solution. But most of the people saying that homeless folks need to just move someplace cheap aren't talking about helping them make money online. They are just ignoring the fact that these people simply cannot currently get their needs met at all outside of the big city and are being arrested for being in the big city where services are.
I run a bunch of websites. I can't get Patreon support sufficient to let me develop them full time. I didn't get the economic development job I applied for last December.
I think I have actual workable solutions that don't just throw people to the wolves. And I can't get traction because basically no one really wants this solved. They just want to blame the homeless and not actually work on real solutions.
There is a nationwide shortage of affordable housing. This is not unique to big cities. So sending people to small towns with no services and poor job prospects isn't currently a fix. And it is starting to make me spit nails to hear that.
Meanwhile, tech giants want to eliminate like 80 percent of jobs and replace it with UBI. Then articles that state that in the first paragraph fail to actually explore this dystopian vision and, instead, wax eloquent about how do gooder social workers will live so much better with UBI to supplement their underpaid job. They don't actually get into what life looks like if we hand everyone $10k annually with no hope of ever having a job again because robots are doing everything.
And people wonder why I'm suicidal so much of the time. Good god.