Forgive me, but it sounds to me like an easy way to justify hating on the homeless. Chronic or otherwise.
Who remembers anyone who's simply camping for the day at the public library and using it to try and search for jobs?
I can tell you, I've seen all of those and more. I worked with homeless people long term in a shelter for 2 years, and, of the folks I came into direct contact with every day, I don't think 95% of them could survive contact with the real world of employment, paying rent, etc. due to disability (mental or physical), addictions, and/or general lack of a support system. Granted, I worked with people who were not in the shelter's higher tier programs (where housing was provided for a set period, and job assistance provided, in exchange for attending training and religious sessions). The more vulnerable ones, the ones I worked with, were the ones you'd see out on the street, collecting cans and bottles or panhandling.
People "hate" the homeless because the ones they come into contact with who are visibly homeless are often not functional members of society. Simply put, they violate social norms in a way that disgusts most people. Nobody "hates" someone who's couch surfing or living in a car, but who's clean, not an addict, and is trying to get out of the situation the best they can.
That just leaves me speechless
However, there's a large class of people that are not out there panhandling, not making themselves visible to regular people who are homeless, and are perfectly responsible and capable. These people can and are benefiting from programs like this.
Let's not blur this distinction for some misguided sense of social justice.
It really isn't difficult to imagine becoming homeless, which then leads to depression and other mental issues and then using drugs to escape that. So some proportion of the "problem group" are going to be redeemable too.
For example, I knew a man that was incredibly ornery, almost always drunk, and prone to occasional violent outbursts. Everybody (including the rest of us in the camp) avoided him. About a year after I left the camp, I ran into his daughter and learned that he had been a normal, successful eletrician that had sustained a severe brain injury at work, and his employer managed to avoid paying for workman's compensation or helping with his medical bills, leaving him permanently disabled and with no safety net.
I knew another man that also received a brain injury during a car crash in which he also lost the only extant copy of his masters' thesis in anthropology (the crash occurred in the 80s), and was in a similar position.
I knew a man that actually managed to get a section 8 apartment, but lost it because he opted to move back to the riverbottom and let a pregnant homeless woman stay in it in his stead. He was then also cut off from ALL social programs.
I saw a man get banned for life from an entire network of shelters spanning a huge chunk of the state for taking three (3!) single-use packets of Tide laundry detergent out of the facility.
I have also met a (very) small handful of genuinely odd people that just preferred to live mostly off the grid but still wanted to be near their families/veterinary clinic/spouse's grave/etc. but they are very much the exception and not the rule. I think that for some people with limited experience with the homeless, people that are chronically homeless might appear to all fall into this category.
I do 't think this happens all the time, or even to a majority of the population, but it is an idea that I have heard repeated numerous times.
From my experience, the details are almost always surprising, and the search for simple explanations or solutions is frustratingly unsatisfying.
Homelessness doesn't cause depression, which is a biological illness. Depression, uncontrollable anxiety, addiction, etc. are the root cause of the vast, vast majority of homelessness.
[1] http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/addiction.pdf [2] http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/Mental_Illness.pd...