Assuming your limited interface is representative, and there in fact always are more usable beds available than homeless people (I doubt this, but only have anecdotal evidence to the contrary from working with homeless people) - how does that translate into 'homelessness is elective'? I've seen a multitude of reasons that destroy peoples lives, and makes them unable to be a productive, rent-paying, law-abiding citizen.

Also, bed availability aside - I've heard many who are scared of the available shelters, due to threats, drug dealing or harassment from other ill-fortuned inhabitants.

Maybe we just define 'elective' differently.

I urge anybody who is worried about homelessness in their area, to try and dig deeper into possible root-causes for wide-spread homelessness. Maybe each and every individual homeless person have made bad or even catastrophic decisions that led them to their calamity, but if that really is the case (just for arguments sake - my experience says otherwise for most cases), why are so many making these bad decisions? Let's treat systemic problems as such, and make sure that we don't only focus on relieving symptoms, and maybe we find homelessness to be a solvable problem.