I once qualified for assistance with job hunting based on my handicap. Thankfully, I was offered a corporate job making better than minimum wage about the time I completed the lengthy intake process or they would have had me permanently underemployed and destitute instead merely trapped in poverty for a decade or more.

Please note that I spoke of opportunity, not jobs nor jobs training programs. Lots of job training programs et al actively limit opportunity. They don't want their participants to get too uppity or ambitious.

> So shelter beds go unused

Shelter bed usage in Seattle runs at 90% as of last year, with low reported use rate before that being an artifact of bad reporting rather than reflecting actual conditions [1].

[1]: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/qa-with-p...

If true, then there is something wrong with the policy that all shelters need to be sober. Introduce some number of shelters—in parts of the city where high drug usage is a problem—that include safe use spaces (i.e. with medical access, clean needles and dispose boxes, no drug arrest policy etc.)

LA tried it too.

There are several thousand shelter beds that go empty each night in LA County, include nearly a thousand in Skid Row, because the shelters have sobriety requirements and most of the homeless would rather be high than housed, especially in the summer.

In the winter, it's usually easier to convince the homeless to knock off the contraband and use the shelters, especially after the first dozen or so weather-related exposure deaths.

Note that homelessness is not a problem of the same scale as Seattle in many cities around the country, and around the world.

These cities have in turn some measures and initiatives that are proven solutions that reduces homelessness. Note that not all of them could work in Seattle, but some of them might.