https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Nevertheless, thank you for showing your privilege. Judgement made.
Not to mention, I don't know where you folks develop your anecdotes -- you really do meet a lot of totally ordinary, high-functioning adults in soup kitchen and community pantry scenarios. They just happen to be broke and hungry.
At any given time, most homeless families are only temporarily homeless, and most hungry families are only temporarily hungry. Life has its ups and downs. Most of the adults spend most of their lives working, just like everyone else does.
The "hardcore," long-term homeless, who spend years at a time unhomed, are not terribly representative of the great mass of Americans who have spent some time unhomed.
Poverty is endemic in America, and it's a hard time to be a working stiff, especially if you work in, say, the Bay area, as the comic's author did. ("Santa Luna" seems like a very thinly fictionalized Santa Cruz.)
A man like the author, in 2020, could very well find himself in the encampment he so obviously feared.
The comment that started this discussion involved observing people visiting a soup kitchen. Short-term homeless may outnumber long-term homeless in an absolute metric (I was homeless for a few months in 2014) but long-term homeless make many more lifetime visits to a soup kitchen and therefore comprise a higher proportion of the people you meet. They also comprise a higher proportion of the people who are at any given time living on the street. If you solve short-term homelessness but not long-term homelessness, you haven't made nearly as much of a dent in the shelter beds and tent cities as you have in the quoted statistic of people who are ever homeless.
I'm sure you do meet "high-functioning adults" in soup kitchens, but I would also doubt they're the modal attendees.
For example if a typical longtime homeless person would make (round number) 400 visits a year, and a typical transiently homeless person would make around 40 visits a year, then if eg there were 20 transiently homeless people a year for every longtime homeless person, then the makeup of a soup kitchen would be two-thirds transiently homeless.
I do get it. When people think about homelessness, when they cast a ballot, we don't want them to think about the "hardcore" (as you put it) unsympathetic homeless. We want them to think about the more relatable people experiencing transitional homelessness. People who are leaving an abusive situation, people working a job that didn't cover their rent, etc. The Rosa Parkses of homelessness.
And that sucks. It sucks that the "hardcore" homeless are so stigmatized that the only acceptable way to talk about helping them is to frame a larger problem in which they can be hidden away as an unrepresentative minority.
The thing about what you call hardcore homelessness is the serious mental health issues many of those people have. And that is much bigger harder issue.