You are not describing homelessness. Andre has a home. You are describing a class that has resorted to this type of activity due to inequities in society.
Andre is evidence that simply giving people what they need is not enough to stop criminal behavior.
But who is to know what Andre's life would have been like if he had been given what he needed when he was 14? You can't expect someone to spend some of their most formative years on the street and then bounce back just because they suddenly have a roof over their head.
Providing housing certainly is not always sufficient to solve everyone's problems. Plenty of people who've never been homeless commit crimes, develop drug habbits and find other ways to destroy their lives.
Housing is however, necessary, if you want to have any luck helping people. Fixing economic, psychological, substance, or emotional problems becomes many times harder. When people are desperate and are treated liked outcasts regularly, deterring criminal behavior also becomes several times harder.
So yes, housing does not fix everything. It is however a necessary first step in any plan to deal with the homelessness and its comorbidities. Any approach that doesn't start with housing is doomed to fail.
The comment you were replying to wasn’t making any sort of a judgement, what they said was straight up just factually describing the current situation. They weren’t blaming Andre for becoming homeless. They were using him as an illustration that just giving free housing isn’t some magic pill that will solve everything, and the effective solutions need to be more comprehensive than that.
The reality is that people often do make reasonably good decisions from the set of decisions available to them - and that set is often quite bad. Andre's only source of income is selling stolen goods. If he'd stop doing that, wouldn't it be worse for him because he'd have no income? People will say "he should just get a job" but have you tried getting a job? Like, ever? It's far from trivial, especially if you have a criminal record! So, given the choice between A (easy and effective) or B (difficult and probably ineffective) or C (having no money) the best decision is obvious. Choosing A is a good decision. And if we don't want Andre to choose A, we need to give him a better option.
Oftentimes it starts with growing up:
> Andre said he has struggled with homelessness on and off since he was 14. That’s when he started selling at 3rd and Pine. He’s been there almost everyday since. He’s 30 now.
If Andre had a computer at 14 he could be commenting on Hacker News today. Or with other factors he could be an athlete, an artist, an entrepreneur, idk, anything. But he got started on the "petty crime to pay bills" path and that constrained his options from then on.
When we combine this known fact - that his crime begins with not having a stable childhood, which is largely determined by who you have as a parent and how your society treats them - with the attitude that "everything you do is your fault" - we come to the conclusion that it must be Andre's fault that his parents were poor and homeless, which is absurd.
But "end homelessness" was never only about simply providing shelter.