Vancouver is doing a lot more for homeless people than SF/LA and it is still not working.
This is underreported to a criminal degree.
Want to solve the homeless problem? Adopt one. Let one live in your home. You'll quickly come to find how even the most sympathetic cases ended up on the street in the first place.
We couldn't keep a roof over the head of a schizophrenic family member, and there are no grants or stipends available to renovate your own home to the security standards of a mental hospital. Unlike problematic foster children, there is no state agency that pretends to have your back in this endeavor. Meanwhile you're cohabitating with someone regularly insulting, screaming at, assaulting, battering, and occasionally molesting your family members, which does wonders for their mental health. Normally your entire family has to be incarcerated in state prison to share this sort of experience-- the mentally-ill adhere to the Rules of Society about as well as the criminal population. So in failing to solve one problem, you create five more.
Even more fun in California, since they become tenants of yours after something retarded like 14 days and the savvy ones will shake you down when you try to [unlawfully] evict them.
This isn't a problem we can currently solve. It's hard not to criminalize the mentally-ill when their behavior is indistinguishable from that of actual criminals. The only difference seems to be "they can't help it," which is the same argument that has been made to excuse criminal behavior itself. It's not an excuse to coddle either group.
The general public gets terrorized by the homeless and vote for any politician that offers a solution. The politicians offer 'solutions' that only enrich themselves and their NGO/developer friends (more money for more housing!), while not actually addressing the problem of homeless terrorizing the general public. The homeless just keep doing what they do, enabled by the politicians who seek to keep them locked into their destructive lifestyles while pretending to help. The homeless are given de facto permission to continue harassing regular people in the street, vandalizing and stealing from shops, wander through working class neighborhoods screaming in the middle of the night, etc.) They are permitted to do all of this because it keeps the pressure on the general public to vote for the corrupt politicians who profit from it.
The only way to break this cycle is to clue the public into the dynamic, but most people who figure it out will move away for greener pastures, instead of sticking around and trying to reform local politics.
I don't know if modern institutions could be better. However we know they failed in the past. If you want to propose them again, you need to provide some proof that they new ones will be better than the old.
Well, I'm glad someone is because everyone else seems to be worse off as a result
Fortunately mass incarceration and just doing nothing aren't the only two options.