> Though, while we differ in our perceptions of what has been attempted, and how sincerely those efforts were made - we agree on solutions. The solutions require serious efforts from a very empowered local community (which would imply state funding to support those efforts).
I live in Northern California in the middle of ground zero for this issue. Ten years ago I would have agreed fully with what you wrote. But since then I've been paying very close attention to how this has all unfolded at the state, regional and local levels. I also happen to have a lot of social contacts who work at the city and country levels in the agencies directly responsible for dealing with homelessness, ranging from social workers to funding agencies to law enforcement.
Based on what I've seen in my community, in the media and what my friends who are directly involved have told me privately (which is more frank and somewhat different than what their agencies say publicly), my opinion has changed. Most fundamentally, I now understand that "homelessness" shouldn't ever be thought of as a single issue because there are vastly different kinds with different causes, consequences, costs and possibility of remedies. Most of the serious societal problems related to homelessness come from the particular subset which are chronically unhoused and treatment resistant, primarily due to chronic substance abuse and mental illness. Sadly, for many of this type, there are no consistently effective solutions - and no amount of funding can reliably solve it at scale - because any lasting solution requires first solving the underlying chronic addiction and/or mental illness. Unfortunately, these are wickedly complex, deeply individual problems and lasting solutions require making difficult "no win, lesser of evils" choices more related to morality than politics. Respecting an individual's right of self-determination can quickly conflict with their right to choose self-destruction.
I now understand that there ARE no "good solutions" to this type of chronic homelessness. Even if you or I were anointed "king of the world" and given virtually unlimited funding, at best, things might be a little better but the fundamental underlying causes would still remain unsolved. All solutions which might make a substantial, long-term improvement on chronic addiction and mental illness at scale involve moral positions I could not personally enforce on other people, such as forced treatment, conditionally withholding treatment or actively enabling essentially "slow-motion suicide" (as a social worker friend of mine called it).