Their reporting did no such thing. Neither the article itself nor the linked guide have any case study naming a single city trying something else and having it work.
It’s an attempt to create a fact recursively.
6 cities that have made substantial inroads on their homelessness problems. The way to do it seems to be to offer homeless people homes.
The article seems to answer the question of: where is it easiest to live on the street, as it mentions Berkeley and San Diego having good weather, therefore, being easier to live outside.
The only success story seems to be Houston which famously has a low cost of living. I’m not sure this qualifies as a solution to the problem.
Salt Lake City and Utah in general are the poster city/state for the program.
That said, I do feel it is cheaper to subsidize housing directly than to fund the grift heavy homeless industrial complex that we find in cities like SF or Portland or Seattle, where lots of money is spent with no results.
https://www.usich.gov/sites/default/files/document/19%20Stra...
Most of the other suggestions are banal, and self-evident qualitative improvements (assuming you agree with the authors that homeless are people to be helped, and not a problem to be solved, which I wouldn't take for granted on HN). eg. maybe cops and sanitation workers aren't equipped to help people, so why are we sending them? Maybe housing costs are too high and we should build affordable housing? and other points which ChatGPT could probably summarize.