So, sure, maybe it works if people sign up for it and show they actually want to do something.
But it clearly doesn't work if you just hand it out and hope for the best.
That borders on irrelevant when 33% of your homeless population qualify as having a traumatic brain injury, etc. Hospital stays are about $5K per day--if a homeless person hits the hospitals for 20 days in a year you've already spent more than $100K.
After Saint Reagan (hack ... spit) "closed the institutions", there was supposed to be something better. That never happened. So, now you have the mentally ill cycling between the streets, the emergency rooms, and the prisons.
You can't fix homelessness without first fixing healthcare. Otherwise you're just rearranging the deck chairs.
The Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which made it possible to close the institutions, was almost unanimously passed in the Assembly and the Senate, in an unholy union of civil libertarian do-gooders and budget cutting conservatives. In fact, the lone dissenter in either legislature was a law-and-order Republican.
And it's not like Democrats have been shut out of the government of California ever since.
The funding for the alternatives was also slated to come from the federal government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1...
But Reagan and a Republican controlled Senate killed it. Because funding was supposed to magically "trickle down" from thin air.
And, through it all, the mental health facilities were always chronically underfunded.
If you pass a bill that destroys mental health systems for the sake of civil libertarian concerns, "its issues weren't magically fixed through half a century later, which was totally unforeseeable" is not a good excuse.
Why? Because they're not permitted to use illegal drugs in the provided housing facilities, they will lose the housing. These "houseless" people basically have two homes, the streets are their summer home where they get high and continue to be a nuisance. The provided housing goes mostly unoccupied in these instances. Having written that, maybe the analogy works better in reverse - the public housing is the unoccupied summer home? Either way, it's totally not being used as intended because of the restrictions placed on the housing.
When I was homeless I lived outside because if you have a decent tent and sleeping bag it's perfectly comfortable, and I like to have a weapon handy no matter what and I reject any living circumstance that would prohibit that. At no point did drugs enter the equation, but if they did, it wouldn't have changed the calculus.
I actually think if they did just give 100k to homeless people a year that it would actually solve itself.
The problem is they give 100k to grifters who say they'll do something about it.
This is where good faith opinions can differ. Do these folks still deserve freedom/autonomy or can we force them into rehab or mental heath treatments? If the only crime they have committed is not having a bed to sleep in, I'm not sure I'm comfortable with taking away their freedoms. I'm closer than I was five years ago but I'm not universally there yet.
I got to meet the "org executives" (it was really only the two of them, grifting, in the entire org) who were collecting a nice fat government check per person enrolled in their program. They came by to see how we were doing, and were there for less than 15 minutes. Two ladies in their 50s who were more interested in talking about how excited they were to be going off to pick up their new company cars after lunch, matching Jaguar XJs.