[mcv]

I think the city should just provide enough shelters for the homeless. That seems cheaper than running public transport that's not getting used the way it's intended.

It's hard to fix every cause of homelessness, but providing shelters is pretty easy.

[xzcat]

The rationale for why "just add more shelters" is hard has been explained to me as:

* nobody wants a shelter built near them * even if it does get built, it's often women/children only

and the second bullet point isn't (afaik...) just sexism or anything, it's just picking risk categories. Consider all the following like you were an insurance company trying to appraise how costly it is to do business with a group of people: Apparently homeless men are, collectively, more expensive to shelter than women/children because they're plagued by more expensive issues - more violence, more drug issues, etc. So homeless shelters frequently can't afford to operate if they try to shelter men. So it becomes an issue of "women/children only" or "it's literally too expensive to safely run the (both-genders) shelter to be feasible".

[mcv]

But leaving those men on the street in also expensive for society. I understand this is how it works for any individual shelter, but for the city as a whole, they're going to be paying for this one way or another, whether they provide shelters, let them sleep on the bus (a great place for people with violence/drug issues) or just abandon them to the streets to let them figure it out on their own. I think providing shelters, and maybe guidance with their problems, is still going to be the best option for the city. As long as they can look at the entire context, and not just a single shelter.