[unregistereddev]

The currently in-vogue answer is "give them houses", but your answer is more attainable. When someone asks me for money I take it as a reminder to donate to organizations that help the homeless and near-homeless.

The best homeless shelters have programs targeted at helping people graduate into apartments. They have social workers and counselors that try to help people overcome addictions. They partner with charities that collect donated home goods and turn them into a "free store" so that when someone graduates into an apartment they are able to furnish it. This is how the shelters in my area operate, but many shelters do not have the resources to offer this many resources.

The best food banks do not question your level of need, but offer food and hygiene supplies to anyone who asks. If someone owns a car and home but has run across hard times, these no-questions-asked resources help them make do without losing their car or their home.

Giving to homeless shelters and food banks helps us to have better homeless shelters and food banks. Shelters that have more resources are able to offer more to those in need, including helping people graduate to stable living conditions.

[PittleyDunkin]

> but your answer is more attainable.

It's also just institutionalizing homelessness rather than trying to address the cause of the problem: refusing to give (or subsidize sufficiently) people who need houses.

> The best homeless shelters have programs targeted at helping people graduate into apartments.

The capacity and cost of this is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the problem with homelessness we face today. It's nice, it's good that there are some resources available, but it's not going to lessen the overall problem of homelessness.

[consteval]

I don't believe that is the root cause of homelessness. Rather, the root cause is actually lower-level and is a fundamental flaw of capitalism.

For all of time, there will always be a subset of people unable to work. Homeless people aren't just homeless, they're jobless, many permanently so. Due to mental illness, disabilities, drugs, etc.

Ultimately giving these people houses does not solve the problem, because they will still be very unsuccessful in a capitalist system. You need a job to survive. What happens if you don't have work?

We don't have a solution for this. Typically, we do bandaids. Retirement funds for those who can't work, medicare, social security. That helps a bit for those people who did work but no longer can.

SOME homeless people can be "trained" to be ideal capitalistic laborers. Most can't, and never will be, because of physical limitations of their person. We don't know what to do with them. Previously, we just institutionalized them. Disqualified them from society. That was awful, so now we let them participate. But they fail, and always will fail.

Ultimately, there is no way around it regardless of the solution you choose. There will always be a subset of people that cannot work and will never work.