[entelarust]

In seattle we have a ton of missions and shelters in the downtown area. Most have a one night limit, or a weekly one night limit. But Seattle is also very walkable and there is enough shelters to round-robin and have somewhere to stay/get a meal every night of the week.

We also had a downtown "free ride" with our bus system which let you take the bus within the downtown area free of charge to promote downtown living/working. But this ended up being dominated with loitering homeless. Luckily, they finally got rid of this last summer.

[stephengillie]

Seattle also has 6 or 8 tent cities, each literally about 200 people camping in a church parking lot or city park for a 2-week span.

This part of the planet is mild enough to support human life with a minimum of shelter. Areas with this attribute will always have humans trying to survive on fewer resources than average.