Canada

I do volunteer work for a couple homeless orgs in Toronto. The common misconception is "you can't solve homelessness because they're all addicts or crazy" and that's simply not true. First and foremost the addicts and the mentally ill are the last groups that are going to seek out assistance. Food lines for example are generally going to be vacant of both those groups. but said lines are still massive.

Next you have the fact that the vast majority of the mentally ill don't even know they're homeless. This is another thing that is rarely if ever acknowledged. You can try to talk to these people and in most cases they say they have a home, that they're housed, and they're just "out and about" right now. With the addicts it's just fix to fix. that's all they are concerned about. Neither group will ask for help because as previously stated A. they believe they're not homeless or B. they're just looking for the next fix. When approached and actually offered help they will generally accept it, it's just that no one has reached out and told them where to go for said help.

There's also that misconception that they will refuse to live by the rules imposed on them. this is make belief and I've never come across any place that has "rules" preventing someone from doing something. It's also a false narrative that shelters bar drug use. this isn't true at all. Shelters will provide safe consumption areas for users and try to provide said user with help.

In most cases the homeless population, currently, consists of the elderly, women escaping domestic abuse, middle age single women who have lost their primary source of income, LGBTQ+ youth, the physically disabled, or simply people who lost their jobs. the most shocking uptick are middle age women. it's REALLY bad for that right now. So can homelessness be solved for these people listed? 100% and doing so you'd see a massive reduction of people sleeping outside in your average city. A homes first initiative with needs based assistance can work. in 2013 a study in Toronto was shown that the city spends on average 75K a year PER homeless individual. this included shelter costs, medical, and other resources. that's 75K per person in YOUR tax dollars that went towards not solving anything. Providing housing + assistance would be massively cheaper in the long run.

The primary barrier to solving this aren't the people sleeping rough. It's the people with roofs over their heads who simply don't want to pay for it and feel these people are getting handouts. that's it.

Step one is getting the easy cases housed, the ones whose issues are largely just financial or who want to do necessary meds, therapy, etc. and are just waiting for the opportunity. Then we can work on the hard cases, and yes, we need more services than just housing there. But if we never do step one, we won't get to step two.

Look up what Finland did.

Homelessness is a policy choice.

So what did you think about the parts of the article which described what they are doing to address those very challenges?

The line between having a home and not having one is far thinner and more attributable to chance than this comment acknowledges. I am not religious, but the statement "There but for the grace of God go I" is something that applies here. Family circumstances, health circumstances, community circumstances are largely a roll of the dice and we live with the outcomes, and those dice can be re-rolled at any time in a person's life through major personal tragedy or just an accumulation of factors that amount to as much. Truly, there but for the grace of God go any of us.

and the person doesn’t want to live near others.

They'll solve that by only homing the people who DO want to live near others.

The rest can and should enjoy the freedom of Canada's wilderness.

Can you at least concede that a housing-first model can turn a big homelessness crisis into a smaller one, no? Also note the Your Way Home plan is more than simply stuffing people in rooms, it starts with outreach, meeting people where they are, to determine how and when they might want to move into more stable shelter, and what their other needs are.

There is a book called Abundance written by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that references a study finding the correlations for homelessness and the main issue for homelessness is lack of housing due to limited supply and rising prices and demand. Housing first feels like a great first solution, but also creating more affordable housing to prevent more homelessness and then allow for some mobility upwards.

Then what do you suggest?