US Authoritarianism

It's far more complicated than that for many of the homeless. A really high proportion have chronic mental health problems like schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder. These people cannot maintain even a basic apartment. Fires are common. As are faeces smeared on the walls, major structural damage, dead animals, bullet holes and use of firearms inside the premises. Throwing a mentally unwell person into a home to fend for themselves doesn't work. The mental health treatment has to come first. It can take months, if not years, to help them out of their hole.

Another significant portion of the homeless have chronic addiction. In addiction treatment, we say that "a locking door is a death sentence" because the LAST thing you want is to give a junky unsupervised privacy to shoot up as often as they like. Apartments often turn into local hubs for dealing and sex work. This attracts all kinds of unsavory characters and crime - especially violent crime. You don't want to know what a junky would be willing to do to get a fix. A major part of this problem is called "destigmatization." This is a great documentary on how it has so thoroughly failed in Vancouver, specifically.

Both groups require intensive support before being given housing. Not after and not at the same time.

A studio apartment can be over $3,000 in the Bay Area. Meanwhile, there are like five homeless people on every block of the city I lived in with five-digit population. The city would need to find some way to seize land, without calling for a vote, in order to have enough housing for everyone since rent control has been voted against for over a decade.

The main issue is that people would vote to drive the homeless into the sea before they would vote to house them.