My Midwest college town has a frightening number of homeless, and most of them don’t look like drug addicts. They look like people who lost their jobs and their homes and were kicked out onto the street.
From a good source - there are three types of homeless.
There are the “urban campers”. those people have resources, family, etc. They just enjoy living in the streets (believe or not, there are a lot of them!).
There are the people who got some family problems, like hostile divorce, lost job, etc. . which forced them on the streets (yes, there are some like that on the street, the media try to convince us that all are like that, we the conservative, tend to discard them all), and then there are the mentally ill and drug addicts.
There should be different approach to these groups.
The urban campers should be banned from the streets, the poor shall be given some job and the mentally ill should be sent to hospital.
None of them really need a shelter, homelessness is a symptom, not a disease.
apparently, all of them have some money/resources from welfare, food stamps, and all those kitchens and thrifts stores. They do not really starve, what they really need is to be treated like individuals and address their underlying problems.
Unfortunately our welfare/police/lawsuits system is exactly the wrong medicine!