JFK setting out to shutdown the state mental hospitals and federalize mental health broke the system, and that was also during the era when the left started shutting down flop houses and boarding houses where a person could get room and board from perhaps an old lady or two.
That was also the era when the left and the courts were blocking vagrancy laws and being able to force people into mental health care.
“flop houses and boarding houses where a person could get room and board from perhaps an old lady or two”
I stayed in a couple of those in San Francisco in the early 70s when I had a field service job and it wasn’t worth keeping an apartment in SF for the few weeks between jobs during the year. The ones I stayed at were a notch above a flop house - they were called “Guest houses.” You got a small room with a sink, a toilet and shower down the hall, and a communal (i.e., living room) room. I forgot that “urban renewal” destroyed most of those places as well as all of the tenements that were cheap housing.
You listed a lot of the bad things that were done to destroy the lowest-cost housing and de-institutionalized people who needed care.
The federal government has really screwed things up the past 65-70 years when it comes to low-income housing, care, and the flood of drugs.