Some of the ways it goes bad places:

1. Defining the help based on their status as homeless. This means they need to be on the street to get help. Getting off the street can disqualify them for ongoing services.

2. Many programs to help people with serious problems come with a lot of strings attached. They are often highly controlling. Jumping through the hoops involved can be a huge burden in its own right.

3. Terrible, terrible "concentration of poverty" effects.

One of the problems with living in, for example, public housing projects is that everyone you know is poor. You lack access to human capital, to people in the know, to people with connections and power.

Homeless programs take that issue and cube it. You are standing in line with addicts and people who are seriously ill, who are smoking while you wait or who smell strongly of cigarette smoke or of marijuana and who are very germy, coughing and sniffling constantly. It's a great way to make sure you stay sick and get sicker. It's also a very challenging social environment to crowd together a bunch of people who are very stressed out and who typically lack good coping mechanisms for dealing with social friction.

4. Some of the worst programs charge money to participants and/or use them as free labor to help sustain the service. These services typically have a very poor track record of actually helping people solve their personal problems.

Anyone's personal problems are always a combination of two factors: Them and the rest of the world. If you are the wrong gender in a sexist environment or the wrong color in a racist environment or the wrong socioeconomic class in a classist environment, other people can be an active barrier to you being able to solve your problems.

I have about six years of college. I was homeless because I have an incurable medical condition and I was clear that working a corporate job and living in a mold filled apartment were barriers to me being healthy and solving my problems. I'm not mentally ill and I don't take drugs. I chose to go sleep in a tent while figuring out how to make money online so I could get myself healthier.

The one thing I consistently asked in various online forums was for help figuring out how to make money online. I mostly didn't get any such help. I got pissed all over and told I was "panhandling the internet" and just a charity case.

I did eventually figure out how to make a little money online. That plus paying off my student loan helped me get off the street. My income is still incredibly low. I still have an incurable medical condition. I still deal with sexism and classism as barriers to my income goals.

If I had been treated with the same respect as anyone else on Hacker News who is trying to figure out how to create a profitable online business and taken seriously in my goal of developing an earned income, I believe I would have developed that income much quicker and would be making a lot more money. Having to figure it all out myself with no one willing to toss me a clue and people actively pissing on my efforts has been quite the uphill battle.

So when I hear you say that things going what I describe as "a bad place" may be the right place if lack of a home is not their biggest problem, what I hear is justification for intentionally keeping people's problems alive out of prejudice. What I hear is the assumption that people who are currently very poor or who have mental health issues or an addiction don't really deserve the kind of help that would give them a shot at getting a good life.

Because that's how I got treated and it actively made it harder to resolve my issues.