Though I strongly disagree with the overall sentiment here, as well as some of your specific statements, your post touches on some interesting points.

In an earlier post, I mentioned a very, very small group of people that I have met that were almost mystifyingly homeless despite them having very few limiting factors that regularly contribute to homelessness.

The one thing they all had in common was that they stayed in places that didn't have harsh winters or dangerously hot summer (e.g. coastal California). I have not, however, met any person that fits that description in the Oregon/Washington deserts, Utah, Colorado, or even inland California.

In a nutshell, yes it is technically possible to sleep outside in coastal California without risking death from exposure. However, climate does not mitigate the risks posed by arrest for illegal lodging, violence from those around them (other homeless people, and others that are simply cruel), starvation, theft etc. It also does nothing to help with access to (even critical, immediate) healthcare, counseling, education or really any other factor that helps people get into a better situation.

As far as smartphones go, I agree that access to one can be life-changing to a homeless person, bt I could not disagrew more strongly with your characterization of that access making living on the street -with all the risks that that entails- as "less unattractive". To be earnest, I suppose I don't understand that point. If your landlord shows up with a police officer to forcibly remove from your home for not paying rent, the relative "unattractiveness" of what comes next for you isn't a variable that is taken into consideration. You have what you can carry, and hopefully an idea of where to walk next.

If "what you can carry" includes a smartphone, your chances of getting access to help is certainly improved dramatically, and yes, if you can find a spot that is near an open wireless AP, you might watch some Netflix. It is hardly the equivalent of living in a 3k/month apartment.

From my experience, cars and vans break down or get towed, phones break, phone plans run out of data (or in some cases, phone minutes. The poorest peole often still don't have reliable access to unlimited plans, even in 2018), you can get banned from coffee shops for making others uncomfortable by your appearance alone (people don't like to look at a person that has to carry all of their belongings with them).

I lived in a car for a while, but sold it for $300 for a train ticket to a place with fewer police. I had an eight year old laptop running an old distro of Ubuntu (without a working battery) that I traded for a weekend inside during a particularly bad cold snap. On two different occasions I have had to leave every single object I owned behind, and start over with only the clothes on my back and whatever was in my jeans' pockets.

If your point is that there is a differnce between homeless people and, as you put it, "homeless" people, then yes I agree. The biggest difference here is that of access to resources that can help bring one off the street, and whether or not perfectly healthy, capable people are making intentional decisions to reject those resources. The latter group is a genuinely fascinating anomaly, and does not reflect the reality of the problem.

Personally, I find that "move somewhere that's more desirable or manageable" to be problematic. The only reaon why I was able to leave a particular city was because I had a car to sell for tickets. If I hadn't, I simply would not have left. Even when I got there, I didn't have two nickels to rub together, so housing prices didn't really matter.

I would encourage anyone that feels this way about the homeless to do a bit more digging, or just have a conversation with a few people that are currently or were recently homeless. This particular attitude of lumping everybody under the umbrella of The Worst Examples doesn't seem to serve the goal of fixing this problem.