I have decades of experience with homelessness, as a journalist, a direct outreach activist and for brief periods as a homeless person myself, many years ago.

Most homeless people don't start out mentally ill or addicted to drugs, but people who are mentally ill or addicts often end up homeless because there's no support system for them, at least in the US. Your local mental health system is a lot more poorly funded and overstressed than you almost certainly realize, and the same is true of drug treatment programs. It's easy to say people shouldn't have started doing drugs; as easy as it is to say that nerds who can't just get laid should learn not to be creepy dorks, and just as ignorant of reality.

Many homeless people become dependent upon booze or drugs to either numb the suffering of their existence or to keep going under horrible conditions. If you weren't allowed to sleep anywhere for fear of arrest or assault, you'd probably take speed too, despite what you might believe about yourself from the comfort of having a roof over your head.

There are serious logistical problems inherent in all the solutions that affluent people consider "obvious", because they haven't actually thought them through or lack the life experience to understand why they won't work. Building housing out of the way where you don't have to see it is a nonstarter, and if you can't logically deduce why you have no business expressing a firm opinion about the situation... but I'll spell it out for the slow folks.

If you're homeless, and you get a room, what's the next step? You might think it's getting work but in fact, due to America's idiotic state/federal system, it's usually getting ID. Where do you get ID? Government buildings. Where are those usually located? Downtown. Where can a person with limited skills get work? Day labor. Where do you go for day labor work? Usually downtown. But where is the actual work done? Usually in the suburbs or industrial districts, which means you're commuting on a bus from wherever you got warehoused away so people don't have to look at you to downtown, and then off to the suburbs, often back downtown to get your pay, and then back out to Human Warehouse Land.

I met a couple in Vegas who'd lost their house due to both of them being laid off. They slept in a tent in an empty lot with a few hundred other people in an industrial area north of downtown, bothering no one. They both got work, but on the edges of town, so they had to get up before dawn to catch a bus to work.

So when the cops came at 7am to roust everyone out of this lot and slash up any tents left standing after the 15 minutes they gave everyone to gtfo (which I've seen happen with my own eyes), these folks weren't there... and came home to find all their possessions ripped to shreds and left in a Dumpster or to simply blow away on the street.

And that's not the exception: it's the norm for homeless folks. It's only getting worse due to the increasing cost of housing and living.

And maybe you don't give a rat's ass and you think life isn't fair. I agree with you. So let's tax the shit out of rich people and use the money to build houses for poor people who can then sit on their asses and do nothing if they want to.

Or is that the kind of injustice you actually do care about? Because of you think paying more taxes when you'll never want for a meal in your life is more unfair than sleeping in an empty lot because you lost some genetic lottery or don't have the Bank of Mommy and Daddy to cover you when you feel like starting a business, you might want to consider that you're not a rational decision maker but simply a bit of a prick.