When I was young, due to some bad business deals and other factors, my family went homeless for a few months. We lived in a cheap motel, 4 of us to the room. We had some hot plates and cooked some in the room and used the bathroom sink to wash up afterwards. It wasn't too bad to be honest, we had food, shelter, clothing, jobs and each other.

We weren't the only "housing challenged" residents of this motel. By the late night activity in the hallway and the parking lot, most seemed to have some kind of severe addiction problem, though there were a couple illegal immigrants who had secured a room through a friend while they worked for remittance money. On more than one occasion, drunk/high people tried to force entry into our room later at night. My father slept by the door with a hammer after the second time.

Despite this, I'm not an authority on homelessness, but I know it sucks. For people like us, without severe mental, substance or family problems, wanting the make the sucking part stop is what kept us working on getting out of the situation. So I understand the ideas behind some of these notions around "not encouraging" people to be homeless. Having lived in those kinds of conditions before and not minded them terribly, to be perfectly honest, I've had moments where I've thought "if I could have a room and food, without working at all, I wouldn't bother looking for a job". So I fundamentally get where that's coming from.

However, I also have several people in my family with severe psychological and addiction issues, and recognizing these same issues in the homeless I see out on the street every day, I understand that "getting out of the suckiness of homelessness" is not a major driver for them. Their hierarchy of needs is often screwed up and insomuch as they are able to satisfy that hierarchy, getting shelter (and even food) is often not a major priority for them. So no amount of having food kitchens or not having them is going to be a major decision point for them to suddenly come off their additions, become sane, and become productive members of society. However, I do think that people should be able to eat a safe meal if they need it.

Now that I'm long out of that situation, educated and affluent, I also suffer from NIMBYism. I worked very hard and have spent significant amounts of time and money to live in an area where I don't really have to worry about the kinds of negative environmental factors and activities that come with handling large homeless populations. I don't want a food kitchen anywhere near where I live. Not because I don't believe in feeding the homeless, people need to eat today not after a six month job training program, but because for people who aren't working their way out of homelessness, there are large numbers of negative issues that homeless people bring along with them and it contributes to an environment I don't want to be in.

So this is a very tough issue. However, just offering services isn't really a good answer either. When I spent some time in Portland, I was struck by the number and permanence of the homeless population there. It's not a particularly great outdoor environment, but the large number of free services in the downtown area have created a more or less stable population of self-supporting homeless. The principle complaint residents I've spoken to have is that it's great these services exist, but once they've been served, what's next?

I've observed poor coordination among homeless service organizations. You go here for food, here for the shelter, here for blankets, here for a job, if you're extremely lucky you might be getting medical/psychological/addiction care on a sporadic basis.

But what really needs to happen is a centralized "get off the streets" center. If a homeless person wants any services, they have to check in there and they must participate in all of the appropriate services proscribed to them. I'm also an advocate that they should immediately be working in return for the services. Every city has loads of work that needs doing, picking up litter, emptying public trash bins, park beautification, cleaning up graffiti, repainting bridges, filling in potholes, etc. In exchange a person who's "in the program" should get 3 hot meals a day, a small dorm room with a door they can lock, free psych/rehab/basic medical clinic treatment. They should be scored on participation, and if they do well, move on to more advanced programs like finding rent-controlled/shared housing, real jobs that pay money, mass-transit subsidies etc.

A friend of mine had a horrible experience and ended up in a battered women's shelter with 3 kids. The program they put her on was better than any homeless program I've seen. Within weeks, she had a job, psych counseling for her and her kids, and in a couple months had moved out of the shelter and was splitting a town home with another woman from the program at hugely subsidized rent (based on how much she made at her job). Within a year they had found her a two bedroom apartment just for her family. This was for a person who had money in her bank account, work history and some job skills, and a sizable social network who helped her out during her ordeal with food, money and places to stay.

It wasn't perfect, but I was surprised at how much better it was for her than for the homeless who don't really have anything at all.