While all your ideas have problems individually, modern homelessness is a mental health problem, rather than one of housing.
While perfectly healthy people choosing eking out a meager living of booze or drugs by panhandling on the subway is irritating, the real issue is that many homeless are not homeless by choice, but because they have mental illness that inhibits their ability to work or associate with people.
Any solution aimed at punishing the voluntary homeless while ignoring the mentally ill is missing the point.
Umm. The characterization of homelessness as a mental health issue is very convenient for not facing the ongoing changes in our society. While it may be true that some segment of the homeless population is mentally ill; that's the tip of the iceberg for the real problem.
Young, wealthy, privileged people like the majority of the audience of this site have no concept of how easy it is to fall through the cracks and lose everything.
And the problem of poverty and homelessness is only going to grow. The majority of Generation X has NO Savings for retirement [1] and what do you think will happen to them?
And in fact one of the cities having an epic and fairly invisible homelessness problem is San Francisco [2].
There may be a very small minority of people who choose to be unhoused; but they are generally not the problem.
Mental health is definitely a part of the homeless problem, but it's not the majority. 37% of homeless in SF are reported to have a mental illness. Whether or not that's the primary cause in those 37%, is another question.
While perfectly healthy people choosing eking out a meager living of booze or drugs by panhandling on the subway is irritating, the real issue is that many homeless are not homeless by choice, but because they have mental illness that inhibits their ability to work or associate with people.
Any solution aimed at punishing the voluntary homeless while ignoring the mentally ill is missing the point.