It should come as no surprise that not all unhoused people are the same. There are many different ways to be unhoused, many different reasons to be unhoused, and many different circumstances in which those folks are living (e.g. with their family, battling a drug addiction, working one or more jobs, multiple things). There are vastly different things that different unhoused people need, and I think what this article may be getting at is that the city isn’t offering enough of those different resources. (And maybe they can’t.)

For example, there’s a nonprofit that specifically helps women in shelters with financial literacy who have escaped abusive homes where they never learned how to manage money. That is a very specific problem that could make a huge difference for some people. We think a lot about the part where unhoused people may be dealing with drug additions and/or mental illness (I can’t imagine being unhoused for a prolonged amount of time and not having some kind of mental illness considering how stressful that must be), but there is also no one solution to how to handle that.

Yes, there are inevitably some unhoused people who do bad, destructive things, who are incredibly difficult to provide care for because they don’t want it. But I think it’s a bad faith argument to abandon anyone and especially to use those folks as an example as to why other unhoused people don’t deserve to be supported. And I think it’s because of that perspective that some unhoused folks don’t want to be lumped in with others.