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The problem is that both are correct. A good majority of the people who are homeless during their lives are homeless for a reasonably short period of time before they get their shit together. Just giving those people more resources would plausibly help them reduce their time as homeless, reduce how much they suffer during that time by a lot, and be a reasonable use of resources.
However a majority of the homeless at any given time are the problem sort who won't accept the help you give them, will destroy any housing you provide them, and are responsible for basically all of the negative externalities.
As with most things, the ability to identify the groups is hard, and a mechanism to provide services to the first group and harsh discipline to the second is harder and probably illegal. So instead both sides pretend the whole homeless population is one that deserves their preferred solution and I think about All Debates Are Bravery Debates.
No, it isn't. It may be difficult to do at scale in a way that is legally/bureaucratically acceptable, but you can tell the difference between a "I'm in a bad situation and need a little help to get back on my feet" and a "meth just feels better with a machete in your hand" in about two minutes of conversation.
I think it might be a little more difficult than you think for some edge cases, but I broadly agree. I was also pretty obviously talking about policy though, which means doing it "at scale in a way that is legally/bureaucratically acceptable".
I will happily concede that the punisher walking around talking to homeless people and smoking the problematic ones would have a very high rate of success though if that's what you'd like to talk about instead.
Actually, thinking about it, I think there's a pretty easy way to differentiate on a policy level: criminal record. People down on their luck, the "have nots", won't have meaningful criminal records. The anti-social, criminal drug addicts, the "will nots" or "can nots", will. Where I live, pretty much everybody who ever gets arrested for criddler shit already has a significant record of violent crimes. You'll see a news story about "man arrested for charging after somebody with a machete", and when you google them they've got years of arrests for similar crimes. A massive amount of the west coast's homeless problems could be solved by simply keeping those people in jail, and it would be easy to deny those people access to resources like free housing if they have any arrests in the last five years (I'd be open to excluding victimless crimes like simple drug possession).
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