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Neely ran away from a residential care facility he was placed in as part of a plea deal and there was a warrant for his arrest at the time of his killing. He's a shining example of someone who should be institutionalized, but lowering barriers to instituionalization involves complex trade offs and reasoning about them from viral news clips seems like a bad idea.
It comes up a lot in discussions of homelessness that there are lots of low visibility functional temporarily homeless people, and then a smaller number of high visibility dysfunctional long term homeless people. I briefly worked with an otherwise functional middle aged adult who had been homeless for a couple months. Cheap flophouses would be a huge benefit to people who are temporarily in between relatives with couches to crash on, but it wouldn't do much for the guys screaming on the subway.
Forensic mental health facilities are effectively prison tier secure. They are designed with multiple layered barriers between the inmate and the outside.
I have experience with the design of these facilities. In one fun example some open air courtyards are designed without 90 degree angles (think octogon rather than square) and with rotating anti-climb barriers . The reason for this is that some mental health patients are capable of ridiculous feats of strength and will attempt things that no sane person would attempt. Things like wedging themselves into a 90 degree corner of an outdoor courtyard and shimmying up 6 metres to get onto the roof.
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Yes, that I can see. The people together enough to couch surf could use a flop / boarding house. Housing the Jordan Neely's with this cohort would drive them out, or pull down the marginal ones.
The cohort in tents are often in tents because of addiction or other mental health issues. They may not be as aggressive as Neely, but they're unlikely to be suitable for flop houses either.
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