We got the idea around the same time we started to believe having money is more important than how other people are doing... so a really long time ago

Homelessness is a hard issue. It's not as simple as just showing compassion and providing these services. Other places have tried to provide services to help the homeless and they often end up completely destroyed. I lived in Seattle for a few years and every new initiative to help just ended in complete disaster.

The working homeless who aren't on drugs aren't really the hard group of homeless to help, or the ones who cause problems. It's the ones who are on drugs who will strip the wires from a house you provide, or completely ruin any apartment on a drug binge. It even got so bad in Seattle that ports potties provided to camps were completely and irrevocably destroyed by the homeless.

I wish the issue was as simple to solve as "provide services and show compassion" but it isn't. We do a disservice to everyone by not acknowledging the full scope and difficulty of this problem and boiling it down to simple ineffective platitudes.

Perhaps, one point is Jesus supposedly saying that we would always have the poor. I bet this has been perverted in many people's minds that there is no point to trying to solve the problems of poverty because, well, Jesus said we would always have that problem. And perverting what Paul wrote, saying that if someone is not willing to work then "let him not eat." Christianity telling us how to mistreat the poor.

Former Christian here, so liberating to be free of a mindset that insists that we can never solve the problems of the poor.