Harm reduction and rehab still only treats the symptom, not the cause. The cause is financial instability brought on by insecurity in housing, food access, etc. It's an issue of human dignity in the economic sphere that drives people to such depths, not recreation.
Unfortunately we still have a large portion of the population who believe that one must deserve to live a dignified life, and then apply all sorts of caveats on who is deserving. So we can't reshape the economy to support everyone because the people at the top need to feel like the work they did to get there somehow speaks to their character rather than merely their circumstances. They can't accept that they're not actually that special and so have some pathological need to draw lines between "us" and "them" (e.g. "taxpayer" vs "freeloader").
Undoubtedly that can be the cause in some cases, but there are counterexamples. Like West Virginia which has a bad opioid addiction problem yet relatively low homeless rate. What does appear highly correlated is homeless rates vs. cost of housing to income ratios. Find a city with a real estate bubble, and you'll likely find a large tent city too.
"We have to fix every single problem to prevent people from smoking meth in public."
No we don't. This wasn't a problem 10 years ago. This isn't a problem in much, much poorer countries. This isn't a problem in fucking Houston or Tampa or NYC or Boston.
I get that you want to overthrow Capitalism, but the rest of us want to live a normal life without junkies shitting on our stairs
I'm not really a revolutionary about it, but those living "normal" lives are far from normal if they aren't stressed about the day-to-day.
It would be nice if life wasn't so stressful all the time for so many people. Look at all the wild drivers, the lack of camaraderie in basic everyday life interactions, you can point to all manner of social ills and if you empathize with those who are struggling to get by -- which is most people according to every statistic released in the last 6 years about it -- you would easily make the connection between worrying about not having a bed and enough food and the kinds of shitty behavior people end up enacting.
Those cities don't have a problem with homelessness because their cities either suck to live outside in the winter or suck to live outside in the summer.
You'll also note the high proportions allocated to police in every city budget (NYC cops get something like $5 billion per year!). The difference between some cities and others is primarily the level of controls they put on police re: homeless people because of progressive policies. The cities with hardline positions look better because the homeless are pushed out, not because the homeless find homes there.
Unfortunately we still have a large portion of the population who believe that one must deserve to live a dignified life, and then apply all sorts of caveats on who is deserving. So we can't reshape the economy to support everyone because the people at the top need to feel like the work they did to get there somehow speaks to their character rather than merely their circumstances. They can't accept that they're not actually that special and so have some pathological need to draw lines between "us" and "them" (e.g. "taxpayer" vs "freeloader").