Thank you for the question.
This is a solution that's over 100 years old. I was over in England not too long ago, and I found that there was a shelter that was created for people coming in to work in the cities. This has been our response. What's happened is that while our society has changed over time, our response has stayed largely the same.
In the past, people would come in, mostly men, and it was for very temporary stays. What's happened now is that we have a shelter system that's trying to deal with all of the population, utilizing a model that was really designed for another time.
From a politician's standpoint, especially as a mayor.... Mayors tend to be the politicians who hear about homelessness the most. They're the ones taking the calls, because there's someone downtown, and the answer tends to be very understandable: You see someone on the street and you assume they need a place to go, so a shelter seems to be the logical in-between place, because we all know housing is unaffordable.
I'll say that I've been doing this work for 20 years, and housing has always been unaffordable. I've never been in a time where housing was affordable, but the same answer comes through, and it's being reinforced only now by the courts, which are saying that the answer to homelessness is that you must provide shelter. The direction to municipalities is that they must provide shelter, so from a legal standpoint, we're entrenching shelter even further into our system, which then makes it very difficult to look at other options.