Not All Homeless Are The Same

We're making the problem worse by treating them like they are.

MCSU+H is built for the Functional Unsheltered™ — the nearly half of all unsheltered people who aren't addicted or mentally ill, and who can move off the street on their own with the right tool.

Nearly half of all unsheltered people — an estimated 42 to 57 percent, roughly 115,000 to 155,000 people out of the 274,224 counted unsheltered nationally on a single night in January 2024 — are not mentally ill and not addicted. They're capable. Given basic shelter, sanitation, and dignity, this group can stabilize and move forward on their own. Right now, no program in America is built to reach them.

Two Responses, One Blind Spot

America responds to homelessness in two ways.

The first is Housing First. Its resource-intensive core is Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) — treatment paired with permanent housing, reserved under HUD's rules for people with a documented disability, most often serious mental illness or chronic addiction to alcohol and drugs. It's the right tool for that population. It's also expensive, slow to site, and structurally incapable of scaling to the much larger group who don't need clinical services — they need a place to be.

This isn't an assumption — it's written into federal policy. HUD's own definition of "chronic homelessness," the threshold that determines eligibility for nearly all permanent supportive housing, requires a documented disability. Someone without a qualifying disability can be unsheltered for years and never meet that bar, no matter how long they're on the street. The Functional Unsheltered aren't an edge case Housing First happens to miss. By HUD's own definition, they were never eligible in the first place.

The second is the sweep — legal since Grants Pass v. Johnson removed the requirement to offer an available bed for each person caught in an encampment dismantling. In practice, a sweep is usually triggered by a constituent complaint: tents, dirty cardboard, trash, and blankets strung on a rope. The municipality responds to the voter by ordering it cleared.

The Functional Unsheltered don't meet PSH's disability-based threshold, because they aren't mentally ill or addicted. And they get no separate track from the sweep — they're cleared right alongside everyone else, with nothing offered in its place.

Why The Alternative To Sweeping Hasn't Worked

A wave of recent state laws — in Texas, Kentucky, and Florida — tried to offer a middle path: cities would designate legal camping sites as the sanctioned alternative to a sweep. Four years later, none of the three states has produced a single certified site.

The reason is straightforward: a designated site has to sit near the food, water, medical care, and transit people depend on to survive, and also far enough from residential and commercial property to clear a city council vote. No fixed site can solve that contradiction and still get approved. That's why the "humane alternative" to the sweep hasn't materialized anywhere it's been tried.

A Tool Built For The Population We Can Actually Help

The MCSU+H doesn't compete with Housing First or PSH, and it doesn't replace enforcement. It's built for the population both leave stranded: people who need a bed, a place to be clean, a toilet, and somewhere to keep their documents safe — not a caseworker, not a bed in a facility, not a court order. One person deploys it in under two minutes. It moves with them. The city owns it, tracks it if it chooses to, and empties it. There's no long site, no HUD application, no waitlist.

It doesn't solve homelessness. It solves it for the one group of unsheltered people the system can actually move off the street — because they're the only group capable of moving themselves, if someone gives them a way to do it.

Source: HUD 2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, Part 1: Point-in-Time Estimates (huduser.gov). The Functional Unsheltered range (115,000–155,000) is derived from HUD's published unsheltered count applied against research estimates of the situational/transitional share of that population — HUD does not publish this category directly.