It's not even "but it is hard", but the perennial excuse of "scale", as if the US isn't split in states, and cities, and counties. This comes up so often when someone don't want to acknowledge a solution that works elsewhere (everything from trains to, well, this), and ignoring that you don't need to solve the entire problem everywhere at once to make things better.
If this was some super-costly policy that needed a big apparatus around it, then they'd have a point, but e.g. in Finland, one estimate is that it costs them up to 9,600 euro a year less to house a person first vs. leaving them homeless. As such, just starting to provide some housing units and gradually grow it would be a win for every local government with a homeless person.
It only starts to become a challenge if a few local governments reaches such a level of provision that it attracts homeless people from surrounding areas that don't do anything themselves, but that's not a reason not to start.
Sometimes it feels like US taxpayers wants the government to burn money if the alternative is to do something that might help other people with it.
If this was some super-costly policy that needed a big apparatus around it, then they'd have a point, but e.g. in Finland, one estimate is that it costs them up to 9,600 euro a year less to house a person first vs. leaving them homeless. As such, just starting to provide some housing units and gradually grow it would be a win for every local government with a homeless person.
It only starts to become a challenge if a few local governments reaches such a level of provision that it attracts homeless people from surrounding areas that don't do anything themselves, but that's not a reason not to start.
Sometimes it feels like US taxpayers wants the government to burn money if the alternative is to do something that might help other people with it.