I travel to many off the beaten path neighborhoods (mostly) all over the west coast and the homeless encampments I see in places like LA and the Bay Area are just people who can’t afford housing but have cars and RVs to live in.
Kind of annoying because the places where 20 years ago you could park a truck are full of urban campers. Last week I was driving around in Fremont, a couple miles from where I grew up, and every square foot of road around the place I was delivering to was occupied by people living on the streets. When I last lived there in the 80s Fremont was just your average boring suburban hell where there’s no way they wouldn’t have cleared out these encampments. Pretty sure that’s where they had a bunch of signs basically saying “no camping” which they obviously don’t bother enforcing.
Everything I have studied suggests that, yes, homelessness is directly related to a lack of affordable housing.
Until very recently, there were condos and houses available in that exact price range in downtown Austin. Yet ask anyone who lives there, there are and were tons of homeless everywhere you went in the city.
There are other cities that are way more affordable than SF, with the same homelessness problem. The thing they share in common with SF are the "compassionate" policing policies.
These are stereotypes but in the midwest you either are driven/make the trip to California or your freeze to death in the winter.
In the south, you either are driven/make the trip to california or you are eventually shot or locked up.
On the coasts that is now considered horrible tyranny. So you gotta deal with the downsides of that.
That's because abusive families are one of the primary drivers of substance abuse and mental illness.
Your most certainly can, if you can prove to a judge that they are mentally ill, and unable to make decisions for themselves.
What you describe is technically possible, but extremely rare. Even when someone is involuntarily admitted, the stay is typically capped.
Generally, as long as an individual isn't harming other people, "the system" doesn't have a reason to pursue a judgement. Many of these people are isolated from family/support systems or have nobody to actually care or advocate for them.
Further, many of them have complex cases. While treatment may be effective temporarily, it's hard to sustain the level of care after an admission.
Back in the day the police would beat the crap out of the lowlifes and drop them off outside of town.
And then the liberal guilt peddlers made noise and the men got weak.
Must just be some essential part of their character. /s