Your assessment that there are many different factors behind homelessness in the US is pretty good. (Unlike some people whose confident opinions are best explained by the Dunning-Kruger effect). I don't see how you solution differs from prison. Compounds that remove people who don't have a home to remote areas for their own good feels to me to be more like a dystopian cautionary tale than a workable solution to me.
Rather than jump to my own suggestion for a solution, I'd rather listen to people who have experience with proven solutions, such as these people:
www.coalitionforthehomeless.org
.
Since modern homelessness began more than thirty years ago, research and experience have overwhelmingly shown that investments in permanent housing are extraordinarily effective in reducing homelessness — as well as being cost-effective.
They have decades of experience and data showing that getting an unhoused person in housing is not only cost effective but give people a chance to recover from the trauma of living on the streets. Follow-through with services such as you suggest is also necessary. The objective is to help people heal and move into a life that is better for them.
But assisted housing is a treatment and not a cure to modern homelessness.
The fundamental cause of homelessness is the widening housing affordability gap. In New York City, that gap has widened significantly over the past decades, which have seen the loss of hundreds of thousands of units of affordable rental housing. At the same time that housing affordability has worsened, government at every level has cut back on already-inadequate housing assistance for low-income people and has reduced investments in building and preserving affordable housing.
Not just NY City but in most cities, wages have not kept up with cost of housing. It's getting worse, with rampant inflation. I'm not as certain as the Coalition for the Homeless is about rent control as a long term solution to homelessness in the US, so what alternatives are there? That would be a topic for a different thread.
The war on drugs plays a role in the homeless crisis too. People who get a conviction for drug possession on their record will always have a harder time getting a good job than people who don't. This sends some into a downward spiral that leads to loss of income that ends up with loss of housing. Recreational drug use should not be treated as a crime. Drug abuse is a medical problem, not a crime. End the war on drugs.
Finally, don't you sense that economic insecurity is more prevalent today than twenty years ago? As it relates to cost of housing, it has:
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So, I don't think the long term solution will be found by blaming those who are experiencing homelessness.
