What is the connection? And how strong is it? How many of the homeless population are affected by substance abuse or by severe mental health issues?
Sure anyone has the freedom to choose their lifestyle, but in the case of homeless people what were their choices actually? I might be wrong, but there seems to be a dearth of studies on homeless people. Compare that to e.g. the celebrity LGBTQ community!
Like defund the police or soft on crime, the radical deinstitutionalization that took place in Western countries in the last several decades has most likely contributed to higher numbers of homeless people than otherwise. It has gone too far! The pendulum needs to swing back towards common sense and a more to the middle ground!
Nobody seriously wants to go back to institutionalization as it was practiced in the 19th or 20th century, but some reinstitutionalisation on a case by case basis and with the intent to improve the person's mental and physical health and well being might be advisable!
"... Psychiatric deinstitutionalization was also influenced by the so-called antipsychiatry movement. From 1950 to 1970 the movement emphasized the role that social factors played in psychological disorders. It focused on social pathologies and on the deindividualization of mental illness (abandonment of individual values in an effort to identify with one’s society). At the same time, this movement held that connection to the community offered the best path toward amelioration and affirmed that institutional confinement was fundamentally harmful. ..."
Encyclopedia Brittanica: Deinstutionalization
Wikipedia: Deinstutionalisation
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