It's correlated with poverty, both as a cause and as an effect. Once you eliminate homelessness, you've basically eliminated poverty, and once poverty is mostly eradicated then crime will be mostly non-existent. I'm not saying there aren't rich/career criminals, but 99% of the incarcerated population is of the "poor and desperate" kind. The cost of poverty is just too high on society, not only in fighting "crime" (which most often is not a directed offense against people but a transgression against rules, morals or laws), but also in providing basic services to homeless people and integrating them into some kind of active participation, whether it's work or whatever can help them rehabilitate. This whole excuse about state intrusiveness sounds like evasive BS to me, as private corporations can and should handle social housing. There is no intelligible choice but to have minimum standards of survival, education and heatlhcare for everyone, paid by everyone. Otherwise you have a big police organization chasing "illegal" behaviour which wouldn't even be occurring if the minimum standards were in place. Why not invest in the proper infrastructure for the poor instead of just reacting when they transgress the penal code? Just look at statistics correlating crime and homelessness and see what the costs are for providing proper social housing versus the costs of vigilance, crime and incarceration.