Well, we used to have state hospitals for people who couldn't care for themselves. But the state hospitals incarcerated non-criminals against their wills in inhumane conditions. This was a violation of due process and their civil liberties. The involuntary incarceration of the insane has no legal or moral basis. Especially since they were widely used to shut up undesirable mentally handicapped people, too, and a number of reports revealed that many of the so-called insane may not have been any such thing. It was a good way to get rid of a troublesome wife, though, if you have a doctor willing to sign the right papers...
BTW, they TRIED to clean up the enormous human rights abuses of the state hospitals many, many times before they were finally shut down. It. Never. Worked. As long as people who couldn't speak for themselves were confined against their wills, they were abused.
Widespread homelessness among the mentally ill can be traced back to the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the influential works of writers such as Thomas Szasz, Erving Goffman, Ken Kesey, and R.D. Laing. These authors maintained that sufferers of mental illness were a kind of political prisoner to an unjust social structure and that they were "really just marching to a different drummer and should be free to do their marching in the streets," and so paved the way for the wholesale deinstitutionalization of mentally ill individuals in the U.S. When many of them ended up homeless and alone, posing a danger to themselves and sometimes to others, civil liberties activists "snuffed out any lingering possibility that the state hospitals and the community mental health centers might treat the vast majority of the seriously mentally ill" by reinterpreting their condition of homelessness as a state of emancipation.
The ACLU successfully sued to have the state hospitals shut down and anyone capable of lifting spoon to mouth was put on the streets. One such case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Patricia_Brown
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