> If a city claims “moral responsibility” for 100 homeless and 100 more move in, do they get a one way bus ticket out of town? Locked up?
Yeh, if the city claims moral responsibility for those 100, and if the other 100 move in and don't meet the criteria, then yes... they get to say "tough luck, you're not our problem".
The city might still choose to offer the bus ticket, if they found out that another city is obligated. Or they might not. That's up to them.
They might not even do anything about the 100 that they do agree are theirs. There are thousands of municipal governments, and some are quite callous.
As far as locked up, I do not know. There are laws on the books about vagrancy still, though those have been challenged multiple times by various courts, so I think that'd be rare or non-existent.
The policy I propose is bureaucratic, and boring. It doesn't criminalize anything. It's just a checklist of how a homeless person would (or wouldn't) qualify for any sorts of benefits the city government might decide to provide in the future. That's all that's needed. If this policy apportions the homeless in such a way that a town of 3600 residents has a number that their resources can handle, and a large city of millions can handle, and every size in between such that some large percentage (above 98%) are apportioned to at least one municipality, that's all that's needed. The logjam is broken, and more common legislative processes will eventually arrive at solutions that see them sleeping in beds instead of gutters and dumpsters.
There are caveats. This doesn't work so well in isolated places. Hawaii and Alaska... no clue with them. Their problems probably stay where they are now. Mainland North American, maybe continental Europe would see a large reduction in the problem. But then there's that 1 or 2% who don't get apportioned anywhere... personally I'd hope that with the problem having been reduced 50fold already, the federal government would step in and take care of the remainder. That's probably foolish of me.
