I think they tried that in SF and it did not work at all. There's definitely a subset of the homeless population that would take advantage of something like that, but my guess is that those people are not really a problem to begin with. In other words the people that could take a free apartment and then turn their lives around are probably not defecating on the streets and shooting drugs in broad daylight. If you take the latter and give them an apartment it's only going to exacerbate their bad habits. The biggest problem that happens to overlap with homelessness is all kinds of illnesses from addiction to mental issues, and those are not being addressed. These problems are confused with lack of housing for some reason, and then the problem just never gets actually solved.