Did you do it when your parent(s) lost everything? And you had nothing? Staying in shelters and eating in soup kitchens? That's tough on kids and shouldn't be happening here.
Kids suffer a hell of a lot more indignities than a few days of not having a "home"! A life time of being raised by dysfunctional, chaotic, drug abusing parents for instance... or just parents who split up. 99% percent of a kid's stability is their parents being sane and reliable. I mean seriously... what makes the soup kitchen worse than the school cafeteria, and the shelter worse than staying in a motel? Families get first dibs and high priority in those places for the brief time there are there.
People who stay in shelters and eat in soup kitchens are considered homeless. According to the article with no attributions, whatever they are defining as "homeless families", these people are only homeless for a few days. And according to the article I linked earlier, the number in this group
has declined by 36% since 2010. So no reason to be getting in an uproar now.
Apparently overall homelessness is less than it was then as well, despite the covid effect of turning functional addicts into dysfunctional ones. We can't blame the explosion of homeless people on public lands on homelessness in general. Rather we can probably give Bob a good deal of credit for making this a popular alternative.