I agree, and I forgot about the "half billion over 12 years" line in the article. But why throw shade at the homeless due to a failing of the city?
Also, if the city is going to provide a service here (which it has, by outsourcing to Intersection), it needs to make it "Available to Everyone", not just "Available". Right now because people can and do camp out there all day it's the latter.
These systems have cameras and the city and Intersection absolutely should be using those cameras to rate-limit peoples' use to make it "Available to Everyone". Except the cameras are facing the wrong way.