Reminds me of being told "you can't lay in the grass" in Millennium Park in Chicago by a security guard. They build something nice and then you can't use it properly.
It's much more complex than that. Every homeless person I've every offered to help has already rejected the systems in place to help them. Maybe they should have for various reasons. Reform and innovation in this kind of social work is sorely needed. But the whole story isn't that "society" just wants to give dirty people the boot.
The few genuine charities that offer help with no strings attached, and with sensitivity to potential unintended consequences, are frequently underfunded and subjected to frequent attacks by the powerful. For instance, the city might pass an ordinance criminalizing the act of giving away food gratis, if it was not prepared by trained personnel in a commercial kitchen with a current health inspection certificate, just to shut down a group that gives away sandwiches that were prepared in a church kitchen.
I don't think that "society" hates the homeless, but its self-appointed lords and masters sure seem to hate how they don't play the grossly unfair games that seem to have been set up just for them to lose. And there's my tinfoil hat, creeping back onto my head.
There is a vein of Puritan/Calvinist/Prosperity sadism running through the US. Adherents believe that those people are in the gutters because God is punishing their poor character with unfavorable circumstances. So in order to solve their financial problems, they must first accept that it is all 100% their own fault, and that random chance has no role in success or failure. People become rich only through hard work and public virtue, therefore poor people are all lazy degenerates. This twisted logic poisons public policy, because some rich people like to believe all their money makes them better than other people, and they spend a significant fraction of it on politics.
Those who genuinely believe in charity and "as you treat the least of you, so you treat me" may have greater numbers, but they have lesser funding, and therefore smaller political influence in the US. They can't seem to pass any public program to help people without someone amending it to punish the poor in some way for the sins made obvious by their financial condition. This leads to homeless rejecting official help.
From the outside, it just looks like institutional cruelty. I just cannot fathom the type of thinking that would spend thousands of dollars installing unnecessary armrests on park benches, just so that poor people derive less benefit from them. It is embarrassing for a supposedly advanced and modern society to have the human detritus of its public policies on display for all to see. But instead of fixing the broken policies, or accepting responsibility for those that were hurt, the evidence of brokenness is swept under the rug.
> There is a vein of Puritan/Calvinist/Prosperity sadism [...]
Where are you seeing this?
This is because I have overheard with my own ears a serious suggestion that it would be acceptable to vanish homeless people in the darkness of night and turn them into dog food, to be sold at a premium. Some people are just evil, delude themselves into thinking they are good, and they have far more money than a just world would ever allow them to touch. Maybe you don't hear that kind of thing often in places where the rich folks are mostly hippy-dippy liberals, but hearing it from even one pair of lips, without an iota of shame, is unsettling--like seeing one cockroach in your kitchen. What is being said when I'm not around to overhear it?
I also detect signs of it in written legislation and political discourse, particularly with regard to amending welfare programs to include work requirements or blanket consent to arbitrary searches by state officials. It's as though the default assumption is that recipients are out to cheat the system for a free ride, and spend all their benefits on illegal drugs.
I can't imagine how anyone could become so rotten and yet live, but from the anecdotal evidence, they do exist, and for bizarre and unfathomable reasons, their opinions count more than mine, even when we have the same number of votes to cast.
In the case of the personal anecdote, they had just finished replacing one $100k pedigreed lap dog--that had been run over--with another, when the d-bag refused to help his own nonagenarian mother with some of her bills, actually suggesting that she go on food stamps if she's having so much trouble.
Rich trash indeed.
Ironically, the unmitigated social problems that result from lacking basic social safety nets increase expenses many other places, including in healthcare, possibly by more than the programs would have cost. Instead of getting rehabilitation, an addict has to steal to feed their addiction, prompting more spending on police forces, plus fear and mistrust of others, and the addict uses a series of emergency room visits when things inevitably go badly.
You surely aren't saying it's as simple as "people with stuff hate the poor people".
It's literally everything else that they don't have.