i remember when i was younger ppl would carry food in their cars and hand it out to homeless with hungry signs. some of them would take it and be grateful and that was good. some of them would only want money (obv what that would be for) and so we move on. but it was good we could hand out some food. now most ppl i know aren't comfortable doing that any more. bc a bunch of them have been attacked when they wouldn't give cash. most of them not bad, but having a guy trying to pull open the door or grabbing the car is scary for most of us and really fucking scary for somebody like a small woman. so it's not that people don't still have sympathy for the honest guy down on his luck but there's too many of the bad ones now.
the problem is look at low income housing, people will tell you there's not enough. "oh just build more". but low income housing these days is really fucking bad. i have friends who are landlords and tried running low income housing and its awful how bad it gets torn up, how hard it is to get people to pay with rent and eviction moritoriums. and it only gets worse.
it cost more for them to run low income housing than blue-collar housing that's still not fancy but has better tenants. there's so much damage and crime around the low-income. remember austin bought that hotel for a homeless shelter and it got trashed to shit in like 2 weeks? same kinda problem.
so it ain't a simple problem to fix. and the moritoriums and rent control that cities keep adding only makes more people leave the low income housing business.
but all that aside me and a whole bunch of other people are just done. and if the homeless don't leave other people will, look at these cities rn. and once all the rich people are gone and all the middle class people are gone then they're really gonna be in trouble.
tbh our problem is we can't punish people who got nothing so laws don't mean nothing to them. like what do u even do to a person shitting in a downtown street? arrest them? put them where? now u spend money keeping them in jail and they will get out back on the street. and relapse rates out of rehab are shit specially since a lot of those people end up there from a court order so that ain't any kind of solution here.