So why were loitering laws introduced? I doubt it was purely a sadistic effort to ruin the lives of kids.
My guess is that combatting gang crime was a major reason.
My guess is that combatting gang crime was a major reason.
IMO what all these laws have in common is that they're designed to allow the police to legally ask questions to people (or straight up remove them) who look suspicious but haven't committed any crime. Why would anyone want to remove people who haven't done anything wrong is a more nuanced question that I'm not qualified to properly answer.
Your link refers to an article which is very American and very 2018. Lots of large font size headings about race and sexuality and gender. I don't think it's a productive take on how to manage the tension. Racially homogenous societies still need to decide how to handle people who try to sleep at train stations and yell at the commuters.
Trains are transportation infrastructure. Drivers don't have to put up with people setting up a queen bed in the middle of their lane on the highway. If a country doesn't protect its public transport infrastructure, then the rich and the middle class stop taking the train, the poor have to put up with things, and the mentally ill get an overpriced and noisy mobile homeless shelter. One that costs more and helps less than crisis accommodation.
I agree that the two aren't exactly the same, but public transport users have a right to safe, comfortable, unobstructed travel. There's a difference between preventing a class of people from using public transport to travel, vs preventing everyone from using public transport to sleep.
I also note that the case of long distance travel is an exception, because you might legitimately need to sleep at a station between legs. I'm talking about people who sleep in train stations with no intent of travelling anywhere.
At this point, I'm beginning to think you consider the mere presence of a rough-sleeper at a train station to be blocking the use of that train station, regardless of what it is they're actually doing.
Places with less black-white racial animus were comfortable adopting animus for other minorities, or for the poor in general. Post-Civil-Rights, loitering laws (and a panoply of other practices ranging from swimming pools to mortgage approvals to cul-de-sacs) were exploited not to enslave, but principally to simply eject categories of people.
For a take on the origins of the Anglo cultural tradition of persecuting the poor in general, this goes a lot further back - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ec9Al5ezYs