Relying on libraries to be de facto homeless shelters is bad for everyone compared to the alternative of dedicated facilities. It's worse for homeless people, worse for the library and staff, and worse for patrons.
Taking homeless people to jail because they're homeless just seems stupid and pointless, not to mention harmful to the person going to jail.
Shelters have the issue where people don't want them near where they live (for often justifiable reasons) but obviously they have to go somewhere.
There's already plenty of invisible homeless people living out of a car that shower in the gym. They aren't a public nuisance and there should be structures where someone like that can get help from.
But the actual homeless problem are the drug addicts and beggars that are a public nuisance. There's no solution to that problem other than moving them against their will, is there?
It shouldn't be a crime exactly to set up a tent in a park because you're homeless, but if you then refuse to get help from society to fix the underlying issue, that's not acceptable. Can't have it both ways.
If you wanted to find a shelter bed for every single person on the street in a major city like San Francisco right now, that’s not possible. And that’s just the physical space, not even the medical staff or caseworkers you would want to handle those. And you need those in jail too, because corrections officers can’t and don’t want to manage mental health episodes.
Californian jails were at 200%+ capacity as recently as ten years ago until courts ordered that constituted cruel and inhumane punishment. Now most counties are around max capacity.
In some states like Washington, mental health is so under capacity that even the willing do not have spaces to be admitted into, even accounting for the people whose insurance would pay for something like that.
We did it with state institutions, which were supposed to be replaced by community mental health centers but that never happened. And then we did it with jail overcrowding reduction, where we didn’t set up adequate recidivism reduction programs.
Before the recent pivot to tough on crime, a lot of sentencing reform was started by Republican led states, simply because jail costs a lot of money.
What level of spending would you like to see?
Prison, which was being used for that purpose, costs California $127k a year https://www.lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost
Just the bed at a Californian state hospital for mental health treatment costs at minimum $150k+ a year. https://www.dsh.ca.gov/Hospitals/
And both systems are already overcapacity