Gunfire may be a little extreme, but we should consider carefully allowing a person like this to continue to work for the city. There's a certain attitude that pervades the lower echelons of public service that entices people to beat up the helpless with the letter of the law. They pretend that they're doing good by "enforcing city ordinances" and then smugly refuse even to tell the poor guy which building to go to because its "not their job".

This is evil (little e). We'd be better off with the position they fill being vacant. Should they ignore the law altogether? Certainly not, but we employ humans so that it can be enforced with intelligence and compassion. I have a suspicion that those who would engage in this kind of cruel enforcement on the low end are the first to give favors to the wealthy on the flip side. That's just what corruption looks like from the bottom.

It seems to me that many bureaucrats are just blindly following a set of rules laid out for them and they are afraid of bending the rules for fear of getting reprimanded.

This reminds me of two things I saw on Hacker News. One was some TED talk which mentioned a hospital janitor who knew when to bend the rules when cleaning around grieving relatives. The other item was some study that demonstrated that if experts were to follow a set of instructions for a task that they themselves wrote, then they would fail at that task.

You're advocating murder?

Anyway, yes, the system tends to fail when people work outside of the system. I'm not sure why this guy can't live in the subsidized housing until he has enough money to legally run a business and pay his own rent, though.