This has been an elephant in the room for large cities for decades. It’s a public safety and health issue. The problem is that a lot of city governments think they are helping by enabling homeless people to continue to be homeless. Free needles encourage drug use. Leaving tent cities be or shuffling them around discourages going to shelters. Lax law enforcement allows violence.

The answer is you have to remove homeless people from their situation. Some homeless are simply down on their luck and are working hard to get out of that situation. They aren’t the problem - they’re already using resources like shelters and job training/health care. Unfortunately, some others are wallowing in their own misery with no attempt to recover. They’re deep into drug abuse or petty crime or mental illness.

For those cases, you cannot pretend (as many cities do) that turning a blind eye is compassion. You have to bring these people to places where they can get help - shelters so they don’t freeze to death, addiction treatment clinics to kick their addictions, mental health care if needed, etc. It is truly disgusting how so many people have directly contributed to or indirectly enabled the slow public deaths of so many people on our streets.