I have been substantially inconvenienced by people who are homeless. I live down the street from a soup kitchen, and I got scabies after someone apparently spent the night in my unlocked car. But obviously any inconvenience I experience pales in comparison to their suffering on the streets.

It's natural to be frustrated and annoyed by homelessness at times, but surely it's easy to also feel compassion for these people, too, no?

It depends on the situation. I certainly feel compassion for people who are down on their luck; who want to be part of society and have just gotten unlucky; and who are scraping to get by and trying to fix things. I absolutely want to extend them help and see them get back into a healthy, happy, and productive state (and have done so in the past).

That being said, I don't have much compassion for people who harass me incessantly for money and scream obscenities at me when I won't give them any; who pull weapons on my friends and mug them at knife point in broad daylight; who urinate and shit in public without even making an attempt to seek privacy; who are violently disruptive just to do it; who shoot up drugs on the street and make no attempt to seek treatment or be part of society; who get on public transport and start screaming about their schizophrenia-induced religious nonsense; etc.

These individuals certainly show no respect or compassion towards me or to people I know who have been assaulted by them. Why is it my responsibility to deal with them as a private citizen when many don't seem to even want to be helped and when the government who I pay taxes to in part to ensure my public safety doesn't seem to care either?

Many of these people experience serious mental health issues, including addiction. I've had mental health struggles myself (depression) as have many people here. If you are among them, ask yourself how well you think your recovery would have gone without a safe, warm, dry place to retreat where nobody would bother you.

Then there's the issue of many mental disorders strongly affecting executive functioning, which is required to keep appointments with their healthcare provider. Even people in the most stable of circumstances miss appointments; now think how difficult that would be when you don't know where you'll be sleeping that night (plus aforementioned mental health issues).

All of these issues compound on one another. I have nothing but sympathy for people experiencing homelessness, and nothing will change that.

When I worked for the public defender, most of my clients were homeless at some point.

They were homeless, and mentally ill, because they chose to use powerful, mind-altering drugs that fucked up their brains. They chose to keep using those drugs.

I have absolutely no sympathy for drug addicts. Using drugs is a choice. The fact that it has serious consequences does not engender sympathy. If anything, the fact that people know drugs will fuck them up and still use them anyway makes me less sympathetic to drug addicts.

I have great sympathy for the homeless who are merely down on their luck. You can identify them pretty easily. They're the ones that aren't drunk or high, and they're usually in the shelters at night because they'd rather have a hot shower and a hot meal than spend a night on the street with the addicts.

Generally, people who make that argument are completely wrong and somehow fail to recognize how nonsensical it is to argue that social workers etc just don't interact with homeless people enough to see them with contempt.

Social workers aren't pro-homeless. They're pro-people, and they generally work their asses of to get people into housing so they aren't homeless anymore.

And yes, every single one of them absolutely feels contempt for the homeless who choose the streets over shelter just so they can stay high. I worked with enough social workers when I was a public defender to have a better grasp of their views on the homeless than you do.

That's such an obviously false statement that I can't believe you bothered to type it. I've been related to enough social workers to have a better grasp of their views than you do, apparently.

Going to need a source on that. In my experience it is only people who are exposed to homelessness in some way that have any feeling on the matter what so ever.