I lived in Lausanne and used the youth hostel when I first moved there. There was a homeless drunk guy that the police would put in the hostel every night, he smelled horrible. It wasn’t a great experience for me but at least he wasn’t sleeping on the street. Lausanne also had a lot of squatters, mostly young foreigners, but that was a completely different subculture. I never figured out why the police didn’t come down hard on them, they did on everything else.