Maybe you shouldn't put these people in the same category. Not everyone living in the street is the same. Some are just poor. Some need medical and/or psychiatrical help. Some may be on the street by choice (see: Hobos (meant in the 'going from town to town, often by freight train or hitchhiking' sense)).
A couple of weeks ago I had to avoid an altercation with a woman who talking to herself on the subway, she didn't like the way I "looked" at her as I was doing my best to mind my own business. She starts mad-dogging me and then darts off the train.
Every so often a transient blocks the stoplight at a large, 6-lane intersection near my house, because he decided to ignore the crossing signal, and sometimes even the crosswalks.
My young sister doesn't feel safe walking home on certain routes as there are groups of disheveled men hanging out doing nothing in particular. I've counted over a dozen of them, blocking the sidewalk and sometimes a lane or two on the street.
The strip mall near my house has had to fence off certain areas open spaces because they had a habit of hosting impromptu bike chop shops.
A woman who owns a local tasting room at said strip-mall has told me multiple stories of shenanigans with the local transients, as they like to get into trouble in their outdoor bathrooms, and her business has the closest key.
Last week a man was sucker-punched because he asked a transient, who was sleeping in his car, to leave. (The man who got punched needed to drive to work.)
Last year a woman was stabbed with a needle by a transient while waiting in line at a drive-thru.
My city's local subreddits are rife with complaints and specific altercations. Most city parks are or have homeless encampments, and you can find them pretty much anywhere that there is unattended open space. My city even opened a safe zone for unhoused to camp, with police supervision and outreach resources available, and had to shut it down due to lack of use.
City police generally do nothing; they are underfunded, understaffed, and still butthurt from the BLM protests and imposed COVID policies. Some of the videos that have been posted online have been downright childish.
I know that not everybody is the same, and there are a handful of locals that I see repeatedly and know to be decent folk, but it is extremely difficult to be charitable with a narrative like this. And I am aware of other cities around here that have it much worse.
There are areas of town that I used to enjoy walking through, but now they smell of a shit and piss. People are not quite as destitute as some of the South American cities I've walked around, but it feels like we are getting closer to that.
If the homeless, as a group, would control/behave themselves people might have a different attitude. But they don't, and it takes a long time to recognize whether a specific individual is worth helping or not.
This isn't Minnesota or New York City. Our winters are mild; you don't need meth to stay warm at night, and the transients here tend to have more than enough clothing to stay warm when it gets into the low 50s/40s.
In fact this mild weather is probably why we have so many of them literally dumped on us. (Dumped, as in, given a one-way ticket to a sunny, seaside city of their choice)
Community policing programs work, just look at the success that Urban Alchemy has had in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The community is more than capable of policing itself, but it doesn't.
With respect, do you believe people choose to become addicts?
I'm not talking about opoids which were sold to folks as non-habit-forming for a long time. Or other cases of addiction without consent. But I don't think that is the case here, for the majority of people.
[1] https://www.drugs.com/sfx/methamphetamine-side-effects.html
You can then argue that it's caused by mental illness and we should be empathetic, but I've talked to multiple people who actually worked in psych wards, my mother being one of them. They know they need to take care of them and be empathetic, but boy don't they all have stories to tell that has caused them to dehumanize them to some extent, or suffer burnout as the alternative.
Don't just empathize with the mentally ill, but also the others you so easily burden with doing the actual work.
The person I replied to posted a laundry list of complaints about when those damn homeless jerks made them uncomfortable after saying they are so hard to empathize with. It's so whiny and disconnected from the actual hardships that caused these people to behave this way. Why can't they just be clean and polite and normal?
But for that, you'd need a functioning healthcare system.
Because it is really, really hard to be empathetic with the homeless folks here, based on how they behave.