This is the intended consequence, not a side-effect.

Cities want to reduce their homeless population, because it's distasteful and discourages consumers in those areas. The place I grew up in gentrified rapidly over the course of the 90's and 00's and homeless people made the rich whites that wanted to go to the starbucks feel uncomfortable. On a large scale this would hurt the economy.

A city in this situation has two options. They can treat the underlying causes of homelessness, build more affordable housing, spend more on mental health, etc. But this is expensive and takes money out of the economy at both ends, because you can always make affordable housing unaffordable and collect more property tax and income tax from the new residents.

So, the city went with the cosmetic option: Make it extremely difficult to be homeless within the areas the city wanted homeless people gone from. This entails a number of very cheap, but very effective changes to the environment to just make it difficult for homeless people to be around:

* They installed bars on benches, so that nobody could sleep on them, and encouraged property owners to install spike strips in doorways so that homeless people couldn't sleep there.

* They installed "help the homeless" parking meters so that people could "give their change to the homeless" (really, give their money to a charity, that would have overhead, administrators to pay, etc., resulting in much less going to homeless people), and made it illegal to panhandle and to give money to pandhandlers.

* They made it illegal to serve food without a license, criminalizing Food Not Bombs (a group that collects and distributes food for free, for everyone, not just homeless people) and also giving food directly to homeless people.

* The few homeless people that remained in the area after they left were harassed by police and driven out directly.

At the same time this was going on, the city was closing shelters and selling the land to developers.

Writ large, no city has any incentive to actually address homelessness when it could just try to drive homeless people out of its borders and make it Not Their Problem. And that's what's happening here.

As an aside, it's disgustingly dehumanizing to refer to homeless people as "the homeless" or as "homeless" in the noun form. These are people. They are exactly like you. As we technologists destroy more and more jobs while simultaneously increasing the degree of inequality in society, we will be causing more and more people to become homeless, so we should be more conscious than normal about this problem and how we can fight it.

You even said it yourself, there's not enough money or support. So save the extra $3 you would otherwise be giving out and make a year end donation to a worthy organization. Maybe give a weekend of free time. That will go miles beyond just throwing cash out of a car window at a random intersection. Ever wondered how many homeless get hit by cars begging at intersections by the way? It's more than you'd like to know.

There is no "solution to homelessness" while there are people made homeless. A society where many people are made homeless is going to be unpleasant. In ways, it should be unpleasant, the unsolved problem, that being the existence of homeless people, should be visible.

The solutions are the existence of jobs, affordable apartments (and mental-health care for those with serious mental disabilities, etc).

Talking about "a solution to homelessness" is essentially saying we need to make intolerable situation orderly - to turn some section of each city into something like an open-air prison. In that sense, "solving homelessness" while there are still homeless is undesirable.

Why not just say, "This is the status quo. I want to change things by --" ?

The reason this article is trending is that the status quo is broken. Instead of outlawing Good Samaritans, why not take the time and make the effort to educate them?

The educational information in your posts is quite valuable and deserves more attention than it is getting.

Part of the problem is the mentality people go into this issue with, and changing that will do wonders for the various initiatives trying to tackle this. That said, it's something I had to go through myself so I should probably be more empathetic

You sound reasonable on first blush but your words are aimed to harm and crush the weak. That you put your apologies for a regime for the policing of the poor in apparently plausible and benevolent terms simply makes your words more harmful.

I think you should be ashamed of yourself.

Edit: Your parent post is very eloquent (if deceptive imho) argument for "give up on helping your fellow human, instead trust the authorities". Are you happy with living in a world like that really?

You can't expect good communication to occur when you restrict it as you suggest. His comment wasn't anywhere near as disparaging as it can get.

I just don't think you should ban panhandling because it punishes the people who need help instead of helping them.

I also don't support the "this behavior creates problems, so ban it" mentality, as it allows people to avoid addressing the underlying issues.

Mindless and even well-intentioned behavior can have as much to do with socially adverse consequences as actual malice or recklessness. The more closely you connect law and morality, the harder it becomes to accept this. But that doesn't change the reality that it's possible for lots of individually well-intentioned choices to add up badly.

It's a legitimate concern, and an obvious downside. However, things like this should be considered in their aggregate effect - there are pros and cons to both approaches, and the one that should win is not the one that sounds good, but the one that makes the most good experimentally.

Your opponent pdeuchler appears to have substantial first-hand experience with what works and what doesn't, while your retort seems a lot more theoretical. I think both of you should elucidate not just the strength of your convictions, but also basis in facts. That's how we will make progress.

edit: didn't mean to imply I don't have first hand experience, I do, but I was also mentored by people who were/are passionate about and extremely involved with this problem. My understanding of the underlying issues comes from both sources

On a relate note - I found that most startup advice is useless, because people who are giving that advise try to summarize their experience (at best) or someone else's experience (at worst), and they inevitably leave out important caveats. Add in some narrative fallacy and it gets completely ruined. If you listen long enough you will find equally convincing, but completely opposing startup advice on any subject. For that reason I only ever listen to first-hand accounts of what happened, not to any "life lessons", "lessons learned", "10 things that every startup should do" etc.

It's an interesting distinction.