No doubt the council has discovered that the homeless can do without drink, but everyone must needs be somewhere. Trespassing on private property is already a crime, so perhaps the council thinks that banning the homeless from public property will cause the homeless to vanish. It is a myth that the homeless are transients who might as well go one place as another. Austin dropped twenty-odd places on someone's list of best cities in America to live in, and enormous rent increases were blamed for that. Of course the poor fall out of the bottom of the housing market in such a situation, but it is more than that.
Some agencies now require prospective tenants to be bonded in addition to providing a large deposit.
A substantial rent increase at the renewal of a lease is a certainty and there is almost no hope at all of finding cheaper quarters, so rare are vacancies in affordable housing. It is a curious effect of psychology that the more people who are threatened with the real prospect of homelessness, the more those who are already homeless are despised. William Burroughs has called this the smallest monkey effect. When the landlords squeeze the tenants, the rage must be vented somewhere, and the homeless person is the smallest monkey. Attack the smallest monkey.