I happen to live in downtown Dallas, near enough to homeless encampments to walk past them pretty frequently. Tents all over the place near highway overpasses. There was a tent set up behind the Dallas Police Memorial across the street from city hall for about six months. The exact same tent, which never moved. The main branch public library, also across the street from city hall, and a bridge near me where there is a large bus depot, are nearly refugee camps. You can't walk six feet without stepping on someone if you try to go by them when it's dark.

My take on this is what else are they supposed to do? Unless they're all killed, they have to live somewhere, and if they can't hold jobs and/or can't obtain real housing, what option is there other than to live on the street? I don't see how this can be made illegal. You're arresting people simply for existing and not being able to pay rent. What is this supposed to help? These are at least thousands of people in one city, hell, one neighborhood. If they were all sent to prison, there'd be no space left for real criminals.

As for shitting on the street, again, what else are they supposed to do? If there aren't public toilets available to use anywhere, that doesn't change the fact that they're animals with digestive systems that require them to defecate on a regular basis. Hell, with all the walks I go for early in the morning, I have three times in the past six months had to shit on a sidewalk, not because I'm some belligerent lawbreaker or even because I don't have a toilet, but simply because I couldn't get home fast enough when it came on and there was nowhere else to go. It's not even a matter of whether businesses with toilets will let you use them. There aren't even any businesses open at 4:30 in the morning.

I don't even see how this is a matter of politics so much as practicality. There are simply so many people that having the police, courts, and prisons try to deal with all of them would leave them unable to effectively do anything else they're supposed to do. I doubt it even works as a deterrent. Prison isn't any worse than how they're already living and the inability to reintegrate into society means nothing if they were already unable to integrate into society in the first place.

As it stands, sleeping in public and setting up camp in these places is illegal, but they may as well pass a law saying eating is illegal. How can it possibly be enforced? People can't just not sleep and shit, and if they don't have the right to occupy any private space, public space is the only space left.

Edit: I can see someone else already said something similar and got immediately downvoted with the response that they should go to a shelter. Okay, as far as I can tell, the people are sleeping where they are right now because it's within walking distance of aid facilities that are all located downtown. This includes shelters. But these shelters don't have anywhere near enough room for all of these people, and they aren't faced with a "temporary" problem. I've lived here long enough to see the same people and recognize them over the course of years. Some of them have clearly lived on the street for decades.