The problem with homelessness is that it falls into the terrible curse of only showing itself between the blinders you have on, blinders made out of whatever your daily routine is. If you don't make an effort to learn, then what you see is all there is. If your daily routine is to commute into downtown from the MAX, get off and get into your work building and go back home, you probably think the only thing homeless people do is beg you for change and sleep on the benches. The only reason you know of these two things is because these are, in a way, forced interactions; you were forced to listen to someone asking you for change, and your gaze of the beautiful city was saddened by the added sight of a person sleeping outside in the cold.

There is of course more to homelessness than sleeping outside and asking for change, but because your daily routine doesn't incorporate any more opportunities for them to encroach in your lifestyle, you're not really thinking about it. And that's OK, that's just a facet of whatever lifestyle you've got going for you. But when you're more remote from a group of people, it's easier to make decisions against them-- in a way, it's like that Milgram experiment, but slapped onto a macro lens.

Ugh, these homeless people are sleeping on all the benches. Better get rid of these benches.

Know who probably wouldn't have made that decision? Someone who works in housing and knows how hard it is to find a place to sleep.

Yes there are people that are going to take advantages of resources if they're made available to them, like sleeping on a bench, but I think that's just something that needs to be accepted. You can probably cherry pick as many examples of a homeless person taking advantage of free resources made available to them as you can a rich person taking advantage of tax loopholes. Yes people need to be nudged out of a counterproductive lifestyle, but not at the expense of kicking someone else off the bench who really just needed to sleep for a bit.