There is a difference between mass sleeping and mass camping. Sleeping in large groups (30+) is safety in numbers, it reduces shame, induces trust between strangers as sleep is a vulnerable act, it allows the potentially un-peaceful factions within a group to be outnumbered, and it gives a platform from which a sense of community can grow.
Unfortunately it is recurrently the policy in most cities to break such a thing up and this causes problems as it obstructs all of the above. But so too does tents, i.e. you can break a group up with cops or with tents and have the same effect. Tents however are potentially much worse as now drug addicts and thieves have the privacy to do drugs or to perform other illicit activities, storage space for stolen goods, and their own private dumping grounds. Furthermore it induces a territorial attitude in homeless and causes people who used to be content with a backpack to begin hoarding non-essentials .
Multiple times in many situations I've seen the difference constructing a simple polyethylene barrier can do; it can transform a situation and cause people to show a different side of themselves. Needless to say, those who have to tolerate the homeless camps in their neighborhoods are likely less than thrilled about it.
The only exception to this so far as I've observed is a selective pocket [camping] community where people do get along and have familial like ties, but in this case it is a selective territory with the beginnings of formal regulation such as community meetings and "voting people out". Furthermore it is usually not open to homeless people in general- it is it's own crowd. The inescapable reality is that partitioning barriers create a sedentary culture of property ownership, factions, organized rather than natural structure, and all the other things that go with partitioned domestication are all soon to follow.
They may as well have just hit the fast forward button to modern living. But if what you're doing is fundamentally no different than anything else that surrounds you - the same society which created the inequality - then you may as well be held to the standard that you should pay for your own unit.
Unfortunately it is recurrently the policy in most cities to break such a thing up and this causes problems as it obstructs all of the above. But so too does tents, i.e. you can break a group up with cops or with tents and have the same effect. Tents however are potentially much worse as now drug addicts and thieves have the privacy to do drugs or to perform other illicit activities, storage space for stolen goods, and their own private dumping grounds. Furthermore it induces a territorial attitude in homeless and causes people who used to be content with a backpack to begin hoarding non-essentials .
Multiple times in many situations I've seen the difference constructing a simple polyethylene barrier can do; it can transform a situation and cause people to show a different side of themselves. Needless to say, those who have to tolerate the homeless camps in their neighborhoods are likely less than thrilled about it.
The only exception to this so far as I've observed is a selective pocket [camping] community where people do get along and have familial like ties, but in this case it is a selective territory with the beginnings of formal regulation such as community meetings and "voting people out". Furthermore it is usually not open to homeless people in general- it is it's own crowd. The inescapable reality is that partitioning barriers create a sedentary culture of property ownership, factions, organized rather than natural structure, and all the other things that go with partitioned domestication are all soon to follow.
They may as well have just hit the fast forward button to modern living. But if what you're doing is fundamentally no different than anything else that surrounds you - the same society which created the inequality - then you may as well be held to the standard that you should pay for your own unit.