Something annoying about this kind of reporting is that the writer constantly refers to the homeless population as a monolithic group called "the homeless." The writer ascribes all kinds of attitudes and beliefs onto them, ostensibly based on the writer's interactions with homeless people in investigating this story. There's a weird self-fulfilling prophecy going on in which the writer only interacts with homeless pe…
At this point I don't think there's any serious public disagreement that the city's policies of radical tolerance of drug use and refusal to pursue forced treatment of the mentally ill has become too extreme and counter-productive. There are plenty of politicians, perhaps most of them, that would swing the pendulum back. But generations of rhetoric regarding the history of forced institutionalization, War on Drugs, and minority discrimination, has been internalized. Not just the sad truth of it, but the rhetoric, divorced from the reality of that history and thus impenetrable to reassurances of a changed context. So whenever the city tries to change course it's far too easy for political opportunists to inflame passions and stoke cynicism, making the political risk of change intolerable.
For example, Mayor London breed opposed a bond measure to raise more money for homeless housing, drug treatment, etc. She opposed it because as a newly incoming mayor she wanted to the ability to use the prospect of more money as leverage for reform. That is, she supported a bond measure in principle, but not until some policy reforms were in place to insure the money would be more effective. But opportunists and activists outside the political process pushed ahead, which meant all the various departments and political interests knew they had money coming without having to seriously reckon with their manifest ineffectiveness. And the public were willing to just throw more money at the situation--anything to just make it go away--because they've internalized the rhetoric that the homeless and drug use problems are purely structural; they were overly credulous of promises that things would change with just another round of new money.
It's a very unfortunate state of affairs, and in many ways I see similarities to how, on a national scale, generations of conservative rhetoric has been internalized to some non-negligible degree by the entire country, which has in turn resulted in an extreme rightist element effectively being able to drive the national narrative.
EDIT: Removed the "[now ancient]" qualifier on the history of forced institutionalization, in case people thought I meant it to apply to minority discrimination.