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I don't think compelling longterm vagrants to accept mandatory psychiatric and drug treatment in a secure facility under state custodial care is criminalizing poverty.
I live in Seattle. Please tell me which facility within 50 miles of me will both safely house people, and provide psychiatric/drug treatment for them, and I'll get right onto advocating for getting people out of tents and into that facility. Does it have a name, address, and website?
Also, it needs to have room for 5,500 unsheltered homeless people. [1]
That facility, of course, does not exist. This is my entire point. In some parallel universe where support services exist, I'd prefer them being used over people living in tents. I'd even support mandating them, because I also don't like stepping over human shit when I take a walk in my neighborhood. We don't live in that parallel universe, though, and the services that exist aren't up to the task. Shelters are unsafe, have incredibly limited admission hours, are often at capacity, don't provide enough support services, and refuse to take addicts. There's a reason people are sleeping in tents, and that reason isn't 'they don't know that shelters exist'.
Those people know shelters exist. Those shelters either don't want those people, or those people don't want to live in those shelters, because that life is worse than living in a tent by the overpass. If we're going to talk about compassion, I'm not sure how compassionate it is to force people into a living condition that's worse than the squalor they already live in.
As of February 23rd, 2022, we have exactly three options that we can implement.
1. Sweep the streets and 'house' all homeless people in prison. [2]
2. Keep sweeping tent cities from street to street, shuffling people between 3rd and 4th and back to 3rd and back to 4th. [3]
3. Do nothing and let people live in tent cities.
There is no option 4. It doesn't exist. I'd like one to exist, but it doesn't.
I don't like any of these three options, but the one I dislike least is #3. We just voted for a city council that is going to double down on #2. My prediction is that four years from now, we'll be exactly where we are today. Nobody's building a magical housing and treatment facility for 5,500 people.
[1] There are, at any point in time, ~6,000 sheltered homeless and ~5,500 unsheltered homeless in King county (population 2,200,000).
[2] This is what people mean when they talk about criminalizing poverty.
[3] This is what we call 'Re-arranging deckchairs on the Titanic'. This can be done on a local level, by sweeping tents out of neighbourhoods which complain the loudest, on a municipal level by having suburban police arrest people and release them in the city center, or on a national level, by giving mid-western homeless people a one-way bus ticket to the coasts. The net result is the same - it doesn't solve the problem, it just moves it around.