It's not a nice thing, but I'm not sure if you can really say it's bad. The truth is that while there ARE people who wind up being homless through no fault of their own, more often than not it's the result of people who wind up being there through their own actions and things like say choosing drugs and alcohol over work and paying rent. This is one of the big reasons why the problem hasn't been impacted, plenty of people all over the world have gone in there with left wing morals, providing free food, cheap housing, medical care, and other things to the homeless, all full of wide eyed wonder thinking they are going to be helping the "Left wing TV special" person of someone who just got a raw deal and needs a bit of a helping hand. It ends in diasater however because for every one person who might be like that you probably have 20 people who aren't that turn all of these programs and projects into a joke. They use the mobile health clinics as a free source of painkillers, turn the projects into crime ridden hellholes, and use the soup kitchens and such as bait to draw people into ambushes to be robbed, raped, and exploited (after all, you know vulnerable people will be coming to and from the soup kitchens, so you know where abouts to ambush them).
This is not to say that these kinds of programs cost tons and tons of money, and the question always arises as to where that money is going to come from. A lot of the people homeless on the streets (and part of what freaks me out given my situations) at least in the US are there because of mental health issues, due to the goverment being unable to support the hospitals and such, there was a big deal years ago where they were literally lobbing everyone who wasn't actively homicidal out the door. That's wrong on a lot of levels, but
at the same time raising the taxes to support things like that are not easy to do. Everyone wants the goverment to do all these humanitarian things, but nobody wants to pay the taxes for the goverment to do it.
As the article points out, Hungary also has a problem in the form of the Romani who are a touchy subject. Your dealing with a group of nomads who have an entire culture based off of being homeless, and criminal acts and scams. A lot of people like to romanticize the Gypsies and talk about misunderstandings, but in the end living with them doing what they do is very difficult and it puts a kind of pressure on the entire situation that isn't present where you don't have that kind of ethnic subculture.
I think a lot of it comes down to them wanting to try and regulate the Romanii without actually specifying them and risking outcries of racism especially in the UN. The basic point being to require all of these people to maintain a solid, verifyable identity, and address, so that way if they say rob or swindle someone they can't just vanish into a constantly moving subculture. The basic point is probably that they want to be able to find a Gypsy, ask the address, and when they don't have one lob them in jail... for good or ill.
You can argue all of this back and forth, I'm actually none too fond of any aspect of it (Gypsies or in general) but I understand it. Truthfully it's the kind of problem that does need to be resolved, and despite what a lot of people might think it's not something that is going to be resolve by just lobbing free crap and oppertunities at the poor. Of course throwing them into prison isn't nessicarly going to help either. The end result is that morality has to be re-evaluated and a lot of things we consider cruel and inhumane put back on the table. Me personally, I'd like to see the homeless in the US rounded up and put into international service. Send them out of the country in uniform to do dreg work for US/UN peacekeeping forces. We don't arm those guys anyway in many cases. You use these guys to say dig latrines for refugees, build fences (carryng stones and such) and cool the meals being handed out and so on. In short use them as a sort of support-oriented penal corps. where they can be made to dry out under military watch, get in better shape, and perhaps eventually learn some skills to come back home and contribute. If a lot of them never come back from their duties... well, that sucks and all, but we're dealing with people whose bodies were probably going to wind up clogging gutters as it was... that might sound callous, but I can't help but be a realist. I can't come up with a perfect, utopian solution, but neither can anyone else which is why we have problems like this.
