Oh okay, thanks. Yeah, it sucks to think about, but homelessness in general would probably be talked about a whole lot less if not for people's own discomfort with seeing it---and there are probably both good and bad reasons for that. I think there are situations where a homeless person makes people uncomfortable because of their own behavior, and there are others where people are uncomfortable with homeless people just because they think they make the neighborhood unattractive or whatever. Those are both obviously very different, but they both fit into the category of visible homeless people and 'reasons the general public cares about homelessness'; that is, like you said, self interest.

I agree that there'd be a whole lot less conversation about it if the only homeless people were those living in shelters, couch-hopping, or otherwise removed from the public eye, even if it were still just as common and people were generally aware of it. Take out the personal stake, and people just would care as much.

Which is upsetting to me because the amount of genuine problems caused by homeless people (overall; I'm not implying that all or most homeless people actively cause problems) is virtually nothing when compared to the problems that homeless people themselves deal with. People care about the homeless, but not, for the most part, because they care about the homeless.

Ugh, this sucks. Sorry for the wall of text. Tl;dr, I'm not disagreeing with you at all, just thinking out loud (with way too many words, sorry again).