on the visibility of homelessness

from this article:

As much as anything, individual opinions of homeless people seem not as much about what they do — we all scratch and yawn and piss, some of us do drugs and smoke and drink — but where they do it. Indeed, some of us do a lot stranger things behind closed doors than merely eat or sleep. But the difference between you and the guy sleeping in a doorway is you’ve got somewhere to do it that isn’t subject to bylaw interference. Imagine everything you do in your house or apartment (be honest, I mean everything) all your habits, bad and good and weird and then **imagine doing it all on a downtown sidewalk where the passersby are hostile and no one will let you use a toilet**.

Spot on.