the idea that unhoused people are usually addicted to drugs is a falsehood. the idea that these people are dangerous to the public as a self-evident fact is a falsehood. i do live around many camps. i walk by homeless encampments every single day. i don’t agree with you, and your biases are not some logical result of your proximity to them. i don’t think you can characterize unhoused people as dangerous or irrational categorically, i don’t think you can make assumptions about them being on drugs, and i don’t think that addicts are dangerous by virtue of their addiction. i don’t think the perception you have of these people in need is in any way a rational appraisal of them, and it plays into long held prejudices about impoverished people that cast them as less than rational, incapable of making good decisions, and addled by drug abuse, rather than what they are, people who have fallen into desperate circumstances and need help. attitudes like yours, that see them as threats to your community, rather than community members themselves, make it easier for systems of governance to further deprive them of resources. forcing them into camps, police raids that ruin their tents and dump the few belongings they have into landfills, building hostile architecture that makes the only places they can live unlivable, making laws that criminalize the only way they can survive. pitting your concern for your people against your “pity” for your unhoused neighbors is a false dichotomy.