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Can you spell out why you believe that giving things to the homeless, or abstaining from assaulting or expelling them, is bad? Is it just the "more of them will move into the area" thing (so it's bad that they disgrace some people who don't want anything to do with them with their presence, as opposed to... staying somewhere far away from civilisation? If they otherwise just hung out in another city, the total number of people unwillingly exposed to the homeless would be about the same), or do you actually think that this materially increases the number of homeless (either by keeping them alive when they would otherwise die, or by incentivising people to become homeless who otherwise wouldn't)?
It seems to me that the last theory would require extraordinary evidence, and the "homeless would stay in the woods if civilisation were successfully hostile to them" route can be expected to result in them dying all the same (I'd guess that the majority of people who are homeless don't have the executive function/skill level to eke out a living on land that is so useless as to remain unclaimed by civilisation). If your ask amounts to solving the homeless problem by accelerating the homeless-to-dead pipeline, you should be explicit about it, because the main obstacle to realising your proposal will be that upon reflection most people will be against it on moral principle, and this topic attracts enough attention that you can't hope to sneak some policy past the public without them realising this.
I would think the point is instead "accelerating the homeless here to homeless in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco pipeline". As South Park explained many years ago with their "California is super cool to the homeless" song.
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The effect of the carrots and sticks is largely to displace them to areas that are more willing to give up beauty, cleanliness, safety, tax dollars etc. vs. areas that are less willing to. Seems Pareto optimal for all involved, including the homeless themselves for a sufficient amount of sticks should they stick around in a hostile region.
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There's a big difference between NYC homeless problem, California homeless problem, and Kalispell, Montana having a homeless problem. NYC homeless are people who are/were otherwise living in NYC and wind up on the street, NYC faces relatively little risk of attracting outsize homeless population to the working population, NYC is simply so large that its resources will be large enough to handle the situation. California cities attract some homeless people, who like the mild weather, and faces some risk of attracting too many homeless people if they are too generous, but again has a large economy and resources to handle them.
Kalispell, Montana can quite easily attract too many homeless people for a town of 20k residents to handle. We have no concept of residency in a town, as opposed to a state, and a strong tradition of freedom of movement between states. If Kalispell is facing a wave of homelessness among people who grew up in Kalispell and its environs then Kalispell has some responsibility to care for them. But to say that Kalispell must care for thousands of homeless residents raised anywhere in the United States is difficult. And if Kalispell is too generous, they may run that risk, of thousands of bums finding their way to town to take advantage of the situation.
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