This is just another law/ordinance which follows the trend of penalizing and criminalizing people who are homeless. Our country has a long standing tradition of using penalizing measures to make sure that certain populations don't have the right to live in or occupy public spaces - from Jim Crow Laws, to Sundown Towns, To California's own Anti-Okie Laws and surprisingly-still-legal-till-the-1970's in California, the UGLY LAWS which made it illegal for any "maimed, ugly, malformed, disabled or unsightly person" to live be in public spaces. All of these laws made it a crime for certain populations to simply live in urban or public spaces like town centers. The Last of these laws, an ugly law in San Francisco, wasn't found unconstitutional until the 1970's.
Now the more recent trend is to criminalize the status of homelessness by passing punitive measures, such as "urban camping bans", panhandling laws, and "sit and lie" ordinances to make it a crime to engage in survival activities such as sleeping or covering oneself from the elements in public spaces. This law is simply following this trend.
In Denver, the city council passed one of these ordinances recently, an "urban camping ban" which made it illegal for any person to sleep and cover themselves from the elements within the city limits of Denver. The lawmakers said that this law was a tool to get people to services. They said that sometimes you need a stick to drive people to arms of help. They also promised more funding for services.
Every national homeless coalition, agency and group, along with the Obama Administration, has come out against these types of laws long before the Denver Camping Ban was passed.
6 months following the ban's passage, a group called Denver Homeless Out Loud studied the effects of the law. They issued a report called "A report from the street" which can be found at their website; denverhomelessoutloud.org
The study shows plainly that homeless people's lives were not improved- they simply were pushed more into dangerous secluded hiding places, or moved out of the center of town, and they felt less safe. The report also showed that city leaders did not follow up on their promises to improve the lives of homeless people by increasing services.
The real story of mass homelessness in America is simple - We used to believe that the public had the obligation to help the most needy by having public funds available to house them. From 1940, three years after the New Deal Housing programs started, until 1980, two years after Reagan slashed the federal housing budget, America did not have mass street homelessness. From 1980 until 1989, America's homeless population tripled in numbers. Then, again from the mid 1980's until the mid 1990's, homelessness in America doubled again. Since then, the national homeless population has gradually grown until 2005. Since 2005, Homeless populations have plateaued, as small increases of federal housing program funding has occured.
As a country, we still give less to our federal housing budget than before 1978, and homelessness is still a mass epidemic.
So, our answer, as the American public, sadly has been to say, "We won't pay for answers to homelessness, we simply want to make it illegal to be homeless in our neighborhoods, towns and city centers."
That's the truth of what's going on here.

If the Obama Administration is against this, it MUST be a good thing.