when society forced them into debt and hiding, being chased by police

What...?

Huh?

These people love drugs more than they love living with a roof over their heads. That's the whole point. They like living like this.

Another man, who wouldn’t tell me his name, said he was offered drug treatment but always said no. “Out here I feel like a king,” he explained. “I have everything I need, why would I give that up?”

The cops don't chase them, in fact they are explicitly forbidden to interfere. You are just making things up.

Some are mentally ill. But what can we do about that? We can't take them off the street and imprison them in state hospitals. They have committed no crime. In America the ACLU fought long and hard to close the mental asylums, and they won.

Widespread homelessness among the mentally ill can be traced back to the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the influential works of writers such as Thomas Szasz, Erving Goffman, Ken Kesey, and R.D. Laing. These authors maintained that sufferers of mental illness were a kind of political prisoner to an unjust social structure and that they were "really just marching to a different drummer and should be free to do their marching in the streets," and so paved the way for the wholesale deinstitutionalization of mentally ill individuals in the U.S. When many of them ended up homeless and alone, posing a danger to themselves and sometimes to others, civil liberties activists "snuffed out any lingering possibility that the state hospitals and the community mental health centers might treat the vast majority of the seriously mentally ill" by reinterpreting their condition of homelessness as a state of emancipation.

This case is useful reading, it set a precedent outlawing the involuntary commitment of the mentally ill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Patricia_Brown

Basically, the ACLU and the usual left-wing suspects went to court to fight for her right to live in a subway grate and throw her feces at passerby. And here we are today.