Homelessness and Basic Infrastructure
I have a lot of pieces about Homelessness. You should start with Addressing Homelessness as the quick and dirty overview
It takes at least a year and probably a year and a half to two years to build a new apartment building a la Project SRO. Other pieces can be implemented promptly for quick relief to some degree.
Small towns who do brown bag meals and give two or three days worth should see people leave town in between resupply trips or hang out at the library instead of cluttering up the streets and hassling people. As nutrition improves, you should see fewer ambulance calls for indigent individuals.
The concentration of homeless near services is entirely about how the services are designed to force them to stand in line all day to get a free meal three times a day and other essentials. And then people complain and blame the homeless.
If you give them adequate access to food and other essentials in a manner that allows them to go where they want, they can live a little and get healthy and sort their problems and that should put a stop to homeless people hanging out all day, everyday in a limited area to merely subsist with little hope of solving their problems and getting to a more middle class life.
Tree urinals would give access to the ability to pee and clean up without public urination or hassling businesses. This would make their situation less problematic for everyone, including them.
In some situations, you may be able to use fruiting trees as tree urinals to also improve local food security. You do need to figure out who is entitled to the fruit and how to distribute it which I hope is a better problem to have than food insecurity.
I have suggested for slums, make fruiting (female) trees into tree urinals in private yards and pollen-producing (male) trees into public urinals as one potential means to handle that. If it's in your yard, it's your fruit or nuts.
My traffic logs suggest universities link to Eclogiselle, so you may be able to find relevant studies. It would be nice if someone has something suggesting which kind of fruit and nut trees to grow and recipes for the resulting defacto new food staple.
Having trees that are productive during different times, drying fruit not used immediately or cooking something that keeps a few weeks can help extend coverage of basic staples.
If you are someplace very rural and swampy, like Louisiana, I suggest you read this. Creating latrines that use wetlands as natural waste water treatment will improve the ecosystem and attract predators to the bounty. If you start killing them simply for being there, this is likely to fall apart in short order.
Bathroom access for homeless people is a huge point of contention in many places. People both resent providing bathrooms at someone else's expense and resent homeless people relieving themselves outside.
As a practical matter, it's not reasonable to expect them to hold it until they get back into housing and relieving themselves just anywhere is a potential community health hazard.
Low cost, low maintenance latrines and tree urinals are potentially a means to address this issue in a satisfactory fashion that taxpayers won't protest. And it meets my standard that while it's especially valuable to the homeless population, it's not a homeless service per se.
It's for the general public and if people get back into housing and need to pee on a tree less often, no well-paid social worker loses their job. So there shouldn't be any perverse incentives involved.