I agree. But making it illegal to feed the homeless, or feed them in some locations seems heavy handed and wrong.
If you want to encourage feeding the homeless in places close to where they can get other types of assistance, you should take positive steps to encourage that:
Provide assistance (financial or logistical) to organizations doing the feeding in proper locations.
Provide transportation to help the homeless get to the proper locations.
Or most simply:
Ask the organizations or people what you can do to get them to start feeding the homeless in proper locations.
The issue is the realization that feeding the homeless in unstructured environments is a net negative. It makes people feel good because, "Look, I helped that guy eat today." But the reality is that guy could've likely eaten a meal more appropriate to his specific health needs in a ___location best suited to help him with medical aid, psychiatric help, and job skills/placement. So we have this terrible predicament where people feel good about something that actually hurts people because they don't know better. It would be nice if education programs worked and people wised up and stopped feeding the homeless randomly, but you know what? It just doesn't work. We've tried that. So now the law is involved. It may sound crazy, but we have to get people to stop hurting the homeless by encouraging terribly unsafe behaviors like panhandling.
The issue is how you deal with a behavior that may be a net negative.
Do you ban it?
Or, Do you use education, incentives and support to change the prevalence of the behavior?
Also, are you completely sure that if you ban unstructured feeding, all the homeless will get fed in a structured way? Or will banning the feeding lead to some people starving?
Also, how do you know it's a net negative? Do you take the word of a politician who has incentive to move the homeless to low property value areas?
I live in Orlando, the city that got some infamy a number of years ago for banning the public unstructured feedings. I feel confident in saying that education seems to have failed, but banning seems to have been fairly successful at least with respect to curbing the behavior.
So that leaves the question of whether or not it's a net negative. Panhandling is demonstrably dangerous, and an argument for unstructured feeding is an argument for the status quo. I can definitely say that the status quo is an abject failure. As for the structured efforts, those must be measured and improved on an individual basis. They certainly have their own issues, but at least in my city those structured feeding facilities also provide access and information on medical care, job placement, and other assistance that is relevant to the homeless population.
If you want to encourage feeding the homeless in places close to where they can get other types of assistance, you should take positive steps to encourage that:
Provide assistance (financial or logistical) to organizations doing the feeding in proper locations.
Provide transportation to help the homeless get to the proper locations.
Or most simply: Ask the organizations or people what you can do to get them to start feeding the homeless in proper locations.