Is it dangerous? I agree that people with means feel unsafe when encountering poverty but the "it is unsafe to ride the subway because there are poor people there" stuff doesn't appear to be proportionate with actual risk.

I think that one of the huge limitations of how we think about homelessness in the US is that we view it as a problem that non-homeless people encounter. This encourages a bunch of policies that make it easier for somebody to avoid ever having to see a homeless person but which do little to mitigate the suffering of a homeless person.