Item: 1 roof over my head (Part II)

I wonder if there are certain codes of conduct that exist among the homeless.  For example, a lot of times there'll be the same person at a certain corner consistently.  Does this earn you some sort of rights to this particular spot? Is it a social error to take somebody else's corner, even if you happen to get there first one day?  Or is there a kind of logic of distribution, such that the person who's the worst off gets ceded the most generous locations?

I guess everything I've written on this so far is pretty frivolous - irrelevant questions coming from someone sitting in a comfortable house.  Plus, I wouldn't have to wonder such things if I were actually willing to know somebody homeless personally.  Steve Lopez did a series for the LA Times last year about Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, and developed some pretty deep attachments to the people he met.  This series is a better commentary on the giant inter-related block of problems like homelessness, drug abuse, mental illness, illiteracy, than anything I could come up with.

Then the question always is: but what do we do about it?  As much as we all talk, I don't think anyone really knows how to make it go away.  But I'm glad there are people out there this minute seeing patients, serving meals, and handing out blankets.