Tent Cities in Germany?

This came up as a one-liner news item out of Berlin-City over the past couple of days.  There's a city 'Senator' (not a national figure or a Bundestag representative, but just a city council sort of guy), who came up with this new 'idea'....to build or allow tent cities to exist for the homeless folks of Berlin.

Back in 1978, I could have walked around the entire city of Frankfurt, and I doubt if there were more than a hundred homeless folks in the entire city.  Today?  If you draw a one-mile circle with the train-station as the central point, I would estimate that near one-thousand homeless people exist in the city.  Hamburg?  A minimum of one-thousand, and probably going on up to two-thousand easily.  Berlin?  From my last walk around the city, I'd take a guess than it's definitely more than two-thousand homeless folks living there. 

What you tend to notice is that various charities and city-support groups (throughout Germany) have tried to put up one-room 'apartments' and entice the homeless folks to leave the streets, regain some stability, and 'recover'.  The homeless folks who refuse the offer? 

This usually goes to three central themes: (1) every single one of these apartment dwelling deals involves a list of rules (no pets, no drugs, etc) and the bulk of these people can't agree with the rules. (2) Most all of these programs involve rehab, and the bulk of these people simply don't want rehab.  (3) A fair number of these people are mentally unbalanced, and probably need to be in an institution rather than a open-lifestyle apartment building.

So how would the tent-city work?  The Senator in this case left out that part of the discussion.  My guess is that the city would try to find some warehouse....putting a central toilet and shower facility into one end, and letting guys have a 10x10 ft square to put their tent/establishment up.  Sanitation? Well....you'd have to hire a crew to come in and do a major job each day.....to prevent this from becoming a health hazard.  Druggies in the mix?  Yes, and that would beg questions by the cops.

The odds of this politically taking off and occurring?  I would question the potential for the public to buy into this idea.  No one would want their city park, or some area along the riverbank....to become some homeless tent city.

So it's a chatter-topic with no viability?  It'll get discussed and pro-homeless groups will advocate it as an answer to the overall problem.  But it just takes one problem....resolves it, and creates a brand new problem to ponder upon.