[prof_hobart]

I'm not sure that most people would be particularly offended by the fact that it reduces drug dealing, theft, littering etc.

The problem, at least for me, is the sleeping bit. I would much rather that people didn't have to sleep out in the streets and if that issue were properly tackled then I doubt many people would be complaining about the benches/spikes etc. But then, we probably wouldn't need anti-sleep benches if the homelessness problem didn't exist.

But as long as that does exist, making public environments hostile to desperate people just looking for somewhere, anywhere, to sleep for the night seems like entirely the wrong answer. It's not solving the problem - it's just moving it to somewhere presumably less pleasant than that bench could have been.