That must have been your first trip to Denver, which has had a large homeless and transient population since the olden days. If you had engaged some of the homeless characters in Lodo in coversation, they may have expressed the belief that being homeless is not such a bad thing. The homeless in Denver even have their own newspaper. Denver is presently building a $46.5M care facility for sick homeless people, so they are not ignored by any means.

In any case, the Landmark Mall in Alexandria is being turned into a billion dollar INOVA hospital campus, so any shelter there was temporary. With the kind of money that is in that community and DC area real estate values, that wasn't going to last long. A big problem with turning old shopping malls into shelters is that they were built for people with automobiles, so they are usually surrounded by a sea of parking lots which is not conducive to foot travelers.