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I'm sorry but I must ask this. How frequently do you pass homeless people that you can take this time to do this? I walk my commute to work each day, down to the very heart of Chicago near the dead center of the loop, a 40 minute walk door to door. In a given day I pass dozens of homeless people, and different ones most days. Your parable about never walking past a homeless person is neat but it just doesn't work like that, I'd never get to work if I did that. The city spends something like $40k/year/homeless person to not solve the problem. It's easy enough to say you'd never walk past someone down on their luck or whatever you want to call the homeless when it's an uncommon occurrence. Forgetting about the cost of helping these people with small acts of kindness, even working efficiently I wouldn't have the time necessary to do this individual care for each one.
And then there is pulling back the camera and not focusing on these vistas of individual charity at the EA perspective and recognizing the festering wounds that are developing nations. Unless you blinker yourself to some kind of "only poverty that I can see counts and I live far away from it" then yes, the fact that resources are finite will quickly assert itself.
It's difficult to answer your question without self-doxxing. Certainly I live somewhere rather smaller and accordingly homeless-saturated than Chicago. The kind of encounter I described is more on the order of a few times a month. It's also worth noting that this is something I do when shopping for groceries or the like, i.e. when I have time to myself; I don't tend to travel on foot when it comes to getting to & off work. I'm talking about the kinds of people you'll find lurking as near to the supermarket as supermarket security will allow, and the like. People at bus stops. Very, very occasionally, people who knock at my door.
But in any case, yes, obviously this doesn't work if you encounter ten beggars every single day. The point of the anecdote is not "never walk past a homeless person" but "never walk past a homeless person just because you screen out their existence as a neutral fact of the universe". If you can't help then you can't help; I wouldn't personally help every single neighbor on my street if every house but mine got rubbled overnight, either.
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