[EDIT] TLDR: I never committed crimes or hurt people when I was poor as fuck.
When I was 20 I would've maybe thought this. I was a left anarchist, and my leanings are still in that direction. It's not wealth that made me less progressive. I wrote a novel when I was 24 that brought the world down on me; it was a satire that involved a rock band murdering Bush and Cheney at a gala at Bohemian grove. It got thousands of hits from .mil sites and I got police going through my trash cans, my apartment raided. I left the country for 15 years. And railed against the military/industrial complex.
It's progressives who made me less progressive. During my exile I worked, I created things. It was hard. But I never lost my dignity. I never acted like a savage. I did lots of drugs and drinking but I never blamed anyone else; I worked out what it was that I needed to do. I've worked every day since I was 15. I wasn't handed anything. My parents were born in complete poverty.
So when I see a 20 year old beating his dog and literally taking a shit on the sidewalk, and then screaming at me that "how dare you tell a homeless person he can't shit here unless you want me to use your bathroom", when the City of Portland and me put a porta-potty on the corner thirty paces from where he's shitting for him, what I see is an able-bodied guy with a facebook and instagram account who's LARPing as an anarchist and needs to go through some form of hardship which he's obviously not experiencing yet.
I don't blame anyone for anything I could reasonably - or unreasonably - see someone doing. Slapping someone for making fun of your wife's hair is bad but it's not incomprehensible. Beating a dog is outside the sphere of what I can understand, though. So is shitting on someone's porch.
I've started to think the main thing is that people in their early 20s are being told this is an acceptable form of rebellion. It's not the peaceful Drop out, tune out of old times. It's an aggressive attempt to assert rights to dominate everyone around them - to terrorize peaceable people - without any kind of understanding of what terror people like me went through to be here. The one thing you won't find among these Portland youth is any kind of understanding of the immigrant experience. Just (mostly white) entitlement, wrapped in a thin veneer of "woke" speech. With no thought behind it.
Social forces that drive it? Poor education, stupid parents, I don't know. They're a threat to the working order of society. I would say that even more if I were homeless; I say it as a homeowner.
[Edit] Two side thoughts: 1. Just announcing you're a homeowner in Portland is cause for being attacked these days. As if no one deserves to reap any reward for anything they've done. 2. Someone on Nextdoor here last week complained that she was sleeping on her kitchen floor because the same guy had broken into her apartment three times in a week and once started a fire in the bathroom; other people asked why she didn't call the police, and she had, but they didn't respond. Someone asked why she didn't have a baseball bat at least. She recoiled and said she didn't want to hurt anyone. Is that a way to live your life?