I seriously doubt they removed seats because people were sitting on them.

Really? With all the awful shit that cities do to homeless populations, this is hard to believe?

Check out some examples of "hostile architecture". Cities will dump a ton of money on making areas unusable for anything other than walking. Hell, there's no benches at all where I live, and instead there's signs at major intersections saying it's illegal to gove money to the homeless, and I've seen much worse in other cities.