Damn people choosing to be broke. To the debtor’s prison with them.
I hate the practice of Hostile Architecture/Anti-Homeless Architecture, just let someone sleep till the sun comes up. As long as they ain’t hurting anyone or the area then, it’s whatever.
I kinda get it to an extent. I’ve had friends that lived in a bar district that couldn’t get out of their door because the same guy set up shop on their stoop every morning. They tried to convince him to just move to the side leaving them enough room to get in and out without trying to step over him. They tried to get him to work with services to help but he had no f’s left to give. He peed there, never crapped there, though. I do wonder where he went to do that.
The right answer is to properly support, help, and house the homeless, and a city with the wherewithall to maintain a park could definitely make a dent on that.
I agree that support is needed, but I can’t take this argument seriously.
Your anecdote is an annoying case, sure. But one personal experience isn’t representative of the broader homeless population, and it’s certainly not a good argument for hostile architecture.
Using a single cherry-picked encounter to draw sweeping conclusions is exactly how you get policy that “solves” a stereotype instead of a real problem. Broad statistics don’t care about your one story, and neither should public policy.
Mental illness and homelessness go together like sex and cigarettes. You can have 1000 days of harmless hobos sleeping on benches, and all it takes is 1 or 2 stark-raving madmen attacking or harassing people to shift attention and spark concern about safety (falling property values because that neighborhood has a “bum problem”)
I’m not saying it’s right, it just how things work.
Edit: I’ve paid high rent to live somewhere and had to deal with panhandlers, hobos, and thieves. Kindness wasn’t a valuable tool. Needless to say it hits different when you are the one being affected.
I agree that support is needed, but I can’t take this argument seriously.
The way I see it, someone at city hall went out of pocket several hundred dollars to customize those benches. And then they’re paying someone to come out every morning and unlock them (or not and just leaving benches locked indefinitely). All so life is now harder for people already sleeping rough.
Does anyone really believe the city councilor or mayor or whomever who went through that trouble is going to be releasing money to improve municipal services for homeless residents? I certainly don’t.
Ok, let’s turn that argument on it’s head. In what world is not blocking benches and seats in a public a better solution than state funded programs to get the homeless sheltered and fed. I can tell you right now that the numbers of shelters available are shit everywhere I’ve been and most have little to no support for mental health, addiction or anything, just draconian rules about in/out times and in most cases fees.
edit addon:
They don’t need the benches, they shouldn’t have to be on the benches. they shouldn’t feel the need to be on the grate in the winter or camping under an underpass.
Hostile infrastructure, intended to heap misery upon the most miserable among us. We punish people who should be helped, and help people who should be punished. What a backwards world.
Somewhere, something changed and money became all, get it all so you can consume. People stopped caring unless money was involved and they were getting it.
Capitalism only cares about money.
Correction. The money must be obtained without morality or ethics… And laws are written to be both be worked around or punished with fines, hence making them an operating expense.
The only crime that is punished is those done by people with limited or no political or economic leverage. This is why burglary and shoplifting is heavily punished but a company bankrupting entire communities is not.
But it wasn’t like this 25 years ago
It may have felt differently to you 25 years ago - maybe you were in a better neighborhood or something, but capitalism has always been about heartless extraction of money from the poor. Check out The Condition of the Working Class in England for a 180-year-old account of this.
25 years ago, kinda depending on where you were, cops just rousted and beat the shit out of peaple as incentive to “move on.”
Capitalism has always been like this to one degree or another. Maybe its inherent cruelty is affecting more people than it ever has, but it has always been cruel to poor and marginalized groups.
Mildly infuriating? This is disgusting shit.
Why are they so obsessed with making sure the homeless don’t get a basic, involuntary need? Like just shoot them if you are going to be this cruel, and you are going to kill them anyway.
The cruelty is the point. They’ll say a homeless person doesn’t deserve a fee hundred bucks a month to get back on their feet, but they’ll spend 100 grand a year per person to make them more miserable. It’s just good job security (and satisfaction) for the police unions.
They spend YOUR money too, possibly making you homeless in the process.
Cruelty is definitely a big part of it but also NIMBYism. If we don’t see the homeless people, we don’t have to think about them and try to find solutions.
they’re still sticking to the trope that the homeless are lazy, uneducated bums; at best they’re what happens to good citizens after falling into addiction.
they all WANT to be there, but we definitely don’t want them!!!
but that narrative should be falling apart as conditions deteriorate…
but you know, american education lol.
Yes, I really can’t wrap my way around their way of thinking.
There are people who have such big issues in life, and such bad options, that a bench in a park is their best option for a place to sleep. That is horrible, and something must be done. And politicians think removing their best option is a solution?
If people can show enough compassion to invest in getting these people back on their feet, if you are really just going to ignore them - at least to that. Let them be.
If we’re talking drunk people causing issues, and they need to learn to go home instead - then I’d get it. Not my preferred solution, but I’d get it.
I think everyone CAN get together to make a difference, everyone who cares.
drunk and disorderly is arrestable. This is only for stopping sleeping 100%
And politicians think removing their best option is a solution?
Because it gets them votes. The politicians aren’t the problem, they merely reflect public attitudes.
I think some of the politicians really are part of the problem.
The bourgeois don’t want to look at the plebians.
Sure, commuters with jobs are the bourgeoisie.
Lemmy lol. Answer is simple. Everyday folks don’t like seein’ them, as they consider them lowlifes. City is doing “something” about it, so city is doing good. There are shelters, so it’s not like these people have no options.
Everyday folk don’t think about shelters being overcrowded, homeless being alcoholics/druggies just to cope with their situation and thus not being able to use shelters, or the fact that I’ve seen software devs, here on lemmy, mention being homeless or being in the past.
Most people are reactive, not proactive. They see dirty homeless person, they feel yucky, they tell said person to gtfo without thinking about the fact that it’s a person in the first place.
Yeah but being proactive is illegal unless you’re part of some organization and making profit somewhere along the way.
By that I mean it’s fucked up in the US, how I cant by a few boxes of frozen burgers, cook them make a bunch of burgers and start handing food out; unless I was part of some organization that somewhere along the way is making money or hype to make sure their other businesses get business.
…wait, making field kitchens is illegal in USA? I am not living there so I wouldn’t know. Can’t ya like throw barbeque in your backyard or smth?
Yeah, you can do the BBQ thing. You, just can’t for instance buy a used RV and climb on top of it and start handing out cooked food to everyone.
Because people are more comfortable letting homeless people starve or freeze to death than they are with shooting them.
Same reason people are happy to buy ham from the grocery store but would feel uncomfortable slitting a pig’s throat.
We need societal-level solutions to homelessness. We need housing, free healthcare, free mental healthcare, criminal justice reform, and more. But until we can do that, the reality is, concentrations of the homeless are associated with higher crime, reduced patronage of businesses, and decreased property values.
It super duper sucks, but homelessness is a really difficult problem for cities and property owners they aren’t equipped to address. Since they can’t fix the problem, they instead focus on keeping the problem away.
It’s all so fucked.
This feels like a very US-specific way of framing it. In the UK and much of Europe, many of those “societal-level solutions” already exist to varying degrees: healthcare and mental healthcare free at the point of use, unemployment support, benefits towards rent, social and temporary housing, legal homelessness-prevention duties, and Housing First programmes.
They’re nowhere near perfect. We have social-housing shortages, benefit limits, long healthcare waiting lists and plenty of people who still fall through the gaps. But the response doesn’t have to begin and end with moving homeless people somewhere less visible to protect property values.
Your point that individual businesses and property owners cannot solve homelessness is completely fair. That’s precisely why they should sit behind a publicly funded safety net which helps keep people housed and supports them back into stability, instead of leaving everyone involved to deal with the consequences.
If you don’t want to see homeless people in your park: HOUSE THEM
Why spend money on housing them when you can instead (i assume) employ someone to keep to anti-homeless benches on schedule and pay consultants extraorbitant fees to help you design anti-homeless parks
Ironically, the guy who has the job of maintaining the equipment and schedule
Over here entrance to shelters is permitted only to the sober. Its more complicated than that.
It’s a lot easier to get sober if you have housing and basic needs covered.
Our town, one shelter they essentially dry out at (at their own pace), one shelter they go through a program that trains them on basic adulting and job skills like paying rent and filling out timesheets. together they make a pretty successful (very low recidivism rate, i.e. back on the street) mutual aid group
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Agree, but also I still think we should House them instead of investing into hostile architecture because its just more sensible
You have to solve your problems before we help you solve your problems. Top notch logic there.
And it’s impossible to get a decent night’s sleep outside with all the traffic, pedestrians, noises, cops, etc. unless you self-medicate. If you can’t get a good night’s sleep you go insane.
In metro Vancouver area theyve bought old hotels and other buildings and set up barrier free housing. But it doesn’t totally fix it because some, due to mental health, still don’t want housing (or rules that go with housing) and some are destructive and start fires.
Its a super tough problem that needs a root cause fix in early childhood years when kids need a good life.
A former addict/homeless person also mentioned that all the comforts, and safe injection sites, free clean drugs, etc just insentivized them to keep using, since there wasn’t hardship to force change.
Its like a no win situation, right now.
Some people need to hit rock bottom to get the right motivation, others just need a chance to get back on top. We shouldn’t accommodate the former at the expense of the latter.
Ooh, free lock-picking practice!
I don’t think it would be illegal to non-destructively unlock that lock.
- Ex-cop
It’s a master lock, it won’t give you as much practice time as you hope.
I’m aware. If you really want a pedantry fight:
Nothing about my comment implies it would be a long practice session.
I was not looking for any kind of fight and I actually did suspect you knew. I was just hopping on the opportunity to mock Master Lock, since I know they make some of the worst locks on the market.
Full disclosure: I have zero lock picking skills. I probably couldn’t pick this lock if I tried.
not just the worst, but they somehow manage to release new locks that are worse than their old ones, as well as new locks with positively ancient design flaws that every lock manufacturer absolutely knows about, like not including a rear shield in the core, meaning you can just… stick something in there and open it trivially. i’m talking design flaws from the 1800s and early 1900s. their most secure core is used in a PLASTIC LOTO LOCK and none of their metal locks, for no fucking reason. the incompetence is unbelievable.
Fair enough. My hackles are usually up thanks to how people treat me.
You probably could. They’re really not very hard.
Very curious about a hypothetical: You pick the lock and secure it elsewhere on the bench so that it’s not lost and accidentally affix a proper lock keeping the bench in the bench position.
Anything is practice. Repetitive behavior hones skills. Experience is experience, good or bad. Maybe the skill is doing in the open quick enough to not draw attention.
I think it would be a lot more fun though to non-destructively unlock the lock and replace it with another one that looks identical every single day after you free the bench and put it in its upright state, locking it in place.
They’ll think that they’ve got the wrong key every single day. Just keep buying locks and replacing it.
That’s more illegal than I can openly suggest.
Oh, I don’t advise it. It would be fun though.
I guess it’s time to put a bench there, get a hammer drill, put some holes in the cement, and bolt that fucker to the ground, and then round the bolts so they can’t take it out.
Dystopian as fuck.
A symptom of homelessness being a thing although it’s a quite understandable mitigation too.
I guess this is how English and Spanish work but coming from language where the word “free” is not used in similar manner I find it somewhat funny that here we have “free zone / zona libre” and it means that the bench is locked and so many things are prohibited.
The Spanish is a bit easier since it literally translates to “Zone Free of…” followed by a list of things it’s a zone free from but I agree, since a “drug free zone” and a “gun free zone” mean that there is, ideally according to the sign, no drugs or guns but a “weapons free zone” would mean you’re free to shoot combatants on sight, whereas a “weapon free zone” would mean an area without weapons.
using “something free” to say that thing is prohibited sounds so 1984…
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Another example of a society that has lost its mind, and has become psychopathic, because they see sociopathy as a form of freedom. When instead it oppresses the population where it should help.
A Psychopathic solution to a problem that is also caused by psychopathy.
To call it a weapons free zone is disgusting, when we all know it’s to prevent the homeless from sleeping there.It’s easier to lock up a bench than build an affordable home.
Cheaper too.
But, it’s probably not the optimal solution. I suppose it’s a step in the right direction. As bad as hostile architecture is, the old way of dealing with the problem was to have cops beat the shit out of homeless or drunk people if they tried to sleep in a place where other people might be offended or annoyed.
Oh, they still do that.
To me it doesn’t feel like a step in the right direction, since we could have always had the optimal solution, at any time: no beatings and no hostile architecture.
That might be the optimal solution to you and me, but it isn’t the optimal solution for the rich and powerful. Apparently the average voter hates the sight of homeless people more than they hate hostile architecture too.
That’s got to be annoying just to lock and unlock a bench probably every day. Also the bench can still be used as a backboard while you sit on the ground.
It doesn’t stop being a chair it’s just hostile architecture
(Not in OP city) There’s a lot of homeless people here and they like to sleep in entranceways and similar things, so you’ll often see gates etc that get closed in front. One business had a open area beside it that homeless people were sleeping in, so they installed rounded spikes on the ground to make the area unusable. Caused a quite a bit of drama with the city.
Mfs be living in pharloom
