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Yes. Sufficiently large American cities will have enough mentally ill homeless people to make an unlocked bathroom a big liability. Even if they're a very small
by RickS 11y ago
Yes. Sufficiently large American cities will have enough mentally ill homeless people to make an unlocked bathroom a big liability. Even if they're a very small fraction of the population, you only have to find the walls smeared with shit, or a guy passed out with a needle falling out of his arm once before the locks go on.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoYeah, I mean, I know the justification, and it's not really any one business' fault. At this point, any place that tries not locking their bathrooms will instantly find themselves the only place homeless people can go to pee in a mile radius, and be overwhelmed. What sickens me is that people look at ludicrous phenomena like locked bathrooms, or like putting fucking spikes on public benches, and go "Oh, well, you know, those homeless are why we can't have nice things." As if hordes of crazy homeless people are some sort of irresistible natural phenomenon, like locusts, and not something that anyone could possibly do something about. Especially not something that might conceivably have to be paid for with tax money.
- mahyarm 11y agoHomeless congregate in downtowns because it gives the most profitable begging revenue. Homeless populations are also surprisingly small, something like %0.5 or less of the population of a metro area. And then on top of that, most homeless people aren't crazy people who shit on sidewalks. It only takes a few hundred crazy homeless to make a downtown core horrible. They exist because there isn't mental health funding to house and manage them. It's a tragedy of the commons problem.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoI don't think that's a tragedy of the commons. There's no rational self-interest in people who would rather walk past human misery every day than put a extra couple of dollars towards alleviating it. As you say, proper, civilized mental health funding could go a long way towards fixing this problem; even just funding for public restrooms with full-time attendants would help; but we can't get it. It's hard to put that down to anything other than self-absorbed callousness.
- mahyarm 11y agoI should of added more detail. Any place that offers some semblance of mental health and homeless services gets everyone else's homeless shipped to them, or they just start coming themselves. You need a federal level mental health program that houses and manages homeless, but it's expensive, and these people are the hard cases, often with little hope of recovery.