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Why do homeless people camp on sidewalks? Because it works. The question becomes, "works for what?" The proposition appears to mean to make camping "not work,"
by fatdog 10y ago
Why do homeless people camp on sidewalks? Because it works. The question becomes, "works for what?" The proposition appears to mean to make camping "not work," by imposing risk and cost on campers. It's responding to a symptom, but it's like treating cancer with crutches.
What does the street provide an alley or park doesn't? I've said before, the perceived security from non-underclass people walking by. Police protect non-underclass people from violence, and the homeless get this additional benefit by extension by being nearby. In shelters and tent cities, you are more likely to be targeted for crime.
Sure people without addresses have a right to safety and security of person like everyone else, but their behavior (often due to mental illness or drug use or factors outside of their direct control) makes it extra difficult/costly to provide it.
Other people pay a lot of money in tax to the state to reduce their daily exposure to violence, regardless of the factors that might contribute to it. Tent cities are a source of risk, and they are provocative symbols of the limits of the ability of the local government to operate credibly. Governments, mainly for their own sake, must remove tent cities when they pop up, arguably because that's what they were originally chartered to do.
Some may say that the homeless are "just trying to live," but it could be said they are hovering around public services without any sense of responsibility to the local society that provides them.
They are human beings, but ones who take advantage of the lack of a continuous tribal identity in cities, where they can live with people believing they are someone else's problem. People who don't learn to get along get run out of small towns (or worse). Add a drug addiction to severe mental illness, and you basically get a municipal zombie problem.
To me, homelessness is only a complicated problem from the perspective of an ideology that cannot tolerate examples of the limits to its power. Everyone else has solutions, just not ones that reinforce the narcissism of maternalistic policymakers.
- jsprogrammer 10y agoCould you please expand on the argument that governments were originally chartered to remove tent cities?
- jessriedel 10y ago> Other people pay a lot of money in tax to the state to reduce their daily exposure to violence, Just to be clear, police and courts use an extremely small fraction of tax revenue.
- pavlov 10y ago... without any sense of responsibility ... ones who take advantage ... people who don't learn to get along ... All this sounds like you're blaming the homeless. Your last paragraph suggests that you have solutions to the problem. What are they?
- krinchan 10y ago> Your last paragraph suggests that you have solutions to the problem. What are they? Right? I read that word soup and walked away with the paraphrase, "I'd tell you how to fix it, but I'm afraid you just aren't smart enough to understand."
- restalis 10y agoI walked away with something different. Homelessness is supposed to be a complicated problem if you don't get into details. The key is not to treat the mass of the homeless people as a whole but to understand and consider each of the factors that lead to people ending up living on the streets. To address this requires work of course, but for some reason it seems more convenient to be left as a perpetual problem.
- imagist 10y agoCall me crazy, but I think it's pretty obvious that the only solution to homelessness is homes. Of course that's the compassionate solution, but compassion holds little weight in the libertarian idealist sociopathy of Silicon Valley. But even from a cost perspective housing is the only solution. You can make homelessness illegal, but then you're just housing the homeless in prisons. If you're going to house people anyway, there are cheaper ways to do it than with a prison. You can bus the homeless somewhere else, but there's a long history of other places bussing people back to SF. Given the homeless want to be in SF because of climate, opportunities, etc., the average is that they're more likely to end up there. Unless there's something else I haven't thought of, that really only leaves housing. Existing programs are intended to get people into a position where they can obtain housing, but these de facto don't work very well, because they attempt to get them other things before housing. Housing before a job works better than a job before housing. Housing before addiction treatment works better than addiction treatment before housing. None of the existing solutions are sustainable as long as the person isn't housed. It's unrealistic to expect someone to hold down a job or kick their addiction while living on the streets. Without housing, no auxiliary solution is sustainable. So not only is the only solution to homelessness housing, but it's housing first.