6 ms·

Reminds me of being told "you can't lay in the grass" in Millennium Park in Chicago by a security guard. They build something nice and then you can't use it pr

Reminds me of being told "you can't lay in the grass" in Millennium Park in Chicago by a security guard. They build something nice and then you can't use it properly.

neaden 9y ago
That's probably an anti-homeless thing. We try to make it hard to sleep in public spaces to push homeless people to the margins. Like how they put arm rests in the middle of park benches to make it hard to sleep on them.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  > We try to make it hard to sleep in public spaces to push homeless people to the margins. It's much more complex than that. Every homeless person I've every offered to help has already rejected the systems in place to help them. Maybe they should have for various reasons. Reform and innovation in this kind of social work is sorely needed. But the whole story isn't that "society" just wants to give dirty people the boot.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    The systems in place to "help" them are typically also there to control them in some way, and may also be blind to the new risks they may be creating. The few genuine charities that offer help with no strings attached, and with sensitivity to potential unintended consequences, are frequently underfunded and subjected to frequent attacks by the powerful. For instance, the city might pass an ordinance criminalizing the act of giving away food gratis, if it was not prepared by trained personnel in a commercial kitchen with a current health inspection certificate, just to shut down a group that gives away sandwiches that were prepared in a church kitchen. I don't think that "society" hates the homeless, but its self-appointed lords and masters sure seem to hate how they don't play the grossly unfair games that seem to have been set up just for them to lose. And there's my tinfoil hat, creeping back onto my head. There is a vein of Puritan/Calvinist/Prosperity sadism running through the US. Adherents believe that those people are in the gutters because God is punishing their poor character with unfavorable circumstances. So in order to solve their financial problems, they must first accept that it is all 100% their own fault, and that random chance has no role in success or failure. People become rich only through hard work and public virtue, therefore poor people are all lazy degenerates. This twisted logic poisons public policy, because some rich people like to believe all their money makes them better than other people, and they spend a significant fraction of it on politics. Those who genuinely believe in charity and "as you treat the least of you, so you treat me" may have greater numbers, but they have lesser funding, and therefore smaller political influence in the US. They can't seem to pass any public program to help people without someone amending it to punish the poor in some way for the sins made obvious by their financial condition. This leads to homeless rejecting official help. From the outside, it just looks like institutional cruelty. I just cannot fathom the type of thinking that would spend thousands of dollars installing unnecessary armrests on park benches, just so that poor people derive less benefit from them. It is embarrassing for a supposedly advanced and modern society to have the human detritus of its public policies on display for all to see. But instead of fixing the broken policies, or accepting responsibility for those that were hurt, the evidence of brokenness is swept under the rug.
    - throwanem 9y ago
      > I don't think that "society" hates the homeless, but [...] > There is a vein of Puritan/Calvinist/Prosperity sadism [...] Where are you seeing this?
      - logfromblammo 9y ago
        I have seen it personally in my spouse's godparents. I have heard it secondhand about the Uihlein family (Uline company). For the most part, it is twice-removed hearsay regarding wealthy people and families based around the Chicago-Milwaukee corridor. Some of those people are apparently real shitheels--constantly getting detained for drunk driving, but never being held accountable for it. They're super racist, too. It's likely all an intrinsic part of Chicago's endemic corruption problem. I don't live there any more, but am acquainted with a lot of people who still do, and they occasionally like to tell horror stories about their clients/customers/employers/blind-dates/random-encounters from hell. Some of it could be exaggeration or whole-cloth fabrication, but I can believe it easily. This is because I have overheard with my own ears a serious suggestion that it would be acceptable to vanish homeless people in the darkness of night and turn them into dog food, to be sold at a premium. Some people are just evil, delude themselves into thinking they are good, and they have far more money than a just world would ever allow them to touch. Maybe you don't hear that kind of thing often in places where the rich folks are mostly hippy-dippy liberals, but hearing it from even one pair of lips, without an iota of shame, is unsettling--like seeing one cockroach in your kitchen. What is being said when I'm not around to overhear it? I also detect signs of it in written legislation and political discourse, particularly with regard to amending welfare programs to include work requirements or blanket consent to arbitrary searches by state officials. It's as though the default assumption is that recipients are out to cheat the system for a free ride, and spend all their benefits on illegal drugs. I can't imagine how anyone could become so rotten and yet live, but from the anecdotal evidence, they do exist, and for bizarre and unfathomable reasons, their opinions count more than mine, even when we have the same number of votes to cast.
        webnrrd2k 9y ago
        I think of this as attitude as "Rich white trash"... The thing about being rich is that you can afford to isolate yourself for a long time, wrapped up in a community of similarly isolated people. Those attitudes grow and fester without being challenged by different opinions. That isolation creates ideologically-driven people who just don't see how hurtful thier ideas truly are.
  - urethrafranklin 9y ago
    I've been homeless, and you don't know what you're talking about.
    - humanrebar 9y ago
      I'm just talking about the people I've personally helped out. I must not have helped you before. You surely aren't saying it's as simple as "people with stuff hate the poor people".
  - kennydude 9y ago
    In Newcastle-upon-Tyne homeless beg for money, so people buy them food which is instantly thrown away once you turn the corner.
    - vertex-four 9y ago
      They get plenty of food. They have access to food banks, soup kitchens, etc. It's one of the few things charities can sustainably do on a day-to-day basis. It's literally everything else that they don't have.
      - kennydude 9y ago
        They actually beg for money saying they're hungry, or the stupid story of "i've missed my bus so i need 70p"
        vertex-four 9y ago
        Yes, because you won't give them money for anything else.
- icebraining 9y ago
  On that note: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/unpleasant-design-hostile-urban-architecture/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/unpleasant-design-host...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

Reminds me of being told "you can't lay in the grass" in Millennium Park in Chicago by a security guard. They build something nice and then you can't use it properly.

neaden 9y ago

That's probably an anti-homeless thing. We try to make it hard to sleep in public spaces to push homeless people to the margins. Like how they put arm rests in the middle of park benches to make it hard to sleep on them.

humanrebar 9y ago
> We try to make it hard to sleep in public spaces to push homeless people to the margins. It's much more complex than that. Every homeless person I've every offered to help has already rejected the systems in place to help them. Maybe they should have for various reasons. Reform and innovation in this kind of social work is sorely needed. But the whole story isn't that "society" just wants to give dirty people the boot.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  The systems in place to "help" them are typically also there to control them in some way, and may also be blind to the new risks they may be creating. The few genuine charities that offer help with no strings attached, and with sensitivity to potential unintended consequences, are frequently underfunded and subjected to frequent attacks by the powerful. For instance, the city might pass an ordinance criminalizing the act of giving away food gratis, if it was not prepared by trained personnel in a commercial kitchen with a current health inspection certificate, just to shut down a group that gives away sandwiches that were prepared in a church kitchen. I don't think that "society" hates the homeless, but its self-appointed lords and masters sure seem to hate how they don't play the grossly unfair games that seem to have been set up just for them to lose. And there's my tinfoil hat, creeping back onto my head. There is a vein of Puritan/Calvinist/Prosperity sadism running through the US. Adherents believe that those people are in the gutters because God is punishing their poor character with unfavorable circumstances. So in order to solve their financial problems, they must first accept that it is all 100% their own fault, and that random chance has no role in success or failure. People become rich only through hard work and public virtue, therefore poor people are all lazy degenerates. This twisted logic poisons public policy, because some rich people like to believe all their money makes them better than other people, and they spend a significant fraction of it on politics. Those who genuinely believe in charity and "as you treat the least of you, so you treat me" may have greater numbers, but they have lesser funding, and therefore smaller political influence in the US. They can't seem to pass any public program to help people without someone amending it to punish the poor in some way for the sins made obvious by their financial condition. This leads to homeless rejecting official help. From the outside, it just looks like institutional cruelty. I just cannot fathom the type of thinking that would spend thousands of dollars installing unnecessary armrests on park benches, just so that poor people derive less benefit from them. It is embarrassing for a supposedly advanced and modern society to have the human detritus of its public policies on display for all to see. But instead of fixing the broken policies, or accepting responsibility for those that were hurt, the evidence of brokenness is swept under the rug.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    > I don't think that "society" hates the homeless, but [...] > There is a vein of Puritan/Calvinist/Prosperity sadism [...] Where are you seeing this?
    - logfromblammo 9y ago
      I have seen it personally in my spouse's godparents. I have heard it secondhand about the Uihlein family (Uline company). For the most part, it is twice-removed hearsay regarding wealthy people and families based around the Chicago-Milwaukee corridor. Some of those people are apparently real shitheels--constantly getting detained for drunk driving, but never being held accountable for it. They're super racist, too. It's likely all an intrinsic part of Chicago's endemic corruption problem. I don't live there any more, but am acquainted with a lot of people who still do, and they occasionally like to tell horror stories about their clients/customers/employers/blind-dates/random-encounters from hell. Some of it could be exaggeration or whole-cloth fabrication, but I can believe it easily. This is because I have overheard with my own ears a serious suggestion that it would be acceptable to vanish homeless people in the darkness of night and turn them into dog food, to be sold at a premium. Some people are just evil, delude themselves into thinking they are good, and they have far more money than a just world would ever allow them to touch. Maybe you don't hear that kind of thing often in places where the rich folks are mostly hippy-dippy liberals, but hearing it from even one pair of lips, without an iota of shame, is unsettling--like seeing one cockroach in your kitchen. What is being said when I'm not around to overhear it? I also detect signs of it in written legislation and political discourse, particularly with regard to amending welfare programs to include work requirements or blanket consent to arbitrary searches by state officials. It's as though the default assumption is that recipients are out to cheat the system for a free ride, and spend all their benefits on illegal drugs. I can't imagine how anyone could become so rotten and yet live, but from the anecdotal evidence, they do exist, and for bizarre and unfathomable reasons, their opinions count more than mine, even when we have the same number of votes to cast.
      - webnrrd2k 9y ago
        I think of this as attitude as "Rich white trash"... The thing about being rich is that you can afford to isolate yourself for a long time, wrapped up in a community of similarly isolated people. Those attitudes grow and fester without being challenged by different opinions. That isolation creates ideologically-driven people who just don't see how hurtful thier ideas truly are.
- urethrafranklin 9y ago
  I've been homeless, and you don't know what you're talking about.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    I'm just talking about the people I've personally helped out. I must not have helped you before. You surely aren't saying it's as simple as "people with stuff hate the poor people".
- kennydude 9y ago
  In Newcastle-upon-Tyne homeless beg for money, so people buy them food which is instantly thrown away once you turn the corner.
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    They get plenty of food. They have access to food banks, soup kitchens, etc. It's one of the few things charities can sustainably do on a day-to-day basis. It's literally everything else that they don't have.
    - kennydude 9y ago
      They actually beg for money saying they're hungry, or the stupid story of "i've missed my bus so i need 70p"
      - vertex-four 9y ago
        Yes, because you won't give them money for anything else.
icebraining 9y ago
On that note: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/unpleasant-design-hostile-urban-architecture/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/unpleasant-design-host...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]