7 ms·

This is becoming such a frustrating issue. As an advocate of public spaces and parks, it's kind of heartbreaking that maybe 1/3 of public spaces in our town are

This is becoming such a frustrating issue. As an advocate of public spaces and parks, it's kind of heartbreaking that maybe 1/3 of public spaces in our town are no longer usable for all - they have more or less become private spaces for the homeless. I don't have much respect for communities that solve the issue by just "kicking them out" and passing the problem onto others, but it is almost becoming unacceptably common in America. It's a pity - this used to be a problem that was mostly solved by the private market. The rise of homelessness is almost equal to the decline of single occupancy housing (flophouses, chicken wire hotels, etc). But in our quest to eliminate slums and "bad neighborhoods" we ended up just spreading them across cities.

foxpurple 5y ago
IMO the city should provide enough homeless shelters for everyone and then just make homelessness illegal. So if you are found sleeping in a tent you get referred to the nearest shelter and if you refuse you get arrested. We can not allow homelessness to exist because it makes public spaces unsafe like you mention. Homeless shelters can also help by making it hard for them to continue their drug addictions.
- danans 5y ago
  > Homeless shelters can also help by making it hard for them to continue their drug addictions. They do, and this is sometimes why homeless people avoid the shelters. You cannot hold someone in a shelter against their will.
  - crooked-v 5y ago
    Also, more than a few of those chronic drug addictions are self-medicating for other conditions that are only tangential to housing itself and aren't going to get any better if you take the drugs away without offering other support.
  - foxpurple 5y ago
    That’s why my suggestion is to offer them the choice to willingly use a shelter or go to jail. Homelessness and drug abuse can not be allowed to exist to keep public spaces safe.
    - danans 5y ago
      > That’s why my suggestion is to offer them the choice to willingly use a shelter or go to jail You can't jail someone for not sheltering themselves. That would most probably violate their civil rights and would not survive a test in the courts.
      - blindmute 5y ago
        You can jail someone for camping in a park, though. If they want to go sleep and shamble in the woods, go for it. Not on the sidewalks.
- bperson 5y ago
  > Homeless shelters can also help by making it hard for them to continue their drug addictions Many homeless choose the street over the shelter for this reason
- slimsag 5y ago
  Homelessness is already illegal in most places. They are already often referred to the nearest shelter. They are already frequently arrested. Homeless shelter's don't help, they're ridiculously dangerous to be in. You need to do more research on the topic. VICE has some decent documentaries on the issue.
  - awsthro00945 5y ago
    >Homeless shelter's don't help, they're ridiculously dangerous to be in. Then solve this problem. The problem I constantly see with homelessness in America is that municipalities constantly half ass every attempt to fix it, and then throw up their hands and say "well that didn't work, I guess there's nothing we can do!" Building homeless shelters without making them safe places to be is the perfect example of half-assing. I mean ffs, it's in the name: shelter. A homeless shelter not being safe doesn't mean that homeless shelters don't work, it just means your execution was shit.
    - Overton-Window 5y ago
      Do yourself a favour and volunteer at your nearest shelter for an afternoon.
      - awsthro00945 5y ago
        Do yourself a favor and don't make assumptions about me. I've volunteered at homeless shelters before. At a previous company, I was in charge of working directly with a homeless shelter to organize volunteer events for my colleagues. I have firsthand experience at homeless shelters that have successfully become shelters where people really want to be there rather than on the street because of the services and environment they provide.
        cloverich 5y ago
        it would be constructive to provide some examples of concrete things municipalities can do, and that we can learn about so we can hold them accountable.
- xnyan 5y ago
  Even in the best case, homeless shelters have serious downsides (to put it mildly) that you may not have considered. -Have a pet? Not coming with you. A stint at the pound, likely followed by euthanization due to overcrowding. -How about a family? If you can even get into a shelter, odds are it's going to be male or women and children. -Shelters are often unsafe and filled with people who have untreated problems. Violence is a real risk. -Very little space for personal possessions, high incidence of theft. >Homeless shelters can also help by making it hard for them to continue their drug addictions. I would strongly encourage you to volunteer at a homeless shelter. Not only do they need the help, you'll learn that while drugs are restricted at the shelter, it's a fantastic place to meet people who use drugs and find new sources of drugs.
  - zepto 5y ago
    > you'll learn that while drugs are restricted at the shelter, it's a fantastic place to meet people who use drugs and find new sources of drugs Is this not also a problem at homeless encampments?
    - pseudalopex 5y ago
      Making it illegal to be homeless means outside encampments too.
      - zepto 5y ago
        No it doesn’t. People already sell drugs outside of homeless encampments. Making it illegal to be homeless changes nothing.
        pseudalopex 5y ago
        Making it illegal to be homeless means making it illegal to be homeless. Not just in encampments. They said homeless shelters have a lot of drug activity. You implied encampments do too. What was your point if it wasn't about encampments?
- golemiprague 5y ago
  Those people should not get arrested, they should be in a mental hospital. It used to be like that in the old days but then some legalisation stopped the practice of putting mental people into mental asylums so now they roam the streets. Maybe it was because those asylums were horrible but it doesn't have to be like that, we can just improve those places. There are enough shelters for homeless people but you can't force them, we need to force them into something, but not into a prison.
- drewrv 5y ago
  I agree in principle that if there's a safe bed available, setting up a tent in a park should be illegal. But reality is complicated and there are lots of edge cases. Theft and assaults happen at shelters, so maybe there's a bed available but do people feel safe? If you were assaulted at a shelter would you want to return the next night? Forcing people to chose between two unsafe options (shelter or jail) feels cruel. Addiction also complicates things. Should a shelter allow substance abuse? If so it can be a really bad place for recovering addicts. If shelters do not allow substance abuse, then addicts have no place to legally exist. If locking them up actually helped their addiction that might be ok, but it does not. There are other problems with shelters. Many of them have weird hours and capacity limits. Many are gender segregated. What people need is a space where they feel safe, they can store their belongings, they can come and go as needed to get to appointments and services, they can live with a partner or on their own. These are the things that will help people get back on their feet, overcome addiction, etc, and "shelters" are totally inadequate.
bingidingi 5y ago
some small cities literally buy their homeless bus tickets to get rid of them, and their politicians point to the places they send them as liberalism run amok… how do you even undo such callousness
- Qub3d 5y ago
  While this is true (my mother works as a homeless community outreach nurse in a "destination" state and has talked to individuals who show up as a result of this) its only a tiny trickle of the torrent. A huge, huge number of your local homeless population is just that, local. A plurality of them are homeless due to unaddressed mental health issues. Solving homelessness completely may be impossible, but better mental health treatment infrastructure would get us a lot closer.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Happened in my city.
slg 5y ago
> The rise of homelessness is almost equal to the decline of single occupancy housing (flophouses, chicken wire hotels, etc). This has specifically been a huge problem in cities with expensive real estate like Los Angeles and San Francisco. It is why the free market approach to fixing the housing crisis doesn't work. The land is so expensive that it doesn't make financial sense to waste it on low margin affordable housing. Developers realize this, snatch up the current options for housing of last resort like SRO buildings, knock them down, and build luxury condos. Supply of the bottom of the market is decreased in favor of supply at the top of the market and this new construction often is less dense than the housing it replaces. People argue that the new supply will eventually trickle down, but that new supply is always snatched up by people moving into the city leaving the people who used live there with no place to go. There needs to be regulation to force the construction of affordable housing in these markets as the free market has shown it won't be built otherwise.
- davidf18 5y ago
  The free market approach would work but the real-estate markets are not free markets: There is rent-seeking zoning density restrictions that make the land artificially scarce. Reverse the zoning density restrictions and this will be a return to eliminating the market failure in real-estate.
  - slg 5y ago
    Allowing more denser zoning would help, but it doesn't fix the problem I mentioned. As I said, new construction is often replacing higher density affordable housing with lower density luxury housing. This is motivated by profit and not zoning.
    - pas 5y ago
      Mandating density increase would solve this. Of course the problem is that US cities are legally small, the metro areas are big sprawling low density money sinks, and there's very little zoning coordination between cities in a metro area.
watertom 5y ago
hmmm, maybe it's just me but your tone seems thoughtfully heartless. You are heartbroken that public spaces can't be used by all, but you aren't heartbroken that so many people have no other options other than to live in those spaces. Your compassionate solution is to bring back slums, flop houses, and chicken wire hotels (I actually had to look that up), so that you can get back to using your precious public spaces free of those less fortunate.
- LevGoldstein 5y ago
  I'm sure he's open to hearing your ethical, compassionate, and politically viable alternate proposal. Go ahead and post it.
hintymad 5y ago
I wonder how Japan could manage their cities so well, even though they also have their own share of homeless people. As for the US, I think the US people brought the problem upon themselves, at least in some degree: it's increasingly rare to see serious discussions on pros and cons of different solutions. Instead, it's all about politics. The moment someone wants to discuss a solution, somewhere some activist or politician will shout out racism or equity or oppression or white supremacy or some other moral slurs. Amazingly, voters, at least those in big cities, love that.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  This seems like a misdiagnosis. To my mind, the obvious problem is the wailing and gnashing of teeth whenever someone suggests building an apartment complex, let alone a homeless shelter. Impossible to take a step to address the problem if every proposal is shut down by concerned homeowners making a scene at every town meeting.
  - pas 5y ago
    This town meeting driven zoning is ridiculously unique to America. In most places there's a faceless bureaucracy that decides whether the to issue the permit or not. They mechanistically check the zoning and other regulations and that's it. The neighbors can go to court if they seriously think the bureaucracy missed something. Public hearing only happens when it's a public project.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      I’d be curious to see a comparison with other countries with a federal system. My suspicion is that a fetish for local control makes these kind of beggar-thy-neighbor outcomes likelier, but most comparisons have people going for examples like Japan which don't have anything like a federal system.
- hattori31 5y ago
  Resident of Tokyo for years here. The homeless here make some money from picking up trash and selling to the municipalities so noone begs. Also Tokyo is super safe, so they can sleep wherever without worrying. Also you have to count the fact that housing is insanely cheap in places like Tama (although very far from city center) But lately I have noticed an increase in homeless people, maybe its just Coronavirus? At any rate i wish the city did more. Both for them and for the rest of people. I wish them the best, but let's be honest its not a good sight or smell.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> It's a pity - this used to be a problem that was mostly solved by the private market. No, it wasn't. It was “solved” (or, at least, those afflicted were encouraged to keep a low profile so as not to disturb “decent folk”) by government through actual and de facto imprisonment, whether involuntary and abusive institutionalization of those with mental health problems or criminalization of vagrancy.

foxpurple 5y ago

IMO the city should provide enough homeless shelters for everyone and then just make homelessness illegal. So if you are found sleeping in a tent you get referred to the nearest shelter and if you refuse you get arrested. We can not allow homelessness to exist because it makes public spaces unsafe like you mention. Homeless shelters can also help by making it hard for them to continue their drug addictions.

danans 5y ago
> Homeless shelters can also help by making it hard for them to continue their drug addictions. They do, and this is sometimes why homeless people avoid the shelters. You cannot hold someone in a shelter against their will.
- crooked-v 5y ago
  Also, more than a few of those chronic drug addictions are self-medicating for other conditions that are only tangential to housing itself and aren't going to get any better if you take the drugs away without offering other support.
- foxpurple 5y ago
  That’s why my suggestion is to offer them the choice to willingly use a shelter or go to jail. Homelessness and drug abuse can not be allowed to exist to keep public spaces safe.
  - danans 5y ago
    > That’s why my suggestion is to offer them the choice to willingly use a shelter or go to jail You can't jail someone for not sheltering themselves. That would most probably violate their civil rights and would not survive a test in the courts.
    - blindmute 5y ago
      You can jail someone for camping in a park, though. If they want to go sleep and shamble in the woods, go for it. Not on the sidewalks.
bperson 5y ago
> Homeless shelters can also help by making it hard for them to continue their drug addictions Many homeless choose the street over the shelter for this reason
slimsag 5y ago
Homelessness is already illegal in most places. They are already often referred to the nearest shelter. They are already frequently arrested. Homeless shelter's don't help, they're ridiculously dangerous to be in. You need to do more research on the topic. VICE has some decent documentaries on the issue.
- awsthro00945 5y ago
  >Homeless shelter's don't help, they're ridiculously dangerous to be in. Then solve this problem. The problem I constantly see with homelessness in America is that municipalities constantly half ass every attempt to fix it, and then throw up their hands and say "well that didn't work, I guess there's nothing we can do!" Building homeless shelters without making them safe places to be is the perfect example of half-assing. I mean ffs, it's in the name: shelter. A homeless shelter not being safe doesn't mean that homeless shelters don't work, it just means your execution was shit.
  - Overton-Window 5y ago
    Do yourself a favour and volunteer at your nearest shelter for an afternoon.
    - awsthro00945 5y ago
      Do yourself a favor and don't make assumptions about me. I've volunteered at homeless shelters before. At a previous company, I was in charge of working directly with a homeless shelter to organize volunteer events for my colleagues. I have firsthand experience at homeless shelters that have successfully become shelters where people really want to be there rather than on the street because of the services and environment they provide.
      - cloverich 5y ago
        it would be constructive to provide some examples of concrete things municipalities can do, and that we can learn about so we can hold them accountable.
xnyan 5y ago
Even in the best case, homeless shelters have serious downsides (to put it mildly) that you may not have considered. -Have a pet? Not coming with you. A stint at the pound, likely followed by euthanization due to overcrowding. -How about a family? If you can even get into a shelter, odds are it's going to be male or women and children. -Shelters are often unsafe and filled with people who have untreated problems. Violence is a real risk. -Very little space for personal possessions, high incidence of theft. >Homeless shelters can also help by making it hard for them to continue their drug addictions. I would strongly encourage you to volunteer at a homeless shelter. Not only do they need the help, you'll learn that while drugs are restricted at the shelter, it's a fantastic place to meet people who use drugs and find new sources of drugs.
- zepto 5y ago
  > you'll learn that while drugs are restricted at the shelter, it's a fantastic place to meet people who use drugs and find new sources of drugs Is this not also a problem at homeless encampments?
  - pseudalopex 5y ago
    Making it illegal to be homeless means outside encampments too.
    - zepto 5y ago
      No it doesn’t. People already sell drugs outside of homeless encampments. Making it illegal to be homeless changes nothing.
      - pseudalopex 5y ago
        Making it illegal to be homeless means making it illegal to be homeless. Not just in encampments. They said homeless shelters have a lot of drug activity. You implied encampments do too. What was your point if it wasn't about encampments?
golemiprague 5y ago
Those people should not get arrested, they should be in a mental hospital. It used to be like that in the old days but then some legalisation stopped the practice of putting mental people into mental asylums so now they roam the streets. Maybe it was because those asylums were horrible but it doesn't have to be like that, we can just improve those places. There are enough shelters for homeless people but you can't force them, we need to force them into something, but not into a prison.
drewrv 5y ago
I agree in principle that if there's a safe bed available, setting up a tent in a park should be illegal. But reality is complicated and there are lots of edge cases. Theft and assaults happen at shelters, so maybe there's a bed available but do people feel safe? If you were assaulted at a shelter would you want to return the next night? Forcing people to chose between two unsafe options (shelter or jail) feels cruel. Addiction also complicates things. Should a shelter allow substance abuse? If so it can be a really bad place for recovering addicts. If shelters do not allow substance abuse, then addicts have no place to legally exist. If locking them up actually helped their addiction that might be ok, but it does not. There are other problems with shelters. Many of them have weird hours and capacity limits. Many are gender segregated. What people need is a space where they feel safe, they can store their belongings, they can come and go as needed to get to appointments and services, they can live with a partner or on their own. These are the things that will help people get back on their feet, overcome addiction, etc, and "shelters" are totally inadequate.

bingidingi 5y ago

some small cities literally buy their homeless bus tickets to get rid of them, and their politicians point to the places they send them as liberalism run amok… how do you even undo such callousness

Qub3d 5y ago
While this is true (my mother works as a homeless community outreach nurse in a "destination" state and has talked to individuals who show up as a result of this) its only a tiny trickle of the torrent. A huge, huge number of your local homeless population is just that, local. A plurality of them are homeless due to unaddressed mental health issues. Solving homelessness completely may be impossible, but better mental health treatment infrastructure would get us a lot closer.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Happened in my city.

slg 5y ago

> The rise of homelessness is almost equal to the decline of single occupancy housing (flophouses, chicken wire hotels, etc). This has specifically been a huge problem in cities with expensive real estate like Los Angeles and San Francisco. It is why the free market approach to fixing the housing crisis doesn't work. The land is so expensive that it doesn't make financial sense to waste it on low margin affordable housing. Developers realize this, snatch up the current options for housing of last resort like SRO buildings, knock them down, and build luxury condos. Supply of the bottom of the market is decreased in favor of supply at the top of the market and this new construction often is less dense than the housing it replaces. People argue that the new supply will eventually trickle down, but that new supply is always snatched up by people moving into the city leaving the people who used live there with no place to go. There needs to be regulation to force the construction of affordable housing in these markets as the free market has shown it won't be built otherwise.

davidf18 5y ago
The free market approach would work but the real-estate markets are not free markets: There is rent-seeking zoning density restrictions that make the land artificially scarce. Reverse the zoning density restrictions and this will be a return to eliminating the market failure in real-estate.
- slg 5y ago
  Allowing more denser zoning would help, but it doesn't fix the problem I mentioned. As I said, new construction is often replacing higher density affordable housing with lower density luxury housing. This is motivated by profit and not zoning.
  - pas 5y ago
    Mandating density increase would solve this. Of course the problem is that US cities are legally small, the metro areas are big sprawling low density money sinks, and there's very little zoning coordination between cities in a metro area.

watertom 5y ago

hmmm, maybe it's just me but your tone seems thoughtfully heartless. You are heartbroken that public spaces can't be used by all, but you aren't heartbroken that so many people have no other options other than to live in those spaces. Your compassionate solution is to bring back slums, flop houses, and chicken wire hotels (I actually had to look that up), so that you can get back to using your precious public spaces free of those less fortunate.

LevGoldstein 5y ago
I'm sure he's open to hearing your ethical, compassionate, and politically viable alternate proposal. Go ahead and post it.

hintymad 5y ago

I wonder how Japan could manage their cities so well, even though they also have their own share of homeless people. As for the US, I think the US people brought the problem upon themselves, at least in some degree: it's increasingly rare to see serious discussions on pros and cons of different solutions. Instead, it's all about politics. The moment someone wants to discuss a solution, somewhere some activist or politician will shout out racism or equity or oppression or white supremacy or some other moral slurs. Amazingly, voters, at least those in big cities, love that.

emodendroket 5y ago
This seems like a misdiagnosis. To my mind, the obvious problem is the wailing and gnashing of teeth whenever someone suggests building an apartment complex, let alone a homeless shelter. Impossible to take a step to address the problem if every proposal is shut down by concerned homeowners making a scene at every town meeting.
- pas 5y ago
  This town meeting driven zoning is ridiculously unique to America. In most places there's a faceless bureaucracy that decides whether the to issue the permit or not. They mechanistically check the zoning and other regulations and that's it. The neighbors can go to court if they seriously think the bureaucracy missed something. Public hearing only happens when it's a public project.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    I’d be curious to see a comparison with other countries with a federal system. My suspicion is that a fetish for local control makes these kind of beggar-thy-neighbor outcomes likelier, but most comparisons have people going for examples like Japan which don't have anything like a federal system.
hattori31 5y ago
Resident of Tokyo for years here. The homeless here make some money from picking up trash and selling to the municipalities so noone begs. Also Tokyo is super safe, so they can sleep wherever without worrying. Also you have to count the fact that housing is insanely cheap in places like Tama (although very far from city center) But lately I have noticed an increase in homeless people, maybe its just Coronavirus? At any rate i wish the city did more. Both for them and for the rest of people. I wish them the best, but let's be honest its not a good sight or smell.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> It's a pity - this used to be a problem that was mostly solved by the private market. No, it wasn't. It was “solved” (or, at least, those afflicted were encouraged to keep a low profile so as not to disturb “decent folk”) by government through actual and de facto imprisonment, whether involuntary and abusive institutionalization of those with mental health problems or criminalization of vagrancy.