4 ms·

There is no world where the children of the middle class share a community and public space with untreated mentally ill homeless people who have full and equal

There is no world where the children of the middle class share a community and public space with untreated mentally ill homeless people who have full and equal rights to that space. We don’t want to violently oppress people over bourgeois norms of behavior but we do want to live in communities that adhere to such norms. That is the real social function of car dependent geography.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
Then treat the mentally ill for free and give them houses. How is this hard?
- closeparen 4y ago
  Being a tolerable neighbor involves skills, habits, and self control that are far from universal. Showing up to appointments and taking your meds every time is hard for yuppies with mild depression, let alone people with much looser holds on life. Inpatient mental health facilities are necesarily more coercive and less fun than the outside world. The mentally ill have civil rights too and can check themselves out unless their situation continues to meet a high bar for imminent risk of serious harm. People in between “cannot manage own life” and “imminent danger to self and others” are a tricky proposition for the mental health system. It only takes a handful of such people wandering around your city center continuously (seriously, it’s the same dozen faces over and over in SF) to completely change the kind of place it is.
  - jhugo 4y ago
    Why is this such a uniquely American problem? Large, dense cities in the rest of the world don't face these issues.
    - np- 4y ago
      Large dense cities in certain parts of Europe and east Asia don’t face these issues (and even then, there isn’t really the same concept of large and dense in most of Europe), but I would say chaotic unfriendly cities are the default in most of the world. In a sense, many American cities act as a bridge between these two worlds. It also doesn’t help that you can fall much farther in the US than other places before anyone even begins to notice.
    - closeparen 4y ago
      Individualism and unusually strong civil rights? In other countries people similarly troubled would be involuntarily committed or cared for by family.
    - maccolgan 4y ago
      If the government picked people it didn't like from the streets and checked them into a mental hospital, it'd be strangely un-American.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    > Inpatient mental health facilities are necesarily more coercive and less fun than the outside world. The mentally ill have civil rights too and can check themselves out unless their situation continues to meet a high bar for imminent risk of serious harm. I didn't say kidnap and torture them like we did in the 70s. I said give them mental healthcare and housing. People don't become junkies overnight, and a building full of single bed sized lockable (from the inside) rooms available to anyone without stable housing (without fear of the salvation army taking them off of HRT or abusing them) with a few social workers and mediators to teach those skills, a doctor, a vocational educator, and a therapist on staff 24/7 is both cheaper than policing and jail, and would go a long, long, long way towards preventing these problems in the first place. There's absolutely no reason not to do this. It's cheaper up front than policing. It saves the same amount again on cleanup and maintenance of public spaces. It saves many times the amount of money again on reduction of crime and insurance. And it provides a portion again in people that become productive tax payers For the ones that have already fallen to the bottom of the hole you need something more, but surely if it's doing so much damage to the entire city that out of the 300 billion gdp, the inhabitants can afford four dozen social workers and an apartment block to do nothing but try to find a way to help them. The idea that this is even a question in the wealthiest place on earth is mindbogglingly callous and evil, and a sign of a very very sick and antisocial society that has nothing to do with the people that fell through the cracks.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - closeparen 4y ago
      Offering support to people who want it is important and necessary. I am willing to bet however that a decent sized city contains at least one and probably several people who do not very much like having their lives managed by teams of social workers (I wouldn’t!) and will instead avail themselves of their right to shit on the floor of the train station.
      - Schroedingersat 4y ago
        > do not very much like having their lives managed by teams of social workers Then don't manage. Serve and support. Start by bringing a sandwich, a coffee and a smoke and listening for an hour every day, not by shoving them in a cell. Yes, it's expensive, but if it is -- as people here and elsewhere say over and over again -- making an entire area of a city uninhabitable and causing millions in damage and enforcement costs then surely it's worth the cost? Why do people seem to constantly favour being callous and cruel over even being selfish, let alone humane?
Karrot_Kream 4y ago
> We don’t want to violently oppress people over bourgeois norms of behavior but we do want to live in communities that adhere to such norms. Yes exactly. So we segregate them, creating a non-bourgeois underclass that plagues our cities and suburbs. Then we create more elaborate car centric human geography that causes us to pollute more and generate all sorts of externalities such as huge traffic jams and high house prices. Then because the above underclass is disregarded, they become a larger, more present part of our urban fabric who we've consigned to a segregated life of misery. It's a lose-lose race to the bottom. All because we can't do the right thing, spending money on mental health care and assistance out of poverty. Eventually the (monetary but also human, social, and environmental) costs of maintaining the hacks ends up being higher than fixing the problem in the first place. That's what happens when you try to paper over problems without fixing them.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

Then treat the mentally ill for free and give them houses. How is this hard?

closeparen 4y ago
Being a tolerable neighbor involves skills, habits, and self control that are far from universal. Showing up to appointments and taking your meds every time is hard for yuppies with mild depression, let alone people with much looser holds on life. Inpatient mental health facilities are necesarily more coercive and less fun than the outside world. The mentally ill have civil rights too and can check themselves out unless their situation continues to meet a high bar for imminent risk of serious harm. People in between “cannot manage own life” and “imminent danger to self and others” are a tricky proposition for the mental health system. It only takes a handful of such people wandering around your city center continuously (seriously, it’s the same dozen faces over and over in SF) to completely change the kind of place it is.
- jhugo 4y ago
  Why is this such a uniquely American problem? Large, dense cities in the rest of the world don't face these issues.
  - np- 4y ago
    Large dense cities in certain parts of Europe and east Asia don’t face these issues (and even then, there isn’t really the same concept of large and dense in most of Europe), but I would say chaotic unfriendly cities are the default in most of the world. In a sense, many American cities act as a bridge between these two worlds. It also doesn’t help that you can fall much farther in the US than other places before anyone even begins to notice.
  - closeparen 4y ago
    Individualism and unusually strong civil rights? In other countries people similarly troubled would be involuntarily committed or cared for by family.
  - maccolgan 4y ago
    If the government picked people it didn't like from the streets and checked them into a mental hospital, it'd be strangely un-American.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > Inpatient mental health facilities are necesarily more coercive and less fun than the outside world. The mentally ill have civil rights too and can check themselves out unless their situation continues to meet a high bar for imminent risk of serious harm. I didn't say kidnap and torture them like we did in the 70s. I said give them mental healthcare and housing. People don't become junkies overnight, and a building full of single bed sized lockable (from the inside) rooms available to anyone without stable housing (without fear of the salvation army taking them off of HRT or abusing them) with a few social workers and mediators to teach those skills, a doctor, a vocational educator, and a therapist on staff 24/7 is both cheaper than policing and jail, and would go a long, long, long way towards preventing these problems in the first place. There's absolutely no reason not to do this. It's cheaper up front than policing. It saves the same amount again on cleanup and maintenance of public spaces. It saves many times the amount of money again on reduction of crime and insurance. And it provides a portion again in people that become productive tax payers For the ones that have already fallen to the bottom of the hole you need something more, but surely if it's doing so much damage to the entire city that out of the 300 billion gdp, the inhabitants can afford four dozen social workers and an apartment block to do nothing but try to find a way to help them. The idea that this is even a question in the wealthiest place on earth is mindbogglingly callous and evil, and a sign of a very very sick and antisocial society that has nothing to do with the people that fell through the cracks.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - closeparen 4y ago
    Offering support to people who want it is important and necessary. I am willing to bet however that a decent sized city contains at least one and probably several people who do not very much like having their lives managed by teams of social workers (I wouldn’t!) and will instead avail themselves of their right to shit on the floor of the train station.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      > do not very much like having their lives managed by teams of social workers Then don't manage. Serve and support. Start by bringing a sandwich, a coffee and a smoke and listening for an hour every day, not by shoving them in a cell. Yes, it's expensive, but if it is -- as people here and elsewhere say over and over again -- making an entire area of a city uninhabitable and causing millions in damage and enforcement costs then surely it's worth the cost? Why do people seem to constantly favour being callous and cruel over even being selfish, let alone humane?

Karrot_Kream 4y ago

> We don’t want to violently oppress people over bourgeois norms of behavior but we do want to live in communities that adhere to such norms. Yes exactly. So we segregate them, creating a non-bourgeois underclass that plagues our cities and suburbs. Then we create more elaborate car centric human geography that causes us to pollute more and generate all sorts of externalities such as huge traffic jams and high house prices. Then because the above underclass is disregarded, they become a larger, more present part of our urban fabric who we've consigned to a segregated life of misery. It's a lose-lose race to the bottom. All because we can't do the right thing, spending money on mental health care and assistance out of poverty. Eventually the (monetary but also human, social, and environmental) costs of maintaining the hacks ends up being higher than fixing the problem in the first place. That's what happens when you try to paper over problems without fixing them.