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Library wifi is not a homeless service. An 24 hour open seat on a subway is not a homeless service. Parks where children play is not a homeless service. Public

• dijit 3y ago
  The cost to run the service though is as close to zero as you can possibly get. It just feels somewhat inhumane to take something away which is a marginal cost and at best and doesn't cause harm. I mean, Libraries themselves do not need to exist, they are a service, they don't earn money, under pure capitalism they can't exist. But we know as a society that it improves social mobility and education. and I mean, you can't do a lot these days without access to internet.
  • throwawaymaths 3y ago
    Why not provide wifi for the homeless as a service, with its own line item, instead of doing it via the Library?
    • deleted 3y ago
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    • sangnoir 3y ago
      Why segregate an existing service that's already meant for everyone? Would we need another wifi network for Veterans and yet another for retirees?
      • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > Why segregate a service that's already meant for everyone? Because one group denies it to others. In New York, the potent image is that of a homeless person obviously going through a mental health issue, who hasn’t bathed in what smells like weeks, sitting in a subway car on their own. (When I was younger and naïve, I went into one such car and tried to talk to them. I had a handful of what I’ll pretend was a smelly sauce tossed my way.)
        • sangnoir 3y ago
          How about shoring up the social safety net like other developed countries? The length at which Americans go to ignore the homeless (until they are in close physical proximity) is astounding. And most "solutions" are to keep the homeless out of sight without doing anything about their circumstances.
          • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
            > How about shoring up the social safety net like other developed countries? Genuinely curious: how is the mental-health and drug addiction nexus dealt with when one has an unwilling participant?
            • sangnoir 3y ago
              Participate in what exactly? You won't find many takers if the intervention is automatic institutionalization. There are a lot of areas the US has not explored between commiting people to mental asylums and letting them roam the streets.
              • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
                > Participate in what exactly? I don't know–I'm asking what "other developed countries" do.
          • 0xB31B1B 3y ago
            San Francisco, where this article is about, is spending more than 75k USD per homeless person per year on homeless services. The issues is not a lack of compassion of city residents or the collective residents of the city shouting "pull yourselves up by your bootstraps" to anyone in a precarious position. We have been increasing taxes and spending every year as long as I have been here to help "fix the homeless problem" and it keeps getting worse. At the limit, I would prefer we spend our marginal incoming tax dollar on education and schooling for the children of the city, not on non sober permanent housing for out of town meth heads who just want to get high. Doubling down in this issue, you have a huge portion of the non chronically homeless people who are just on tough times who completely avoid the homeless services in the city because of the legitimate issue that a single insane violent drug addict can have on on an entire homeless shelter or an entire 500 unit permanent supportive housing building. SF housed a few hundred people in the pandemic in an old 300 unit hotel and a few of the residents caused 20 million dollars in damage.
  • meetingthrower 3y ago
    Right, but bedding down outside the library at night so you can get free wifi is antisocial behavior. Why should we invest this much in our public spaces and then effectively give them away? I wouldnt want somebody sleeping next to my house so he could get WiFi. Public spaces are ours. Don't get me wrong. I think we should make massive investments in trying to solve the homeless problem, but giving away our public commons is utter stupidity.
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    • gumby 3y ago
      > Why should we invest this much in our public spaces and then effectively give them away? I wouldnt want somebody sleeping next to my house so he could get WiFi. Public spaces are ours. “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” ― Anatole France
      • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        The law in practice doesn’t prohibit it. You’re seeing a debate about whether it should, a debate to which this quip adds nothing.
        • gumby 3y ago
          It directly addresses my excerpt of the comment I responded to. The author asked why access to public space should be "given away" and then wrote "public spaces are ours" (emphasis mine). The cleverness of Anatole France's famous quote is that he framed it in a way that the answers to those questions were automatically obvious, by emphasizing the massive difference in agency and scope of action between the haves and the have nots.
      • 0xB31B1B 3y ago
• williamvds 3y ago
  Libraries are a public service, and free WiFi is often provided along with that service. In this case that service is being deliberately sabotaged for one of the most vulnerable groups in society. Internet access is so necessary in modern life that it should be considered a citizen or human right. Even if you subscribe to the ideology of the homeless being lazy leeches, the counter-effectiveness is quite obvious. Homeless people could be using the WiFi to access online banking, job, and housing applications. Things that would help get them off the street.
  • nvahalik 3y ago
    > Libraries are a public service They are paid for by taxpayers. If the people funding the projects are unable to use them or they are being abused, then it makes sense to ensure that those that pay for the service are able to use them.
  • stickfigure 3y ago
    They aren't refusing WiFi to homeless people. They're shutting it off at night because it encourages people to sleep there. Homeless people are still welcome to come in (or nearby) to use WiFi during normal hours.
• amanaplanacanal 3y ago
  Library Wi-Fi is supposed to be a service for everybody, unless I am missing something.
  • politelemon 3y ago
    Don't think you're missing anything, libraries exist to help connect communities. They are a public service. You pay for it.
• notaustinpowers 3y ago
  I hope you never become homeless. I was, for 4 weeks, and my local libraries wifi is what helped me stay in touch with my parents when my phone data was shut off for nonpayment. It helped me secure a job back at home. You need to rethink your idea of what homelessness is. It's not antisocial drug users. It's also LGBT kids thrown out of their home. It's families being evicted because the parents lost their job. Even if they were antisocial drug users, sympathy, support, and assistance do more help than turning a blind eye and hoping they go away.
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  • iancmceachern 3y ago
    Same boat, there was a time for me when if it wasn't for a library computer I could use for free, I wouldn't have been able to get a job
  • panda888888 3y ago
    As I said in a different comment to another user, compassion fatigue is real. Maybe this makes me cold-hearted, but where I live, sympathy, support, and assistance enable these people to voluntarily continue their lifestyle. 90+% of the homeless people I encounter are addicted to drugs and/or have a significant, untreated mental illness, to the point where they'd prefer to stay on the street as opposed to working. These people don't use the library to look for jobs, they use the library to sell stolen shit on craigslist in order to fund their drug use.
  • 0xB31B1B 3y ago
    Correct, ~75% of homeless people are "invisibly homeless", don't have drug use issues, aren't criminals, take showers and don't practice antisocial behaviors. The problem is that the 25% of homeless who are drug addicts and are extremely anti social completely destroy the system for everyone else. We don't have a good vocabulary for this. The issue is that the street campers at the library were meth heads who shit in the street, screamed at each other in the middle of the night, and caused a huge amount of disruption for the people who live near the library (I live 1 block away from here). We need to have far less tolerance for anti social behaviors in SF, including within permanently supportive housing and nightly shelters. The other issue is that when you spend a ton of money to support the invisibly homeless folks, and tolerate the anti social chronically homeless, you create a giant magnet that pulls in drug users and anti social homeless from the nearby communities and state and you become the dumping ground for everyone's chronically homeless. It is not my problem as a resident of SF to pay for the permanent supportive housing of a chronically homeless meth head from Humbolt county who moved here for a 700 dollar monthly check, reliable street sleeping, passive police force, and steady supply of drugs.
• iancmceachern 3y ago
  But they should be, because the need is clearly there, and not being met
• sangnoir 3y ago
  > Library wifi is not a homeless service. Correct, it's a service for everyone - including the homeless. A world where library doors are closed to some people is a world that has lost its way. Do homeless people have the same rights as everyone else? Granted, they may not readily afford lawyers, but some of the restrictions you're implying trample in their freedom of movement.
  • 0xB31B1B 3y ago
    we're far far beyond "trampling on freedom of movement" in SF. We need to enforce basic laws and pro social behaviors like "don't poop on the street", "dont smoke meth within 500 feet of an elementary school", "don't leave a giant pile of poop encrusted needles on the sidewalk".
• pfffr 3y ago
  Libraries are public services. Subways are public services. Parks are public spaces. If you are so progressive you would be interested in expanding social service spending to help people out of homelessness. This would solve your (personal) problem with homelessness.
  • scarmig 3y ago
    San Francisco already spends half a billion dollars per year on homeless services, which comes to 50k-75k per homeless individual per year. Is there reason to believe that more spending would actually fix homelessness, when most other cities spend less and have less of a homeless problem?
• politelemon 3y ago
  It boggles my mind to see a comment like this, it is fundamentally based on the assumption that homeless people are subhuman and not deserving of amenities. Further it's looking at the purpose and situation in life as a qualification of usage. A homeless person walking into a library to use it, is now a library patron, would they still be excluded due to them being homeless? If I am upset one day and decide to take a long meaningless ride on a subway circuit, am I more or less allowed to do it compared to a homeless person? Of course these examples can be nitpicked and yet will miss the point. These simply become soundbites that justify cruelty.
  • scarmig 3y ago
    Everyone should have access to public amenities. But a widespread homelessness problem ends up denying amenities to people who aren't homeless: when libraries regularly have people smoking meth or shooting up in the bathrooms, that makes it uncomfortable for most people to use. It's easy enough to say "they should just get over it, someone passed out on the bathroom floor is not really a threat to anyone," but that betrays a certain level of privilege that ignores the feelings of most people and the genuine lack of safety and cleanliness that homelessness introduces to those spaces. In your hypothetical example, if you were inebriated, aggressive, and unhygienic, I'd strongly support you being removed from the subway circuit, because you'd similarly be denying access to it to others.
    • im3w1l 3y ago
      Being homeless isn't the same as making others uncomfortable. The correlation is high, yes, but it's important to distinguish nevertheless. Only by distinguishing can you incentivize good behavior.
      • scarmig 3y ago
        Although that is of course true, it's unclear how you translate that into policy. The ideal would be for the city to remove badly behaving people (regardless of homeless status) from public spaces and allow the well-behaved people to go and remain there. In practice, however, the city is unable to make that distinction, and a badly behaving person will, even if removed, return, resulting in the denial of access to the general public.