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Everyone should have access to public amenities. But a widespread homelessness problem ends up denying amenities to people who aren't homeless: when libraries r
by 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 agoBeing 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 agoAlthough 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.