12 ms·

The Disappearance of the Public Bench

173 points by cainxinth 5mo ago

pstuart 5mo ago
Gosh, if only there was some way we could solve homelessness! Don't worry about it, as at least we can drop tens of billions of dollars to show the Iranians how big and powerful we are.
- canjobear 5mo ago
  Is there a $10 billion "fix everything easily" button you have in mind for homelessness?
  - fragmede 5mo ago
    $10 billion would build a lot of homes. If you give homeless people homes, they're not homeless anymore. The problem is also political, unfortunately. $10 billion isn't going to change zoning laws and a NIMBY attitude of freezing things in time. If they like that point in time so much, they should build a museum, sheesh!
    - Dylan16807 5mo ago
      > $10 billion would build a lot of homes. If you give homeless people homes, they're not homeless anymore. But that doesn't answer the question. It's "a lot" of homes, but less than a tenth of what would be needed. And you need a bunch of social workers too at minimum.
      - pstuart 5mo ago
        That wouldn't be enough to do the job but it would be a great start if it was done right. My point was we've flushed $50B (and likely far far more) and what do we get for it? High gas prices. So hurray for the push for renewables and EVs, but there's nicer ways to do it. > And you need a bunch of social workers too at minimum Ok, sure. Remember, we're spending the $50B that's been lit on fire so this gives us more jobs and a happier country. And that money circulates in the economy rather than expatriated profits by the defense contractors.
  - scythe 5mo ago
    Homelessness and visible homelessness need to be distinguished here. The large majority of homeless people are not the ones you notice on the streets. Most try to be discreet. Some have jobs. A person who lives in their car is considered homeless. The best measure to reduce homelessness is to provide timely support for people who are being evicted from their homes before they lose their jobs (which they might still have) and before their mental health deteriorates. This is the point at which assistance is most effective. You have heard the saying, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". Such programs have been applied to great effect in e.g. London. The way to respond to people who have experienced chronic homelessness with complications is different and more difficult.
    - rgblambda 5mo ago
      The Simon Community where I live went around the city one December and counted how many rough sleepers there were. I forget the exact figure but it was less than 100. Meanwhile there were thousands classified as homeless due to being in temporary accomodation. And this is a part of the UK well known for having a homelessness problem.
  - jedimastert 5mo ago
    You know oddly enough, if you just put someone up in a real place to live for like a year, that's enough for the majority of people to get back on their feet.
    - AmazingEveryDay 5mo ago
      I'd like to believe that! Can you link to any research to back up your claim?
      - pstuart 5mo ago
        https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-people.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...
      - jedimastert 5mo ago
        There's a local charity I donate to that does this, they've got I think 10 or 15 apartments they put people up in for 3 months, and offer them various forms of placement assistance while they're there. In the last annual report they had I believe a 95% success rate with people they checked in with a year later. Unfortunately this is pretty selective evidence, but I know for a fact they don't exclude people on the basis of having mental illness or addiction problems, I've worked with them personally.
    - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5mo ago
      [flagged]
      - pstuart 5mo ago
        Why are you singling out immigrants? The homeless in our metro area are very much domestically produced. But you do help illustrate a concern: homelessness is ultimately a federal issue, as some states dump theirs on other more "accepting" states.
  - pocksuppet 5mo ago
    how many homes can you buy for $10 billion? especially if you don't care too much about size, extra niceties, or location?
    - Tanoc 5mo ago
      Given a construction budget of $125,000 per residence for a particularly nice two bedroom single bathroom house of about 1000ft², that's 80,000. Estimates are that there are currently between 750,000 to 800,000 people that have no home right now. Taking the high number of 800,000 that $10,000,000,000 is 10% of those people housed. You could reasonably go down to $30,000 for a build for a single floor house of the same footprint if you used mass produced prefabs, and get 330,000 people housed, or over 41%. Do you realize how much that would uplift things if we suddenly had a 41% reduction in homelessness? Considering that companies like Google and OpenAI are throwing around hundreds of billions of dollars which never get circulated back into the wider economy, spending $10,000,000,000 to bring 330,000 people back into economic and societal participation sounds amazing. That's assuming a somewhat low yearly income of $45,000 per person, adding up to $14,850,000,000 in circulation, or a gain of almost $5,000,000,000 right there. Even if we only achieve half of any of this that's $7,000,000,000 for one year. Two years in and the cost has already been paid back and more. This comes with the giant caveat that we exclude the external costs of such a huge project, like social welfare visits, probation or monitoring if needed, or even just placement programs. Likely those all combined would be a third of the total cost.
  - loglog 5mo ago
    The "fix everything" button is abolishing zoning laws, and its aggregate cost is negative. Aggregate cost is not the issue preventing problems from being solved.
- next_xibalba 5mo ago
  SF spends more per capita than anywhere in the world on homelessness. And it’s barely made a dent. The solution is upstream of money. It’s policy decisions derived from cultural values. In other places in the world, where homelessness is vanishingly rare, these people are made to choose: “you will get treatment or you will go to jail, but we will not tolerate the destruction of the commons.”
  - antonvs 5mo ago
    Another factor in other places in the world is much lower economic inequality. The US has chosen to divide its population in this way.
  - pstuart 5mo ago
    SF has a famously broken city government. As does Portland (the metro I now live in). Note they have huge budgets for their police and there's still plenty of crime -- does that mean they should give up on having police? I think if it were treated as a hybrid program (federal/state/county) there could be synergy that could make it work (more eyeballs on it, more shared resources, etc). And as far as treatment or jail, we do need the power of involuntary institutionalization but it needs to be wielded with utmost restraint and scrutiny. I have family that could have used this, it's pretty much the only way with some. But it always has to be done in the context of helping rather than punishing. There's so much we could do: start a kind of CCC for homeless youth as a baseline starting point and give them paths up and out. Heal those you can and those you can't at least put them somewhere where they can't ruin it for others. I imagine the emotional response to that would be "send them to jail", I completely understand but it's a lot cheaper if we do something else. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-people.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-... https://community.solutions/what-cities-with-successful-homeless-programs-have-in-common/ https://community.solutions/what-cities-with-successful-home...
    - next_xibalba 5mo ago
      > SF has a famously broken city government. As does Portland (the metro I now live in). Note they have huge budgets for their police and there's still plenty of crime -- does that mean they should give up on having police? I don't think the police analogy works. The relevant question is not whether a big police budget solves crime. Not the expected outcome. The real question is whether, when crimes happen, the system is allowed to investigate, arrest, prosecute, punish, deter, and incapacitate criminals. If you port the SF/PDX homelessness model into criminal justice, the analogy would be something like this: we spend a lot on police, but we also prevent them from arresting people, prevent prosecutors from prosecuting, treat enforcement as inhumane, and then decide that the problem is insufficient “resources” or “coordination.” Money isn't irrelevant. It's that money cannot overcome a policy framework that refuses to impose obligations on the people causing damage. You can spend billions on outreach, services, navigation centers, nonprofit contracts, and harm-reduction.. etc etc. But if the answer to refusal is always “try again tomorrow,” then the system has no endpoint and fails. YEs, involuntary institutionalization should be used carefully. Jail should not be the first answer for people whose problem is psychosis, addiction, or incapacity. But that doesn't concedes the central point: for many, voluntary help will not work. The only real solution is compulsory: treatment, supervised placement, or jail. And it can't be after multiple years of attempts while the person languishes on the streets and the commons are destroyed. A crisis care program for homeless youth might be good upstream, but it doesn't address acute problems: chronically homeless people who are severely mentally ill, addicted, violent, or destructive (usually multiple at the same time), and who refuse help. Those cases require either 1) shelter or treatment (won't work for most), 2) secure care, or 3) jail. Again, the question isn't “should we give up because spending has not solved homelessness?” The question is whether the current model is even capable of solving it. A system built around voluntary services, weak enforcement, and tolerance of public disorder will predictably produce encampments, addiction zones, and unusable public spaces no matter how much money it receives. The missing piece isn't just funding. It is authority, conditionality, and a cultural choice to protect the commons. Also, zealously dismantle and prosecute the non-profit homelessness grift complex.
- SilverElfin 5mo ago
  The way to fix it is to have the right incentives and also the right deterrent. If you simply enable a drug addict lifestyle or corrupt nonprofit grift, that isn’t the right incentive. And yet that’s the reality in west coast cities.
TheBlight 5mo ago
I also like clean safe unobstructed sidewalks and parks but along with benches, we've made a decision. We've decided that putting the mentally ill in a facility and arresting people for public drug use is not something we're comfortable with at the expense of those other things. I don't personally ageee with this decision but it is apparently the consensus.
- strictnein 5mo ago
  > it is apparently the consensus And what a strange consensus it is. The prevailing belief seems to be that preventing people from slowly/quickly killing themselves on the street (or, more accurately, dying from addiction) is somehow not "progressive" and the moral thing to do is to pretend like these people have made the choice of their own volition and that we cannot judge them for this choice. In reality, the people who are just rotting away on our streets would be better served if they were brought somewhere against their will and kept there until they were better. Society would also be better served if we did this. The government choosing to involuntarily constrain people isn't something that should be done lightly, but sometimes it is the lesser evil. We've completely abandoned these people and somehow done so in the name of compassion. It's really depressing.
  - JoshTriplett 5mo ago
    What a strange false dichotomy. Either we do absolutely nothing to help people, or we involuntarily incarcerate them? The actually progressive option is to provide meaningful public support programs, and also make housing affordable (by building enough housing). The US mostly doesn't do either of those, but it should.
    - Taek 5mo ago
      I'm not sure if you've had a drug addict in your life at any point, and if not that is a blessing. Drug addiction is a dark place and it's very common that the availability of free support programs is entirely rejected by the user, and the only hope at a normal life requires forceful intervention by family and friends. The only way to solve drugs on the street is to look at the cities that have solved them and copy what works. And, at least with what I'm familiar with, arresting people tends to work and alternatives tend to not.
cucumber3732842 5mo ago
This has little to do with the homeless and everything to do with a society that's shifted from seeking to facilitate positive things (e.g. the comfort of some random person on some random occasion) to one that wouldn't invent fire or sliced bread if it thought that doing so would be good for the wrong kind of people. This is intensified in spaces administrated by government due to the incentives of government and the type of people who are best retained and fill out the org chart of such organizations and it is obvious because these spaces are most public but it's a thing everywhere, for example your hospital has security that could kick out "bad people" (whatever that means) but it still has a crappy waiting area not because they don't want to make it inviting for people who care about you to stick around lest they be there to raise a stink in the event you are mistreated. There are comparable examples of this sort of "make things worse for people who are doing fine things" in all sorts of public and private contexts beyond just seating. I wish it was just the benches.
- gottorf 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - pocksuppet 5mo ago
    What is a drug-addled vagrant?
    - jvandreae 5mo ago
      > It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible. > https://x.com/MillennialWoes/status/1893134391322308918 https://x.com/MillennialWoes/status/1893134391322308918
      - pocksuppet 5mo ago
        Clarifying vague terms is a good thing. Otherwise, two people end up talking past each other because they have different meanings of a shared term.
techteach00 5mo ago
Yup. Public trash cans too.
- burnt-resistor 5mo ago
  You can tell which countries have and haven't experienced urban bombing terrorism by the style of public refuse receptacles. Before: concrete, rock, metal, and wood; after: minimal material hoops supporting transparent bags. Also, public drinking fountains I think are better signals of community commonwealth infrastructure than benches because they take more planning, infrastructure, investment, and maintenance to deliver. Another problem is the privatization of formerly public spaces, often with an essentially mandatory retail consumption component that didn't exist previously. People aren't as free to simply exist in spaces without buying shit than 50 years ago.
  - amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
    And public restrooms. Oh, people shit on the sidewalk in your city? Huh, I wonder why that is.
    - linksnapzz 5mo ago
      Sane people who aren't under the influence of some substance, who cannot find a toilet, are not the cause of the public defecation problem. This is an addiction/mental health/criminal justice problem-and the lack of public restrooms is downstream and not upstream of it.
  - techteach00 5mo ago
    Ya but where I'm from in New Jersey we never had public bombings and the trash cans still vanished
svpk 5mo ago
I'd add that we also chose policies that made housing expensive. It used to be much cheaper to live in NYC for example, but housing options included what was essentially a dorm room with shared facilities. Those were outlawedes for various reasons. There are also a lot of other policy factors that push up housing prices. Cheap housing isn't a panacea, but if there was sub $500 dollar rent in NYC you'd see a lot less homelessness.
- xp84 5mo ago
  Idk about NYC but the people I see on fent in west coast cities’ homeless encampments couldn’t pay a $500 rent any more than they can the $5,000. They’re strung out all day long and can’t pursue any goal besides getting more drugs. On the other hand though, a lot of who’s technically homeless at any given time aren’t that chronic, mostly hopeless, and very visible set. It’s people who did lose their apartment just barely after an unexpected job loss or medical expense. Those ones could be helped by cheaper rent! But that group isn’t very visible, doesn’t bother anyone, and often couch surfs, sleeps in their car and showers at the gym for a couple months, etc. and most importantly, they use the many safety net resources to get back on their feet (getting a job usually).
  - rafabulsing 5mo ago
    Most homeless people aren't born homeless. Maybe at the point they're at now, yeah, a $500 rent and a $5000 are equally inaccessible. But for the people on the edge of homelessness, that $500 rent could be the difference that prevents them from going down the death spiral of homelessness, lack of options, drug addiction, etc.
    - awakeasleep 5mo ago
      To support your point, we’re talking nonsense when we use the word “homeless” to describe all the different types of people who can fit that definition. Doing that masks the fact that there are working people with housing insecurity, by putting them in the same category as emotionally disturbed drug addicts. In every analysis I’ve seen, poor people with housing insecurities outnumber the mentally ill type homeless people by three or four to one. It’s very possible to help them, but very difficult to talk about it because everyone imagines you’re talking about the other “chronic homeless” type.
saltyoldman 5mo ago
My best friend built two public benches for his eagle scout project in the late 90s. Here's one of them, can't remember where the other is (in the same park): https://maps.app.goo.gl/kSFyikeerp7i77oZ8 https://maps.app.goo.gl/kSFyikeerp7i77oZ8
scoofy 5mo ago
[flagged]
- cousin_it 5mo ago
  Are you saying that sleeping on a bench, if you don't have anywhere else to sleep, is antisocial?
  - scoofy 5mo ago
    I’m saying sleeping on a bench that is meant for transit users to wait for a train is, indeed, anti-social. This is fairly trivial to demonstrate using a categorical imperative. If everyone used the transit system to sleep in, then that transit system would likely cease to exist, and the benches would not be maintained. We very much ought to have places for people to sleep. That those resources are rarely provided to many folks satisfaction is shameful. Still when public services are make less functional this can interfere with the literal viability of expensive transportation systems. They can rapidly become insolvent if transit consumers prefer alternatives due to the misuse of spaces. The idea that need trumps all other factors leads us to inefficiency public services that collapse.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - nextaccountic 5mo ago
      [flagged]
      - scoofy 5mo ago
        Firstly, I agree with you. I just don't think it's a contest, and I don't think "ranking something as worse" means the other thing should be considered permissible.
    - cousin_it 5mo ago
      Homeless people have no moral obligation to stay away from benches due to "solvency of transportation systems", if society doesn't care about them in return.
jmyeet 5mo ago
I believe expensive housing is at the root of many societal problems, it's not even funny. We don't have park benches because we've adopted hostile architecture to keep out "undesirables". This mostly means "homeless people". But why are there so many homeless people? The primary reason is housing unaffordability [1]. One of the funny things about China is that there are a lot of "experts" who insist on reading the tea leaves and assign secret, nefarious motives. The truth is that China is pretty open about what they're doing. If you take everything China says at face value you're going to be ahead of 95% of the China talking heads on TV. That's not hyperbole. Property speculation was a common way for Chinese people to accumulate wealth. This has made property expensive in the Tier 1 cities in particular. The CCP had tried to cool this with various reforms but it turned property into a Ponzi scheme. Basically, developers would have to sell new units and then use those funds to finish a previous project. This is a big factor in the Evergrande default [2]. Xi Jinping took power in 2019 and had some policy priorities that include cracking down on corruption, reforming the housing market and ecological living. In 2019, he famously said "houses are for living, not for speculation" [3]. So the real estate market has been in decline for years. Some might view that as a failure but it was an intentional popping of a real estate bubble for the greater good. China makes it difficult and expensive to own more than one home. Likewise, foreign capital can't be parked in real estate like it can in the West. One of the good things about the Internet is that people can see for themselves how modern, clean and people-centric Chinese cities are, particularly Tier 1/2 cities. Instead of investing in society, we militarize and overfund the police, start pointless wars, create homeless people through unaffordability and build our cities around various profit opportunities for mega-corporations (even having to have a card is to the benefit of corporations). And of course we can't forget what role racism played in how our cities evolved and were planned. [1]: https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/ https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/ [2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/default-delisting-evergrande-worlds-most-indebted-developer-2025-08-25/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/default-delisting-evergr... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for_speculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...
- cyberax 5mo ago
  [flagged]
booleandilemma 5mo ago
Our society is sick and it's not getting better anytime soon. We're past the golden era of civilization and barreling towards dystopia now.
jdw64 5mo ago
I think the reason most people do not sympathize with this argument is that most HN readers are programmers, and many of them are still in a relatively secure class position. Traditionally, programming has had a high barrier to entry, but it has also been a profession where compensation has remained relatively strong. As societies become harsher under pressure from high housing costs and economic displacement, they tend to become more aggressive and violent. But many people do not sympathize with this issue because they are not personally in that situation. They mostly experience the visible disorder: aesthetic damage, drug use, and the social harms produced by deeper structural failures. But if we compare this to HN debates about LLMs, an irony appears. In labor-market terms, LLMs are similar to hostile design. LLMs are not installing benches for programmers. They are closer to removing the benches. In the past, there were lower-level tasks where junior developers, non-traditional developers, non-native English speakers, and small open-source contributors could remain inside the profession. CRUD work, documentation fixes, test writing, small bug fixes, simple UI, repetitive glue code — these were not glamorous tasks, and they were often inefficient. But they functioned like public benches inside the profession. They gave people a place to sit long enough to learn. LLMs attack exactly that layer. From a company’s point of view, this is rational. Code that might take a junior developer several days can now be drafted by a model in minutes. Documentation, tests, boilerplate, simple screens, and repetitive API wiring no longer seem worth preserving as training grounds for humans. As a result, the market may look more efficient. But that efficiency resembles the history of removing benches. It is not only the “problematic” people who disappear. Elderly people, children, travelers, disabled people, and ordinary people who simply needed a place to sit are pushed out as well. Software has a similar problem. If we remove low-level work, low-quality work may appear to decrease. But at the same time, we also remove the space where beginners can fail, receive correction, observe others, and slowly acquire the instincts of the profession. So LLMs are not merely productivity tools. They can also function as a force that removes public seating inside the software profession. That is why I find it difficult to reconcile the logic of people who argue that public benches should be removed, while also arguing that LLMs should not be accepted. They are already sitting inside the profession. They already have experience, English, networks, code review experience, and existing project history. For them, LLMs look like a faster tool. But for people trying to enter from the edge of the profession, LLMs are not just a tool. They are a change in the structure of entry itself. The lower seats where people could once sit and learn are disappearing. Newcomers are expected to start from a higher level of abstraction and with stronger verification skills from the beginning. In cities, the logic for removing benches is usually expressed in the language of order, safety, aesthetics, and maintenance cost. In software, the logic for adopting LLMs is expressed in the language of productivity, efficiency, cost reduction, and quality control. But behind that language, what disappears is the buffer zone through which a community receives people. A city without benches may look cleaner, but it does not become more public. Likewise, a software market without entry-level work may look more productive, but it is hard to say that it has become a healthier ecosystem. When I read HN, I often see this kind of irony. And perhaps we all live inside such ironies. That may also be part of what makes communities interesting. People do not seem to have a consistent attitude toward publicness itself. Instead, they show completely different moral intuitions depending on where they are positioned within that public space. I always find that interesting to watch.
Danox 5mo ago
America is not known for caring about public infrastructure if they can avoid it once upon a time most cities actually had a public work department that actually tried to keep you know the public places clean they don’t anymore if you want clean public places you have to go someplace else in the world. Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea. Most of that stuff has been farmed out to subcontractors in America and that includes what your kids eat in most public schools, the school cafeteria is just one big vending machine these days.
mystraline 5mo ago
This is one of the cases in point of Hostile Architecture. Or, you get benches that are horribly uncomfortable. Or with awkward bars (prevents sleeping). Or spikes. In this case, there is nowhere to sit. That's 100% intentional.
OutOfHere 5mo ago
Having no public restrooms within a 15 minute walk is worse than having no public benches. Cities shouldn't be allowed to exist without either of them. Also, ground-level restaurants and supermarkets should not be allowed to reject non-customers from using them. Bulk urine is a good source of urea/ammonia which has commercial value, especially considering the global fertilizer shortage.
- ultrarunner 5mo ago
  These are likely good litmus tests for the distinction between a city and "people storage".
- JuniperMesos 5mo ago
  > Also, ground-level restaurants and supermarkets should not be allowed to reject non-customers from using them. The single biggest reason why there are no public restrooms within a 15 minute walk in many American cities is because the visibly homeless fuck them up, through crazy vandalism, deliberately dirtying them with their bodily fluids, doing drugs in them, etc. Businesses being legally compelled to let non-customers use their bathrooms would exacerbate this problem. > Bulk urine is a good source of urea/ammonia which has commercial value, especially considering the global fertilizer shortage. It's not cost effective to set up systems to capture the ammonia from the urine of people using public restrooms in urban areas, or else people would be doing that. There are municipal sewage treatment plants that sell some of the byproducts from treating human wastewater as fertilizers, because that is cost-effective at their scale and level of centralization.
  - OutOfHere 5mo ago
    The mulch fertilizer from sewage is an impure toxic mess contaminated with PFAS that permanently destroys farmland. It should be banned and never be used. It has already destroyed a significant chunk of American farmland. It is wholly different from urine diversion and ammonia recovery. The two concepts have little in common. It shouldn't require a municipal facility if the residual liquid can be drained into the sewage. It is meant to be a commercial endeavor. Once the urine is contaminated and diluted with regular wastewater, it's already too late to extract urea/ammonia from it. Even this concept is predicated on being able to extract ammonia with sufficient purity without PFAS, pharmaceuticals, and other residue.
dsign 5mo ago
Urban spaces can be kind or unkind, and benches are a good way to judge. A week ago I decided to explore a new part of town. I mean, I've only lived in this town for a few years, but I'm not into big cities, and I live in a country where even the capital can feel inordinately leafy and forested if you come from a town in India. I don't come from India, and my dad saw to it that I got acquainted with the ticks and the brambles from a young age, so short of true jungle or a dense mangrove swamp, I consider most places fair game for a leisurely stroll or a rowing. So I was talking with my mom on the phone, relating to her the greens of a small prairie and the reeds demarcating the swampy shore, and counting the many rabbits that were scattering at my passing, when, at a turn of the dirt trail, I found a stark reminder that I was still in town territory: a perfectly normal bench.
m01 5mo ago
It's becoming harder to find a place to sit down in London (UK), too, especially one without hostile features like bench partitions or spikes.
guilhas 5mo ago
Was in a bigger city in the weekend, and they don't have many benches. But it was nice in a way because people just sat anywhere every stair case step, every curb, grass patches, next to a tree, train station floor,... Where there was a bench 5 people would sit, where there wasn't 15 did Of course it was a pleasant weather otherwise...
chris_money202 5mo ago
Can’t say it’s a problem in Chicago, we still have benches just about everywhere I can think of
cineticdaffodil 5mo ago
Thats normal..poor countries do not have public infrastructure, because if they had it would become a settlement.
rbbydotdev 5mo ago
I recently took a trip to Salamanca Spain, the sight of a regular bench, in the city center, without hostile anti sleeping measures. It was funny, something so plain could so be jarring to see. Could very well have been an elephant on the via.

173 points by cainxinth 5mo ago

Gosh, if only there was some way we could solve homelessness! Don't worry about it, as at least we can drop tens of billions of dollars to show the Iranians how big and powerful we are.

canjobear 5mo ago
Is there a $10 billion "fix everything easily" button you have in mind for homelessness?
- fragmede 5mo ago
  $10 billion would build a lot of homes. If you give homeless people homes, they're not homeless anymore. The problem is also political, unfortunately. $10 billion isn't going to change zoning laws and a NIMBY attitude of freezing things in time. If they like that point in time so much, they should build a museum, sheesh!
  - Dylan16807 5mo ago
    > $10 billion would build a lot of homes. If you give homeless people homes, they're not homeless anymore. But that doesn't answer the question. It's "a lot" of homes, but less than a tenth of what would be needed. And you need a bunch of social workers too at minimum.
    - pstuart 5mo ago
      That wouldn't be enough to do the job but it would be a great start if it was done right. My point was we've flushed $50B (and likely far far more) and what do we get for it? High gas prices. So hurray for the push for renewables and EVs, but there's nicer ways to do it. > And you need a bunch of social workers too at minimum Ok, sure. Remember, we're spending the $50B that's been lit on fire so this gives us more jobs and a happier country. And that money circulates in the economy rather than expatriated profits by the defense contractors.
- scythe 5mo ago
  Homelessness and visible homelessness need to be distinguished here. The large majority of homeless people are not the ones you notice on the streets. Most try to be discreet. Some have jobs. A person who lives in their car is considered homeless. The best measure to reduce homelessness is to provide timely support for people who are being evicted from their homes before they lose their jobs (which they might still have) and before their mental health deteriorates. This is the point at which assistance is most effective. You have heard the saying, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". Such programs have been applied to great effect in e.g. London. The way to respond to people who have experienced chronic homelessness with complications is different and more difficult.
  - rgblambda 5mo ago
    The Simon Community where I live went around the city one December and counted how many rough sleepers there were. I forget the exact figure but it was less than 100. Meanwhile there were thousands classified as homeless due to being in temporary accomodation. And this is a part of the UK well known for having a homelessness problem.
- jedimastert 5mo ago
  You know oddly enough, if you just put someone up in a real place to live for like a year, that's enough for the majority of people to get back on their feet.
  - AmazingEveryDay 5mo ago
    I'd like to believe that! Can you link to any research to back up your claim?
    - pstuart 5mo ago
      https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-people.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...
    - jedimastert 5mo ago
      There's a local charity I donate to that does this, they've got I think 10 or 15 apartments they put people up in for 3 months, and offer them various forms of placement assistance while they're there. In the last annual report they had I believe a 95% success rate with people they checked in with a year later. Unfortunately this is pretty selective evidence, but I know for a fact they don't exclude people on the basis of having mental illness or addiction problems, I've worked with them personally.
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - pstuart 5mo ago
      Why are you singling out immigrants? The homeless in our metro area are very much domestically produced. But you do help illustrate a concern: homelessness is ultimately a federal issue, as some states dump theirs on other more "accepting" states.
- pocksuppet 5mo ago
  how many homes can you buy for $10 billion? especially if you don't care too much about size, extra niceties, or location?
  - Tanoc 5mo ago
    Given a construction budget of $125,000 per residence for a particularly nice two bedroom single bathroom house of about 1000ft², that's 80,000. Estimates are that there are currently between 750,000 to 800,000 people that have no home right now. Taking the high number of 800,000 that $10,000,000,000 is 10% of those people housed. You could reasonably go down to $30,000 for a build for a single floor house of the same footprint if you used mass produced prefabs, and get 330,000 people housed, or over 41%. Do you realize how much that would uplift things if we suddenly had a 41% reduction in homelessness? Considering that companies like Google and OpenAI are throwing around hundreds of billions of dollars which never get circulated back into the wider economy, spending $10,000,000,000 to bring 330,000 people back into economic and societal participation sounds amazing. That's assuming a somewhat low yearly income of $45,000 per person, adding up to $14,850,000,000 in circulation, or a gain of almost $5,000,000,000 right there. Even if we only achieve half of any of this that's $7,000,000,000 for one year. Two years in and the cost has already been paid back and more. This comes with the giant caveat that we exclude the external costs of such a huge project, like social welfare visits, probation or monitoring if needed, or even just placement programs. Likely those all combined would be a third of the total cost.
- loglog 5mo ago
  The "fix everything" button is abolishing zoning laws, and its aggregate cost is negative. Aggregate cost is not the issue preventing problems from being solved.
next_xibalba 5mo ago
SF spends more per capita than anywhere in the world on homelessness. And it’s barely made a dent. The solution is upstream of money. It’s policy decisions derived from cultural values. In other places in the world, where homelessness is vanishingly rare, these people are made to choose: “you will get treatment or you will go to jail, but we will not tolerate the destruction of the commons.”
- antonvs 5mo ago
  Another factor in other places in the world is much lower economic inequality. The US has chosen to divide its population in this way.
- pstuart 5mo ago
  SF has a famously broken city government. As does Portland (the metro I now live in). Note they have huge budgets for their police and there's still plenty of crime -- does that mean they should give up on having police? I think if it were treated as a hybrid program (federal/state/county) there could be synergy that could make it work (more eyeballs on it, more shared resources, etc). And as far as treatment or jail, we do need the power of involuntary institutionalization but it needs to be wielded with utmost restraint and scrutiny. I have family that could have used this, it's pretty much the only way with some. But it always has to be done in the context of helping rather than punishing. There's so much we could do: start a kind of CCC for homeless youth as a baseline starting point and give them paths up and out. Heal those you can and those you can't at least put them somewhere where they can't ruin it for others. I imagine the emotional response to that would be "send them to jail", I completely understand but it's a lot cheaper if we do something else. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-people.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-... https://community.solutions/what-cities-with-successful-homeless-programs-have-in-common/ https://community.solutions/what-cities-with-successful-home...
  - next_xibalba 5mo ago
    > SF has a famously broken city government. As does Portland (the metro I now live in). Note they have huge budgets for their police and there's still plenty of crime -- does that mean they should give up on having police? I don't think the police analogy works. The relevant question is not whether a big police budget solves crime. Not the expected outcome. The real question is whether, when crimes happen, the system is allowed to investigate, arrest, prosecute, punish, deter, and incapacitate criminals. If you port the SF/PDX homelessness model into criminal justice, the analogy would be something like this: we spend a lot on police, but we also prevent them from arresting people, prevent prosecutors from prosecuting, treat enforcement as inhumane, and then decide that the problem is insufficient “resources” or “coordination.” Money isn't irrelevant. It's that money cannot overcome a policy framework that refuses to impose obligations on the people causing damage. You can spend billions on outreach, services, navigation centers, nonprofit contracts, and harm-reduction.. etc etc. But if the answer to refusal is always “try again tomorrow,” then the system has no endpoint and fails. YEs, involuntary institutionalization should be used carefully. Jail should not be the first answer for people whose problem is psychosis, addiction, or incapacity. But that doesn't concedes the central point: for many, voluntary help will not work. The only real solution is compulsory: treatment, supervised placement, or jail. And it can't be after multiple years of attempts while the person languishes on the streets and the commons are destroyed. A crisis care program for homeless youth might be good upstream, but it doesn't address acute problems: chronically homeless people who are severely mentally ill, addicted, violent, or destructive (usually multiple at the same time), and who refuse help. Those cases require either 1) shelter or treatment (won't work for most), 2) secure care, or 3) jail. Again, the question isn't “should we give up because spending has not solved homelessness?” The question is whether the current model is even capable of solving it. A system built around voluntary services, weak enforcement, and tolerance of public disorder will predictably produce encampments, addiction zones, and unusable public spaces no matter how much money it receives. The missing piece isn't just funding. It is authority, conditionality, and a cultural choice to protect the commons. Also, zealously dismantle and prosecute the non-profit homelessness grift complex.
SilverElfin 5mo ago
The way to fix it is to have the right incentives and also the right deterrent. If you simply enable a drug addict lifestyle or corrupt nonprofit grift, that isn’t the right incentive. And yet that’s the reality in west coast cities.

TheBlight 5mo ago

I also like clean safe unobstructed sidewalks and parks but along with benches, we've made a decision. We've decided that putting the mentally ill in a facility and arresting people for public drug use is not something we're comfortable with at the expense of those other things. I don't personally ageee with this decision but it is apparently the consensus.

strictnein 5mo ago
> it is apparently the consensus And what a strange consensus it is. The prevailing belief seems to be that preventing people from slowly/quickly killing themselves on the street (or, more accurately, dying from addiction) is somehow not "progressive" and the moral thing to do is to pretend like these people have made the choice of their own volition and that we cannot judge them for this choice. In reality, the people who are just rotting away on our streets would be better served if they were brought somewhere against their will and kept there until they were better. Society would also be better served if we did this. The government choosing to involuntarily constrain people isn't something that should be done lightly, but sometimes it is the lesser evil. We've completely abandoned these people and somehow done so in the name of compassion. It's really depressing.
- JoshTriplett 5mo ago
  What a strange false dichotomy. Either we do absolutely nothing to help people, or we involuntarily incarcerate them? The actually progressive option is to provide meaningful public support programs, and also make housing affordable (by building enough housing). The US mostly doesn't do either of those, but it should.
  - Taek 5mo ago
    I'm not sure if you've had a drug addict in your life at any point, and if not that is a blessing. Drug addiction is a dark place and it's very common that the availability of free support programs is entirely rejected by the user, and the only hope at a normal life requires forceful intervention by family and friends. The only way to solve drugs on the street is to look at the cities that have solved them and copy what works. And, at least with what I'm familiar with, arresting people tends to work and alternatives tend to not.

cucumber3732842 5mo ago

This has little to do with the homeless and everything to do with a society that's shifted from seeking to facilitate positive things (e.g. the comfort of some random person on some random occasion) to one that wouldn't invent fire or sliced bread if it thought that doing so would be good for the wrong kind of people. This is intensified in spaces administrated by government due to the incentives of government and the type of people who are best retained and fill out the org chart of such organizations and it is obvious because these spaces are most public but it's a thing everywhere, for example your hospital has security that could kick out "bad people" (whatever that means) but it still has a crappy waiting area not because they don't want to make it inviting for people who care about you to stick around lest they be there to raise a stink in the event you are mistreated. There are comparable examples of this sort of "make things worse for people who are doing fine things" in all sorts of public and private contexts beyond just seating. I wish it was just the benches.

gottorf 5mo ago
[flagged]
- pocksuppet 5mo ago
  What is a drug-addled vagrant?
  - jvandreae 5mo ago
    > It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible. > https://x.com/MillennialWoes/status/1893134391322308918 https://x.com/MillennialWoes/status/1893134391322308918
    - pocksuppet 5mo ago
      Clarifying vague terms is a good thing. Otherwise, two people end up talking past each other because they have different meanings of a shared term.

techteach00 5mo ago

Yup. Public trash cans too.

burnt-resistor 5mo ago
You can tell which countries have and haven't experienced urban bombing terrorism by the style of public refuse receptacles. Before: concrete, rock, metal, and wood; after: minimal material hoops supporting transparent bags. Also, public drinking fountains I think are better signals of community commonwealth infrastructure than benches because they take more planning, infrastructure, investment, and maintenance to deliver. Another problem is the privatization of formerly public spaces, often with an essentially mandatory retail consumption component that didn't exist previously. People aren't as free to simply exist in spaces without buying shit than 50 years ago.
- amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
  And public restrooms. Oh, people shit on the sidewalk in your city? Huh, I wonder why that is.
  - linksnapzz 5mo ago
    Sane people who aren't under the influence of some substance, who cannot find a toilet, are not the cause of the public defecation problem. This is an addiction/mental health/criminal justice problem-and the lack of public restrooms is downstream and not upstream of it.
- techteach00 5mo ago
  Ya but where I'm from in New Jersey we never had public bombings and the trash cans still vanished

svpk 5mo ago

I'd add that we also chose policies that made housing expensive. It used to be much cheaper to live in NYC for example, but housing options included what was essentially a dorm room with shared facilities. Those were outlawedes for various reasons. There are also a lot of other policy factors that push up housing prices. Cheap housing isn't a panacea, but if there was sub $500 dollar rent in NYC you'd see a lot less homelessness.

xp84 5mo ago
Idk about NYC but the people I see on fent in west coast cities’ homeless encampments couldn’t pay a $500 rent any more than they can the $5,000. They’re strung out all day long and can’t pursue any goal besides getting more drugs. On the other hand though, a lot of who’s technically homeless at any given time aren’t that chronic, mostly hopeless, and very visible set. It’s people who did lose their apartment just barely after an unexpected job loss or medical expense. Those ones could be helped by cheaper rent! But that group isn’t very visible, doesn’t bother anyone, and often couch surfs, sleeps in their car and showers at the gym for a couple months, etc. and most importantly, they use the many safety net resources to get back on their feet (getting a job usually).
- rafabulsing 5mo ago
  Most homeless people aren't born homeless. Maybe at the point they're at now, yeah, a $500 rent and a $5000 are equally inaccessible. But for the people on the edge of homelessness, that $500 rent could be the difference that prevents them from going down the death spiral of homelessness, lack of options, drug addiction, etc.
  - awakeasleep 5mo ago
    To support your point, we’re talking nonsense when we use the word “homeless” to describe all the different types of people who can fit that definition. Doing that masks the fact that there are working people with housing insecurity, by putting them in the same category as emotionally disturbed drug addicts. In every analysis I’ve seen, poor people with housing insecurities outnumber the mentally ill type homeless people by three or four to one. It’s very possible to help them, but very difficult to talk about it because everyone imagines you’re talking about the other “chronic homeless” type.

saltyoldman 5mo ago

My best friend built two public benches for his eagle scout project in the late 90s. Here's one of them, can't remember where the other is (in the same park): https://maps.app.goo.gl/kSFyikeerp7i77oZ8 https://maps.app.goo.gl/kSFyikeerp7i77oZ8

scoofy 5mo ago

[flagged]

cousin_it 5mo ago
Are you saying that sleeping on a bench, if you don't have anywhere else to sleep, is antisocial?
- scoofy 5mo ago
  I’m saying sleeping on a bench that is meant for transit users to wait for a train is, indeed, anti-social. This is fairly trivial to demonstrate using a categorical imperative. If everyone used the transit system to sleep in, then that transit system would likely cease to exist, and the benches would not be maintained. We very much ought to have places for people to sleep. That those resources are rarely provided to many folks satisfaction is shameful. Still when public services are make less functional this can interfere with the literal viability of expensive transportation systems. They can rapidly become insolvent if transit consumers prefer alternatives due to the misuse of spaces. The idea that need trumps all other factors leads us to inefficiency public services that collapse.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - nextaccountic 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - scoofy 5mo ago
      Firstly, I agree with you. I just don't think it's a contest, and I don't think "ranking something as worse" means the other thing should be considered permissible.
  - cousin_it 5mo ago
    Homeless people have no moral obligation to stay away from benches due to "solvency of transportation systems", if society doesn't care about them in return.

jmyeet 5mo ago

I believe expensive housing is at the root of many societal problems, it's not even funny. We don't have park benches because we've adopted hostile architecture to keep out "undesirables". This mostly means "homeless people". But why are there so many homeless people? The primary reason is housing unaffordability [1]. One of the funny things about China is that there are a lot of "experts" who insist on reading the tea leaves and assign secret, nefarious motives. The truth is that China is pretty open about what they're doing. If you take everything China says at face value you're going to be ahead of 95% of the China talking heads on TV. That's not hyperbole. Property speculation was a common way for Chinese people to accumulate wealth. This has made property expensive in the Tier 1 cities in particular. The CCP had tried to cool this with various reforms but it turned property into a Ponzi scheme. Basically, developers would have to sell new units and then use those funds to finish a previous project. This is a big factor in the Evergrande default [2]. Xi Jinping took power in 2019 and had some policy priorities that include cracking down on corruption, reforming the housing market and ecological living. In 2019, he famously said "houses are for living, not for speculation" [3]. So the real estate market has been in decline for years. Some might view that as a failure but it was an intentional popping of a real estate bubble for the greater good. China makes it difficult and expensive to own more than one home. Likewise, foreign capital can't be parked in real estate like it can in the West. One of the good things about the Internet is that people can see for themselves how modern, clean and people-centric Chinese cities are, particularly Tier 1/2 cities. Instead of investing in society, we militarize and overfund the police, start pointless wars, create homeless people through unaffordability and build our cities around various profit opportunities for mega-corporations (even having to have a card is to the benefit of corporations). And of course we can't forget what role racism played in how our cities evolved and were planned. [1]: https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/ https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/ [2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/default-delisting-evergrande-worlds-most-indebted-developer-2025-08-25/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/default-delisting-evergr... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for_speculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...

cyberax 5mo ago
[flagged]

booleandilemma 5mo ago

Our society is sick and it's not getting better anytime soon. We're past the golden era of civilization and barreling towards dystopia now.

jdw64 5mo ago

I think the reason most people do not sympathize with this argument is that most HN readers are programmers, and many of them are still in a relatively secure class position. Traditionally, programming has had a high barrier to entry, but it has also been a profession where compensation has remained relatively strong. As societies become harsher under pressure from high housing costs and economic displacement, they tend to become more aggressive and violent. But many people do not sympathize with this issue because they are not personally in that situation. They mostly experience the visible disorder: aesthetic damage, drug use, and the social harms produced by deeper structural failures. But if we compare this to HN debates about LLMs, an irony appears. In labor-market terms, LLMs are similar to hostile design. LLMs are not installing benches for programmers. They are closer to removing the benches. In the past, there were lower-level tasks where junior developers, non-traditional developers, non-native English speakers, and small open-source contributors could remain inside the profession. CRUD work, documentation fixes, test writing, small bug fixes, simple UI, repetitive glue code — these were not glamorous tasks, and they were often inefficient. But they functioned like public benches inside the profession. They gave people a place to sit long enough to learn. LLMs attack exactly that layer. From a company’s point of view, this is rational. Code that might take a junior developer several days can now be drafted by a model in minutes. Documentation, tests, boilerplate, simple screens, and repetitive API wiring no longer seem worth preserving as training grounds for humans. As a result, the market may look more efficient. But that efficiency resembles the history of removing benches. It is not only the “problematic” people who disappear. Elderly people, children, travelers, disabled people, and ordinary people who simply needed a place to sit are pushed out as well. Software has a similar problem. If we remove low-level work, low-quality work may appear to decrease. But at the same time, we also remove the space where beginners can fail, receive correction, observe others, and slowly acquire the instincts of the profession. So LLMs are not merely productivity tools. They can also function as a force that removes public seating inside the software profession. That is why I find it difficult to reconcile the logic of people who argue that public benches should be removed, while also arguing that LLMs should not be accepted. They are already sitting inside the profession. They already have experience, English, networks, code review experience, and existing project history. For them, LLMs look like a faster tool. But for people trying to enter from the edge of the profession, LLMs are not just a tool. They are a change in the structure of entry itself. The lower seats where people could once sit and learn are disappearing. Newcomers are expected to start from a higher level of abstraction and with stronger verification skills from the beginning. In cities, the logic for removing benches is usually expressed in the language of order, safety, aesthetics, and maintenance cost. In software, the logic for adopting LLMs is expressed in the language of productivity, efficiency, cost reduction, and quality control. But behind that language, what disappears is the buffer zone through which a community receives people. A city without benches may look cleaner, but it does not become more public. Likewise, a software market without entry-level work may look more productive, but it is hard to say that it has become a healthier ecosystem. When I read HN, I often see this kind of irony. And perhaps we all live inside such ironies. That may also be part of what makes communities interesting. People do not seem to have a consistent attitude toward publicness itself. Instead, they show completely different moral intuitions depending on where they are positioned within that public space. I always find that interesting to watch.

Danox 5mo ago

America is not known for caring about public infrastructure if they can avoid it once upon a time most cities actually had a public work department that actually tried to keep you know the public places clean they don’t anymore if you want clean public places you have to go someplace else in the world. Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea. Most of that stuff has been farmed out to subcontractors in America and that includes what your kids eat in most public schools, the school cafeteria is just one big vending machine these days.

mystraline 5mo ago

This is one of the cases in point of Hostile Architecture. Or, you get benches that are horribly uncomfortable. Or with awkward bars (prevents sleeping). Or spikes. In this case, there is nowhere to sit. That's 100% intentional.

OutOfHere 5mo ago

Having no public restrooms within a 15 minute walk is worse than having no public benches. Cities shouldn't be allowed to exist without either of them. Also, ground-level restaurants and supermarkets should not be allowed to reject non-customers from using them. Bulk urine is a good source of urea/ammonia which has commercial value, especially considering the global fertilizer shortage.

ultrarunner 5mo ago
These are likely good litmus tests for the distinction between a city and "people storage".
JuniperMesos 5mo ago
> Also, ground-level restaurants and supermarkets should not be allowed to reject non-customers from using them. The single biggest reason why there are no public restrooms within a 15 minute walk in many American cities is because the visibly homeless fuck them up, through crazy vandalism, deliberately dirtying them with their bodily fluids, doing drugs in them, etc. Businesses being legally compelled to let non-customers use their bathrooms would exacerbate this problem. > Bulk urine is a good source of urea/ammonia which has commercial value, especially considering the global fertilizer shortage. It's not cost effective to set up systems to capture the ammonia from the urine of people using public restrooms in urban areas, or else people would be doing that. There are municipal sewage treatment plants that sell some of the byproducts from treating human wastewater as fertilizers, because that is cost-effective at their scale and level of centralization.
- OutOfHere 5mo ago
  The mulch fertilizer from sewage is an impure toxic mess contaminated with PFAS that permanently destroys farmland. It should be banned and never be used. It has already destroyed a significant chunk of American farmland. It is wholly different from urine diversion and ammonia recovery. The two concepts have little in common. It shouldn't require a municipal facility if the residual liquid can be drained into the sewage. It is meant to be a commercial endeavor. Once the urine is contaminated and diluted with regular wastewater, it's already too late to extract urea/ammonia from it. Even this concept is predicated on being able to extract ammonia with sufficient purity without PFAS, pharmaceuticals, and other residue.

dsign 5mo ago

Urban spaces can be kind or unkind, and benches are a good way to judge. A week ago I decided to explore a new part of town. I mean, I've only lived in this town for a few years, but I'm not into big cities, and I live in a country where even the capital can feel inordinately leafy and forested if you come from a town in India. I don't come from India, and my dad saw to it that I got acquainted with the ticks and the brambles from a young age, so short of true jungle or a dense mangrove swamp, I consider most places fair game for a leisurely stroll or a rowing. So I was talking with my mom on the phone, relating to her the greens of a small prairie and the reeds demarcating the swampy shore, and counting the many rabbits that were scattering at my passing, when, at a turn of the dirt trail, I found a stark reminder that I was still in town territory: a perfectly normal bench.

m01 5mo ago

It's becoming harder to find a place to sit down in London (UK), too, especially one without hostile features like bench partitions or spikes.

guilhas 5mo ago

Was in a bigger city in the weekend, and they don't have many benches. But it was nice in a way because people just sat anywhere every stair case step, every curb, grass patches, next to a tree, train station floor,... Where there was a bench 5 people would sit, where there wasn't 15 did Of course it was a pleasant weather otherwise...

chris_money202 5mo ago

Can’t say it’s a problem in Chicago, we still have benches just about everywhere I can think of

cineticdaffodil 5mo ago

Thats normal..poor countries do not have public infrastructure, because if they had it would become a settlement.

rbbydotdev 5mo ago

I recently took a trip to Salamanca Spain, the sight of a regular bench, in the city center, without hostile anti sleeping measures. It was funny, something so plain could so be jarring to see. Could very well have been an elephant on the via.