>My big problem with forcing homeless into these safe areas by making things outside them illegal, is that you end up with "out of sight, out of mind". These pr

>My big problem with forcing homeless into these safe areas by making things outside them illegal, is that you end up with "out of sight, out of mind". These programs already don't receive enough attention and support. This is the intended consequence, not a side-effect. Cities want to reduce their homeless population, because it's distasteful and discourages consumers in those areas. The place I grew up in gentrified rapidly over the course of the 90's and 00's and homeless people made the rich whites that wanted to go to the starbucks feel uncomfortable. On a large scale this would hurt the economy. A city in this situation has two options. They can treat the underlying causes of homelessness, build more affordable housing, spend more on mental health, etc. But this is expensive and takes money out of the economy at both ends, because you can always make affordable housing unaffordable and collect more property tax and income tax from the new residents. So, the city went with the cosmetic option: Make it extremely difficult to be homeless within the areas the city wanted homeless people gone from. This entails a number of very cheap, but very effective changes to the environment to just make it difficult for homeless people to be around: * They installed bars on benches, so that nobody could sleep on them, and encouraged property owners to install spike strips in doorways so that homeless people couldn't sleep there. * They installed "help the homeless" parking meters so that people could "give their change to the homeless" (really, give their money to a charity, that would have overhead, administrators to pay, etc., resulting in much less going to homeless people), and made it illegal to panhandle and to give money to pandhandlers. * They made it illegal to serve food without a license, criminalizing Food Not Bombs (a group that collects and distributes food for free, for everyone, not just homeless people) and also giving food directly to homeless people. * The few homeless people that remained in the area after they left were harassed by police and driven out directly. At the same time this was going on, the city was closing shelters and selling the land to developers. Writ large, no city has any incentive to actually address homelessness when it could just try to drive homeless people out of its borders and make it Not Their Problem. And that's what's happening here. As an aside, it's disgustingly dehumanizing to refer to homeless people as "the homeless" or as "homeless" in the noun form. These are people. They are exactly like you. As we technologists destroy more and more jobs while simultaneously increasing the degree of inequality in society, we will be causing more and more people to become homeless, so we should be more conscious than normal about this problem and how we can fight it.