It’s not the sheltering that most people object to, it’s the open drug use, violence, theft, and sanitation issues.
If we as a society would just help these people get some stability, starting with housing, the vast majority of these folks would get their lives back together. We pay more to deal with the other problems homelessness creates, all in the name of not giving someone a “handout”. It’s nonsensical and shameful.
Seriously public housing and universal basic income should make sure that I do not have to see some improvised shelters on public squares. This should not happen.
I hope that’s just bad phrasing. You are not the victim. The problem is not that you have to see the improvised shelters. The unhoused people in that photo are the victims - of economic injustice, of discrimination, of the myriad social failures of our society and government. Their problem is lack of shelter. They solve it with improvised shelters in public spaces.
I want to emphasize this because it’s a way of thinking that’s very hard to maintain in a society so prejudiced against homeless people. Tent cities and improvised shelters and unhoused people sleeping on the streets are not problems. They are solutions, used by the unhoused, to the problem of lack of shelter.
Those solutions are suboptimal, obviously, and cause other problems, including your own negative emotional reaction to seeing them.
But if government and society see tent cities and improvised shelters as problems to be eliminated, instead of bad solutions to the deeper problem of housing inequity, government and society will implement “solutions” that merely relocate or eliminate the shelters to remove them from sight, and leave the unhoused even worse off than before.
Why do you think public housing and universal basic income would not solve the actual underlieing problem of forced homlessness. I have no problem with people camping and large tent cities are perfectly fine, but there needs to be facilities around, which provide some basic services like toilets, waste removal and so forth. So I rather have nomads living in places with some infrastructure to help them out, rather then some random street. However I suspect a lot of people would rather live in proper public housing then in a tent like that.
That’s why I said I hoped I was misunderstanding you. And it sounds like I was misunderstanding you. Sorry!
I agree, the proper use of public facilities are to support the public, and when encampments form on public land, cities need to start by providing showers and toilets and other facilities to meet the immediate needs and simultaneously start working on the deeper structural issues causing homeless encampments to form.
In a limited way, that did happen in San Francisco during the pandemic. Shame they’ve decided to build a skatepark where those tents are located and drive out unhoused people now. But if the city thinks the problem is not homelessness, but people seeing the homeless in public, that’s a “solution”.
Why not both?
In the modern world, basic food, water, shelter, safety and healthcare should be basic human rights.
Our public spaces should be for all of us to share, not to be monopolised by a few. I understand, and don’t blame them. But they are a symptom that something has gone very very wrong with a country.
If there are enough homeless people to monopolize public spaces then why shouldn’t they get that space? I don’t understand where else you want them to go. Non public space is private space, so it’s pretty hard to argue they should go there instead.
Like I get that you’re saying you also want to enjoy public spaces and I think everyone does. But does enjoyment rank above survival? Ideally we wouldn’t have much homelessness, but we do. This is the last place they can go and I can’t find it in myself to kick them out so I can have a picnic or a less unsightly park.
You’ve read it backwards. I want our public spaces back by moving them up and out, not crushing them down. A basic place to sleep, warm and dry, and somewhere to store some possessions should be available to all. They should NOT HAVE to sleep in a public park. They should have a better place, funded by taxes, if necessary.
“I know, let’s just let them camp in public parks.” is NOT an acceptable policy to deal with homelessness. It’s cruel and evil.
I think you’re mixing the pragmatic with the ideological.
Of course we should move them up and out, however our governments at all levels are too “conservative” for the scientifically proven, cost effective policy of giving the homeless homes. This is what we SHOULD do, it’s ideological.
Right now, many homeless people are in tents in public spaces. Our governments and police routinely evict them, which since they are homeless means they have to relocate, often losing all of their possessions. We should stop these government evictions. We should live with the homeless visible every day, and keep the public reminder of our societal failure instead of cruelly displacing them. I know it’s certainly more cruel than giving them homes, but it’s far better than kicking them out and forcing them to restart every few days/weeks. That’s what we can MAYBE achieve in the short term, it’s pragmatic.
I agree with you on the ideological, but it’s important not to let “what we should do” stop us from doing everything we can in the short term.
FYI, I’m not American, and live across the pond. While we definitely have our issues, we don’t have the large scale homeless camps America seems to have.
I find it horrifying that it apparently got that bad to begin with, let alone the shoulder shrug attitude of “We might as well live with it. It’s very slightly less cruel than just kicking them out again and again.”
It was the Victorians that realised it’s actually cheaper to just provide a safety net, rather than deal with the costs of letting people suffer (police, theft, security, damage etc). You are literally paying more, in taxes, to make them suffer than just doing the humane thing and helping them.
I’m not saying “might as well live with it”, I’m saying “can we please stop kicking them out”. I don’t want to live with it, but at the very least can we stop spending money and resources to further harm the homeless?
A good message, but not a meme
It might not be a funny meme, but this is certainly a meme. Albeit a political one with a good message
