The police are already empowered to remove homeless encampments from the street, so unless this prop is tightening the restrictions on their ability to do that — say, requiring that there be shelter beds available (which there often aren’t) — I don’t know what this proposed ordinance is supposed to address.
What we need is more and better bottom-end housing. People avoid shelters because of overly restrictive schedules, no place to keep their stuff, violence and theft from other “guests.” If we had decent flophouses where people had rooms to themselves more homeless would elect to not sleep on the sidewalks.
I’m currently homeless myself but because I have a good job I can afford to stay in hotels (which is more expensive than rent, but that’s off-topic.) I work swing shift, and most shelters have curfews, so they wouldn’t even be an option for me. If I weren’t getting paid as well as I am I’d probably be on the street. They’re going to offer a productive, working, tax-paying San Franciscan a fucking one-way bus ticket to nowhere? Eat a bag of dicks.
In some places, like London, they put human spikes on their buildings to stop people sleeping rough. Also make park benches as uncomfortable as possible and put unnecessary armrests in to make it impossible to stretch out. It’s disgusting.
Right – thanks for sorting that out. I saw the picture and even from my perch here in the Mission District, I knew that tent city wasn’t one of OUR tent cities.
It’s a bit hard to like a post where someone is writing that he is homeless. So rather than like I thought I would say thank you for giving homelessness a face that further highlights how wrong it is to divorce property ownership from its basic function as shelter.
Mark Horvath does incredible work to help homeless people amplify their voice
Which has reached its tragic climax with this goddamn thing: a surrealist artpiece “bench” which resolved all the ingenious methods people have found to still sleep on anti-human benches by making something you can’t sit on at all, let alone lie down on. They also made it entirely out of concrete, because of course they did.
I don’t know who made this thing or who ordered placed, but they deserve to have all of their furniture replaced with that thing in perpetuity.
Why wouldn’t people just sleep on the ground instead? It’s no worse than sleeping on a lumpy concrete slab. That thing exists only to make someone feel clever about being unsympathetic shitheads.
Athens. When I was at UGA, I was talking to one of the homeless guys in front of Blue Sky and asked how he got there. He told me that before the Olympics, they gave him a little bit of money and a bus ticket to Athens and told him not to come back. He then pointed to a lot of the other regulars, saying that’s how they got there too.
Funny thing is that this approach is a temporary solution at best. Atlanta has a bigger homeless population than ever. I think part of it is related to the weather and part of it is due to the fact that it’s a nexus of several major highways.
I’m sure there are plenty of other factors as well, but my point is that if your city has a large homeless population, there are underlying reasons. If you ship people out, but don’t address those reasons, you’re just making room for a new wave of homeless people.
CA’s high cost of living makes it bad to try to get by on a low wage job in, but at the same time the fairly mild climate makes it way easier to live outdoors in.
I would rather try to pay rent in West Virginia on a WalMart paycheck then pay rent in SF on that same check. However I would rather try to sleep outside in SF (or San Jose!) winters where it only drops below freezing a few times a year then die in a VA February, frozen solid before anyone notices my body.
The Hypocrisy Train has finally arrived at San Francisco; and no one is safe from the horrid truth that all of their coffee beans were harvested by slave laborers.
I say we put them all to work cleaning and maintaining the internet tubes under ground, complete with dorm-like facilities. They get 3 hots and a cot and a sense of purpose and enough money for Boba Fett collectables, the rich people don’t have to look at them, I get faster internet, and in 100 generations their adaptations for living under ground will allow them to be able to tunnel where they want and reclaim the surface.
Yeah, the absurdity of California’s housing market means that most of California’s homeless are employed. And they’re not the ones being given bus tickets - those are being given to the chronic homeless who are the most vulnerable when moved, unless they’re going somewhere where they have a support network (which probably isn’t the case, usually). I often wonder how many people move to California with the expectation that they’ll be homeless. I think a fair number of people living marginal existences come here in hopes things will be better, but aren’t counting on being without shelter.
Considering that most urban park benches nowadays have some sort of anti-sleeping feature, I was so surprised to see this bench in downtown Minneapolis that I had to take a picture. I’m not sure if it’s meant to be artistic commentary or just being nice?
