Another solution:
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This is something I could definitely get behind.
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Moving the problem elsewhere is not solving it no matter how much you wish it were so and taxpayer money is intended to provide a healthy and functional society. Part of that is preventing homelessness.
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Even with the new $15/hr minimum wage it isn’t even close to enough. If the spouse and had not bought 20+ years ago we wouldn’t be able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment.
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But he’s gotta eat. I asked the biggest (IMO) hack architect in Ann Arbor why his buildings were so ugly and he said “I give my clients what they ask for.” so …there. Guess you can’t lose your license for practicing Architecture without a conscience.
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Ann Arbor here, where the hypocrisy at City Hall is reaching critical mass. Spending millions on “affordable housing” and “social justice” and replacing all the benches in Liberty Plaza with no-sleep benches like above, and completely removing others on nearby downtown corners when Spring and Summer come around - prime loitering weather.
Our city council always says they don’t want another downtown park because it might become another Liberty Plaza - that is, a place for homeless, unemployed, under-employed and the rest of the traveller types to hang out all day - we can’t have any old, poor black folks playing chess all day - not vibrant enough!!
Our city administrator Howard Lazarus was the Austin public works director, and is apparently in the running to return there as City Manager. I would expect more of the same, more wealth segregation, DDA tax skimming, shrinking and hostile public environments, privatization of public space, etc.
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At least he and homeless people agree on one important thing.
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I used to live in the city and if my building at the time had deterrents keeping the homeless from sleeping, shitting and pissing on the front stoop I wouldn’t have had to call the police to remove a dead guy one morning. I thought he was sleeping with his eyes open. I was wrong.
There are people dying in the streets of your city, and you think that the problem is the unpleasantness and inconvenience of having them do it close to your property. And that reducing their options for shelter in order to relocate the dying to some random place out of your sight is a sensible solution.
Okay.
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My home is not their shelter. I have driven and or directed many to where shelters are so don’t dismiss my humanity so easily. I am all for alternative solutions. There just don’t seem to be many good ones.
That wooden butt-bar might be nicer than the extruded metal bench seats. Those are extremely nasty to sit on in a Canadian winter, and would probably kill anyone who tried to sleep on one without a good foam pad under them, or maybe one of these:
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Most of the significant ones:
The libertarian one: “I got mine, fuck you.”
The republican one: “Homeless people deserve to be homeless and they deserve to suffer, because they absolutely must have done something to deserve it.”
The democratic one: “We can’t pay for it while we’re also balancing the budget like the republicans insist we do, even though the republicans haven’t actually been fiscally conservative since my great grandfather was a boy.”
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Funny thing:
I can fall asleep in just a few minutes in bright sunlight, sitting propped up on a park bench with loud children playing and dogs barking, but I have a hell of a time falling asleep in my pitch dark room, in the middle of the night in my own comfy bed.
Figures.
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First: dang. I was so hoping Ann Arbor would be able to retain its groovy progressive direction. You’re saying all the right phrases but them, blammo, it’s a gut punch. Just… dang. And ouch. How does this just get so far off-track? <—serious question
Financial forensics has never been my strongest talent. And nowadays, such a target-rich environment, one can barely swing a dead fiscally improper cat with hitting… something.
Second: this info is hours old…
Austin names Howard Lazarus and Spencer Cronk as city manager finalists; final decision to come by year’s end
It’s one of those “do I laugh or cry or both” things, like when we in Austin/Texas got rid of Rick Perry but then ended up seeing him pop up in Washington DC situated in a department he swore earlier to dismantle.
Well, dang.
Again.
Dang.
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Pick a scenario you would like to see more of:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/A_Christmas_Carol
“At this festive season of the year, Mr Scrooge, … it is more than
usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor
and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands
are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of
common comforts, sir.”
“Are there no prisons?”
“Plenty of prisons…”
“And the Union workhouses.” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”
“Both very busy, sir…”
“Those who are badly off must go there.”
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
or
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It solves the problem for the people in question.
You can’t prevent homelessness. That’s tilting against windmills. There will always be people who fall between the cracks, and even if you try to house them, simply putting them all together will drive others out onto the street, because we’re talking about people who aren’t capable of living in society.
Well said! Where are the brambles in the woods for people like that, who until now have been hiding out at the edge of the Senate, unable to make the State-bound Shangri-La in a lawful way in public meetings. I should aspire to take the dead ends of the traffic they fall prey to near my offices…
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Personally I pay my taxes in the hope that a bit of it goes to help those homeless people, not so I have a fancy bench to sit on. ie Taxes aren’t to pay for me, they’re to pay for people who don’t have as much money as me.
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That’s a dreadful justification for anything.
The SS officer raised his hands helplessly. “If I didn’t gas those jews, someone else would have!”
It’s fine to say “don’t hate the player, hate the game”, but the best way to end the game is for everybody to refuse to play it.
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