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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

It seems like you're suggesting that as an alternative, we use collective punishment. City dwellers should be putting up with an unpleasant urban environment until someone fixes the homeless problem. Therefore any stopgap measures should be resisted.

It's not clear whether this works. On the one hand it does keep the homeless visible. On the other hand it also punishes people who can't practically participate in local politics (tourists for example). And in general, politically powerful people aren't waiting at bus stops all that much, so this strategy doesn't seem all that well-targetted.

It may also be counterproductive in that it makes people less rather than more willing to support measures that help the homeless and instead promote measures that punish them in return. That is, punishment may encourage more punishment in response.

But I'm just speculating here. It seems like this is unlikely to be settled without actual evidence.

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You complain against punishment, but you seem to be accepting of people already being punished for having been failed by their society in the first place.

I'm just pointing out some problems to consider. That doesn't say anything about what solutions I'll support.

> On the other hand it also punishes people who can't practically participate in local politics (tourists for example)

Seeing homeless people is punishment?

If homeless people are living in the park, other people aren't using it. (Edited)

Seeing homeless people can be worse than punishment?

You keep calling for people to see the homeless as human, but you're not doing it yourself. You seem to have some infantalized, romantic image of them where they are not capable of doing any wrong and anything that happens to them is the result of external forces out of their control.

But they are human. They may be wonderful people down on their luck. They are also capable of being horrible people, committing crimes without any particular excuse, and making bad decisions that are every bit as much their responsibility as it is mine when I make bad decisions. That is irreducibly part of what it means to be human, and if you take that from a group, you have dehumanized them. And in the aggregate, a group of them will inevitably contain some of the latter.

You can't address the problem by neglecting that fact. Many have tried, and as always happens when the solution doesn't match the real problem in the real world, those solutions failed. If berating people about homelessness was the solution, the problem would be solved already. That solution has been tried a lot.

You're failing to see the point:

It is anti-social to force everyone to fully take on the responsibility of all their actions, singularly and personally, forever and with no limits.

You hurt only yourself by creating traps that not everyone can escape from, and then having to live with people who have to fight for a living by any means they can.

As for solutions having been tried: Germany does a damn good job of dealing with unemployed and worse off as actual humans and has no homeless epidemic.

As for your first point: Supposition and assumption. My sister is the very first example of a person who has done a LOT in her life wrong and is "paying" for her mistakes by having to live on government aid. I pay fairly high taxes, pretty much half of all i earn, but i do it happily knowing that so does everyone else, resulting in my sister and my nephew living in dignity, with my nephew having access to high quality primary and secondary education and a chance to be something better; without any single person having to sacrifice most of their life to enable this.

The point about Germany is absolutely true, and merits closer examination.

The three main cities in my life are Berlin, Budapest and San Francisco. Budapest and San Francisco have very serious homeless problems; Berlin does not.

It's easy to point at Budapest and say: it's much poorer than Berlin, in a much poorer country, with government not much interested in the poor, etc.

But San Francisco is waaay richer than Berlin, and of the three has (in my experience) the worst homeless problem.

(I realize you probably couldn't "solve" homelessness in SF without simultaneously "solving" it throughout the US, but that's kind of the point: this is not some force of nature we are doomed to live with in an advanced economy.)

I don't think speaking of 'treating people as actual humans' is productive. It's a rhetorical device to paint people who disagree with your policy proposals as evil. It will get people who already agree with you to give you a pat on the back but it won't convince anyone who doesn't already agree. I say that as someone who probably mostly agrees with your position on this issue

Maybe you think your policy proposals flow directly from 'treating people as actual humans', but they don't. There are lot of (obviously true, from your perspective) assumptions there that will not be shared by people who disagree with you.

Here's the problem though. They aren't being treated as such. They get the same treatment as pigeons.

http://imgur.com/Jp16eNN

And yes, i'm not gonna sweet-talk anyone into "seeing the light". But i'm not looking for headpats either. I'm just tired of this shit where people pretend this is an unsolvable problem.

Anyhow, you have a good head. Please use it better than i do.

Okay, they're getting the same treatment as pigeons. By that logic you could also say they're getting the same treatment as all other humans, since the spikes do not distinguish between homeless and non-homeless people in performing their task.

It's also worth differentiating public and private uses of these methods (for instance, city-funded public spaces vs. private areas where sleeping should obviously not be allowed, like in the photo you linked). I can't blame an establishment for treating the symptom rather than solving the larger problem.

>You're failing to see the point:

I think you're not seeing how you're not comparing apples-to-apples in your argument. Look how you criticize the "companies" for being anti-social in a previous comment:

>By actions such as putting up these spikes, these companies are only being anti-social themselves.

Ok... but later you commend Germany which is a country and not a company for managing homelessness better:

>Germany does a damn good job of dealing with unemployed...

In other words, it wasn't Mercedes-Benz or Siemens or a German restaurant that handled homelessness by avoiding spikes, it was a government that fixed it. The "company" that put up the spike cannot address homelessness the way a government can. If society/government has set up a situation where the homeless do not have paid apartments like Germany, it's quite rational for a "company" to work within the bounds of what society has given them and install spikes to "move" the homeless problem somewhere else. The company made a "local optimum" decision.

Companies != Governments, and therefore they use different tools to address homelessness. Governments can pay billions for housing. Companies, on the other hand, have the budget to pay for spikes. In other words, in the USA, it's not the companies being anti-social... it's the government being anti-social.

> it's not the companies being anti-social... it's the government being anti-social.

It's both.

> it's the government being anti-social

Well, i'm not disagreeing with that.

Maybe not 'every bit as much their responsibility'. People can be backed into a corner, and do things we cannot imagine sitting comfortably in our armchairs. See "Les Miserables" for an example.

Fair enough.

But I refuse to remove all responsibility, because that's dehumanizing itself.

By the point someone is homeless it is abundantly clear that they are faced with a burden of responsibility they are incapable of handling.

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