Agreed. One look at the pictures should tell you why people and businesses are resorting to this.
And guess where the sewage goes when you can't or won't drive your RV to the dump site?
And guess where the sewage goes when you can't or won't drive your RV to the dump site?
like, we can't rly make them stop unless we take they RV, now we got 1 more homeless. or we could take them to prison, now we got 1 more prisoner. none of this fixes the problem bc it's rly hard to punish ppl who got nothing to lose.
These guys do have something to lose - their RV and all their stuff in it. You can't ask them to magically with money they don't have, but you can effect behavior and priorities.
Now if you lose your RV and start squatting in a park, get warned for trespass and then stay anyway, while doing drugs in the open and shoplifting, etc. I'd love to see an escalation that eventually lands you in jail (not prison) and a 1/2 way house and treatment.
Rules need to be enforced. They can and should be enforced extremely compassionately and incrementally. But they need to be enforced.
And if they are not, this is a perfect example of what happens. The city has now de-facto abdicated a lot of it's authority and here we go, back to vigilance committees and self-help of 150 years ago. As shown, the self-help mechanisms lead to sub-optimal solutions for everyone. Now no one can park on those streets at all and the homeless are still homeless. Society just isn't going to just sit back and let shit-heads ruin it for everyone because the current city governance is too ineffective to take care of business in an optimal way.
That does generally seem to be the case. I live in one of the neighborhoods the article is about. There are a couple of RV residents nearby that have been in the same spot for years, keep to themselves, and don't seem to leave much trash around. The city and neighbors seem content to leave them as-is.