We used to have rent subsidies, mental hospitals, all night movie theaters. All gone.
I'm genuinely unsure if this is a parody of the American Way here. "There's no problem here, but if there was, the free market will solve it!"
They said 2 of the 3 things we "used to" have we still actually have, and the 3rd thing is a waste of money because nobody wants it. It seems inauthentic to you to say that there's not enough demand to support all night movie theaters?
The collapse of mental healthcare in the US was due to JFK admin's hasty transition from institutional to community-based treatment without a functioning parallel system. And, it remained unfinished without a proper replacement because subsequent administrations neglected it.
Reagan finished it off by ruining California's mental healthcare system and then the country's. The Regan's M.O. was to defund or ignore anything they couldn't relate to. How many Americans died needlessly from inaction on HIV/AIDS and manufactured crack epidemic as part of Iran-Contra is up for debate.
As such, in the modern day, many persons who need treatment do not receive it. And those who cannot function are often left to remain homeless and on the fringes.
Interestingly, the Cook County Sheriff's Office (Chicago) admins one of the more effective community mental healthcare systems because it's cheaper than locking people up and throwing away the key or bringing them to the ER every other night. Mental healthcare saves money, saves lives, and saves misery.
What you are referencing is a different type of long term psychiatric facility. The supreme court case is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Connor_v._Donaldson
Blame Reagan all you want - I couldn't care less.
(Imagine if you were a recently freed slave, trying to escape the place where you were enslaved, traveling around looking for separated family members, and then that happened to you.)
The unique appeal of a vagrancy law is that it doesn't require a crime to be committed, so it becomes possible to outlaw certain kinds of persons.
Now in the 21st century there's a whole new set of reasons why people become homeless. And I'm not saying that it's easy to deal with encampments in public.
But many of the solutions to these problems are already ruled out in the USA. And that's precisely because the US has attempted to carry on slavery by other means. If you look carefully, you can see that the American obsession with punishing the poor or the sick almost always derives from fear of a racialized underclass. Thus it's impossible to make a public space welcoming, because you-know-who will benefit. It's impossible to make public health good, because you-know-who will benefit.
Not everyone who believes in these ideas today consciously knows that these ideas are racist in origin, but that's definitely how they started.
P.S. of course now the US is such a dysfunctional kleptobureaucracy they can't even deliver bus shelters, literally the simplest possible permanent structure, even when they say they're trying to undo racism
I looked extremely carefully, and observed no such thing. I think you are quite obsessed about race, which is why you are trying to make everything about it. Regular people hate being threatened by aggressive, erratic hobos, no matter what their race is. Last time a crazy vagrant threatened to "fuck me up" for daring to wait for a bus at a bus stop, he happened to be white, and this did not make me feel any more safe or tolerant.
> Thus it's impossible to make a public space welcoming, because you-know-who will benefit. It's impossible to make public health good, because you-know-who will benefit.
Europe makes public space welcoming by aggressively removing and prosecuting vagrants for panhandling, public intoxication, simple drug possession (very much enforced throughout huge swaths of Europe), and disorderly conduct. Europe is much less tolerant about hobos in general, and is on hair-trigger when they're violent. This is also one of the reasons why more regular people use public transit there, because people behaving erratically are promptly physically removed. Ordnung muss sein.
We've lost a sense of community. Look, years ago, before the Internet, we would all go out to the movies together.
It used to be you give the creep-show at the window a couple of bucks, you could spend all day in there popping off. And the joy of it was there were people popping off at the same time. I mean, not that you looked at each other. It was dark. You weren't looking for the gay thing. But it gave you a sense of something bigger than yourself.
Now, they... you know, got rid of all these movie theatres. They're taking all the sex out of the movies. And what am I supposed to do? Go home, turn the lights off, and pop off in front of Charlie?
No, thanks.
It used to be there was a few 24-hour coffee shops, like Happy Donuts, where anyone could hang-out inside. It's no longer 24-hours.
Some people would stay in empty coin-op laundromats where the owners didn't kick everyone out and lock up.
Another option is 24 hour gyms where there are saunas, pools, and such.
You mean in the Castro? wink wink
There are many contributing factors, not just screens, location mobility, or the decline of religion (churches being civic/social functions).
Parks used to have water fountains. Can't hardly find those anymore.
Children's parks used to have cool installations like decommissioned Korea era fighter jets in the sand pit and crawl-through metal sculptures. Those are all gone, replaced by perfectly safe, commercial, prefabricated sets.