San Francisco library turning off WiFi at night to keep homeless from using it
theverge.com
theverge.com
Theoretically, wifi access could help people move on by giving them the network access even old tech could use to look for jobs, living situations, long-lost relatives, access e-counseling and telehealth visits, etc.
It's not the only thing the haves have taken from the have-nots to get them to move on. Bottle and can deposits used to be a much bigger deal in the US. It served its purpose of retrieving bottling materials for reuse to save costs and removing them from the landscape. But some noticed it gave the homeless a little spending cash too. The people in my otherwise fairly liberal city voted in the 90s to remove the local deposits from cans and bottles in order to force the homeless to move on.
Fast forward to 2023. The homeless did not move on. They stayed and are begging more intensely. Many "prominent" homeless (a guy I know just as the Cowboy for his begging flair, for instance) are still here 30 years later.
We really need to implement solutions better than "go be homeless somewhere else."
To say that there aren't solutions in place is incorrect. At least in NYC, the folks you see sleeping on sidewalks have broadly chosen that position over a bed in a shelter. It's a point of pride for many New Yorkers that if you're homeless and willing to get clean, the city will provide a bed for you every night.
https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dhs/downloads/pdf/dashboard/FYTD2...
I have a vague memory that there was a court decision stating that someone cannot be forcibly made un-homeless unless they're a danger to themselves or others.
I'm sure there are some IANALs here who can clarify my murky memory.
This is the program in Santa Monica. https://www.changelives.org/
Sounds reasonable. Then you hear the nuance. A shelter bed was always "available" because one religious shelter would say that one was always "available" even if it didn't in fact exist, and in order to stay there, even if it was, you were required to participate in compulsory religious events multiple times per day.
The gist of the argument was that, among other concerns, Boise was effectively giving the homeless a choice between jail or forced religious indoctrination.
I think the Boise example is probably a good case of generally well-meaning but ideologically driven folks using their city's homeless as a means to promote their views. I imagine if you surveyed most Americans, they'd agree that forcing someone to go to religious events in exchange for a bed is completely inhumane and idiotic.
https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/local/homeless-camp-under-...
The right answer is to house the homeless.
The wrong answer is for Boise to be the homeless Mecca from Portland, Spokane, SF, and Seattle -- who seem to be actively working to get their homeless to move to other cities.
It's probably not "seem." A number of cities have been caught, sometimes repeatedly, buying one-way bus tickets to other cities for homeless people.
It's immoral, but not illegal. When they get caught, there's a brouhaha in the local newspapers for a bit, and then everyone forgets and it starts up again.
I interpreted parent's use of the term "solution" quite differently.
And if you don't want to get clean, just go to San Francisco? At least you can sleep outside in any season without dying.
Fentanyl, meth, and alcohol are some of the most brutal drugs to detox from, and tragically, they're also some of the cheapest and most available for homeless people. I hope my previous comment didn't make it seem like I view getting clean as a simple task, it's actually one of the hardest things to ask a person to do, but after years of spending time with addicts both at all stages of recovery, I think it's the only path back to regular life.
Until you get the significant cohort of homeless who have serious medical conditions proper treatment, everything is simply rearranging the same deck chairs.
The "homeless" are not a uniform block. The woman fleeing her vengeful, abusive husband, the LGBTQ teenager thrown out of the house, the veteran with a traumatic brain injury, and the woman having succumbed to heroin addiction are all "homeless" but all have VERY different needs for making them "not homeless".
This type of thinking is tone deaf and its the reason we're here. If all the homeless needed was wifi, this would have been solved long ago.
It's unquestionably clear the city gov is forcing a wedge between it's residents and the crime, homelessness and business closures by failing to respond.
Did you know the prostitution on Capp St is alive as ever? It's just less visible now that's it's walled off using concrete barriers.
SF already tolerate too much. If residents don't act, nobody will.
Being poor and homeless is so hard. The system is built with countless chicken-egg problems that make it almost impossible to climb out of poverty. On top of this, elitists who are so disconnected are arbitrarily enforcing this kind of amoral depraved nonsense.
Should we just keep stripping the needy of more and more resources until eventually maybe they'll just disappear or die because fuck them for existing and inconveniencing us?
Good grief.
The city policies force them to defecate in the street/bushes and god forbid they use the internet to search for potential employment or other services.
Like... okay, and what are you using your wifi for?
Regardless, removing this would just make them more stressed and irratic. There are worse things than legal porn on public wifi. If this tradeoff means 1% of them feel relaxed enough to actually do a job search afterward, and get motivated to get money for a more comfortable, more private place, then it's worth it.
But this is all a red-herring and not the real issue.
The lack of a panacea--a silver bullet solution to homelessness--does not mean all our resources are just a suboptimal waste. These incremental improvements are worthwhile when the cost tradeoff is so tiny (e.g. an internet modem with a properly configured firewall basically runs itself)
Pretty sure it's more a matter of location. Normal people only masturbate in the privacy of their own homes.
I know San Francisco is a very progressive city, but I don't think they're yet ready to embrace homeless people jerking it on the sidewalk outside the library.
That being said, your comment comes across as reductive to the homeless population as being nothing more than a snide, tongue-in-cheek joke.
This "Normal people" messaging is what allows us to abstract homeless people into this "other" group, which is dangerous and inhumane. Like it or not, these people with all of their problems are a part of us all.
I mean, I get that you want to see homeless people better supported. But championing their right to masturbate in public is I think going to get your cause more opponents than supporters.
It is only a joke until you actually see that, then it is no longer a joke, just sad reality.
The real unemployment numbers are the issue. The reason we keep raising the retirement age is to prevent a drop out of the workforce, you can only raise it for so long before you lose the valuable workforce you need to sustain a region.
Many homeless people are jobless and without income. Providing federal jobs isn't helpful because,
1.) Criminal Records. Some have these. 2.) Lost Identity. Without an identity rightful employment is hard. 3.) The government doesn't have enough work. State / Federal
If we want to overcome this challenge of homelessness you need to divide the homeless into the categories of need and provide services equal to that need.
Down on luck just need a home and a job.
Druggies need to be locked up to get clean. But not the way we traditionally lock them up, I'm sick of our penetentrary system it sucks, but there are other ways to criminal drug use. We just need to adapt like other countries.
Mentally ill just need a together home with other people who can provide vocational, mentoring and emotional guidance.
It isn't simple but we lump them into HOMELESS and then we remain fucked.
I do believe that the homeless are getting an unfair share of a blame for the actual crime happening in San Francisco, but they are deeply contributing to the overall levels of lack of safety and the knock on effects of shootings related to turf wars related to supplying them with illegal drugs.
at some point enough is enough and they gotta go.
i think it’s a juvenile attitude to look down your nose at the endless victims and tell them to just be more understanding of the hardships the homeless face.
"Go somewhere that rich people aren't" isn't much of a solution.
... in a town of 250 people, where nearly a third of the population lives below the poverty line.
The ONLY people that benefits is the residents of SF or wherever, that successfully managed to "make it someone else's problem".
In my mind? All you've done is create a powder keg.
Versus the love they're getting from the populace now?
Perfect is the enemy of the good. San Francisco is three quarters of the way towards spending its median income on its homeless [1][2][3]. That is how you generate a toxic backlash against a subgroup.
Has anyone asked the homeless in San Francisco if they'd want a free apartment in Willard? When rates were lower, we could have probably paid for their mortgage for less than it costs to temporarily house them. That is the opportunity cost.
[1] https://abc7news.com/sf-homeless-plan-housing-all-san-franci... $70k/shelter bed/year
[2] https://smartasset.com/retirement/average-salary-in-san-fran... $96k/year median individual income
[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MHICA06075A052NCEN $120k/year median household income
Right. So they're getting no love in either place. So why is this better?
> San Francisco is three quarters of the way towards spending its median income on its homeless
The median income in Willard is $26,000, so how far do we think that's going to go?
But like you say, there's no love in either place, so moving these people from San Francisco to Willard (I know, hypothetical) has very little to do with what's best for them, but instead "what's best for the residents of SF". Nothing much changes except SF residents don't see them and don't pay for them now.
It's not a city where you want to rediscover yourself in, unless you inherited property from a previous generation or you're one of the lucky few whose career is benefiting from the latest tech gold rush. You will not escape the homelessness cycle unless SF taxpayers guarantee you free housing until you get hired by Netflix.
You don't have to hate homeless people to not want to be around them.
I walk by this library frequently (it's on 16th just east of Market) and I _have_ seen that there used to be a bunch of people there most nights, and this often isn't true anymore. But as someone who lives in the area, my "exposure to homelessness" has not in any way been reduced; I just pass tents in slightly different parts of the neighborhood.
Brb changing my BSSID to “FBI Van #80085” as a practical step to protect my property
Nope, none of this changes my feelings, and certainly does not grant me "depravity tokens" that I'm now allowed to cash-in. "Hello, I have five depravity-tokens from being treated badly by a homeless person, I'd like to spend it on treating them badly in return."
Someone now loses their home after that - let's say to a fire and they didn't have it insured for that because the house insurance market is either dysfunctional or close to it in some parts of the US. You now have 1 homeless person again. Do you also ship them off again?
Do you just forever keep shipping off the unlucky and downtrodden people to some other place?
What if they lost their house, but have insurance paying soon, the insurance company is just dragging their feet for a few months. They will be fine, they will be able to pay for a new house or rebuilding. But until then they might be without housing. Ship them off anyways?
The goal is not to get rid of the homeless in the city, it’s to “get rid of them.” And -consciously or unconsciously- at its core, the goal is to have a group of weak people who are easy to oppress.
The rhetoric hasn’t basically changed in 90 years. It’s disgusting and frankly I’m shocked to see this sort of talk on HN.
Perhaps Reddit was running interference for us…
Just a bunch of conservatives and liberals chilling. No logic people.
This is exacerbated by the fact that any amenities designed to service the homeless (like a wi-fi tower out in a field where an encampment wouldn't bother anyone) would amount to officially recognizing the existence of the buildings erected there. I do not think the city could handle the contradiction of forcing one type of resident to go through an elaborate permitting process to build a shed, but allowing another resident to erect a temporary home in an officially recognized location. They are stuck turning a blind eye to it.
If you combine the two effects, you end up with the case they have now, where small-scale amenities will be overwhelmed, while large-scale amenities or directly intentioned actions are impossible because they would violate the fiction that none of this is happening. I know it sound hard to believe - that within the eyes of the system there are no homeless encampments: but just to offer one piece of evidence in support of it, I am not aware of any fire inspections going on in the tent villages.
> Take care of your people...
Don't view or consider them as their people, and in some cases, don't even think of them as people at all.
It makes sense that local residents would do this. Internet Access is to us humans like light to a moth. But we could have been moths that were forever lit.
Or explicitly put up free wi-fi where you want the homeless to congregate.
it's not natural so it's not humane.
My personal space is sacred and my neighbour has no right invading it in any shape or form. I don't care if he lives 100m from me or 30cm away behind wall in the same building. it's all the same.
Also the ground under and air above from center of earth all the way up to end of atmosphere is my space, everything founded in that soil as well. If it's mine it's mine.
If I decide with milion other people to concentrate in one big spot our sky will be free from artificial crap obscuring free natural sky view. Your globalist collectivist agenda is completely irrelevant to me.
And if you cross our sky we have full right to get your crap out of our sight in self defense by any means we decide to use.
Clear borders and agreed rights keep everyone more happy and more free.
If people want to kill themselves slowly, poison themselves, test any new fake things on themselves let them.
But keep them away from those who want to live the whole naturally designed length of time that we were given being born on this planet from nature. And if you shorten my life I get right to shorten yours, what's only fair but creates a never ending cycle on enmity and incompatibility.
Also city is not natural human growth environment.. but that's another topic.
And regardless, San Francisco's homeless problem won't go away by ignoring it or pretending to. Makes more sense for the city and area to deal with it, by coming up with more effective and humane solutions. To not do so, creates a worldwide bad look and increases the embarrassment. Various people (or groups) are already making fun of the US by constantly reporting on and shooting videos of its huge numbers of homeless, to push back on the bragging, bravado, and hypocrisy.
SF is incapable of digging itself out of that hole. Clearly it's not a problem of insufficient spend, and the local politics will not allow for the necessary level of action, so this will continue in perpetuity until there is outside intervention.
"We need to humane harder" is clearly not working. It feels good in the short term, but 10 years later things only get worse and we're scratching our heads wondering why nothing is improving.
Which item specifically? Having "open hours" seems reasonable.
Go be homeless somewhere else is not a practical solution and never has been.
"Emergency housing is a drain on taxpayer dollars." "Job placement is taking jobs away from locals." "Soup kitchens are another drain on taxpayer money." "Homeless services are a waste of money."
It makes me sick how people can act when it comes to the homeless population when so many of us are just 1 bad month away from being homeless ourselves.
Put people into a hopeless unemployable situation and don't allow them a way out and meanwhile complain that no one wants to work.
We could fix the one of the biggest economic issues right now by enacting a program to get people back on their feet but apparently the real solution is for them to die.
1. Employed but unable to afford the COL of the area.
2. Too mentally unwell to hold down a job, possibly due to a history of hard drug addiction.
I agree that some homeless people can be meaningfully helped through drug addiction treatment and/or employment programs, but it won't solve the whole problem.
These attractor cities then experience undue burden of having to fight basically an entire country's homeless problem using only municipal (rather than state or federal) tax dollars; where every social welfare program they add, creates "induced demand" by making them into more of an attractor city for surrounding homeless populations.
The homed people living in these attractor cities, experience a reality where they can choose to vote in progressive parties that throw however-much money at the problem of homelessness — adding public housing, shelters, food programs, jobs programs, etc. — with the only result being ever more homeless people showing up in the city. Which causes these homed people in these attractor cities to get burned out on the idea of solving homelessness.
(An aphorism: "the river sees more water than the lakebed.")
AFAICT, the only way out of the problem, is to
1. set aside federal funding for solving homelessness (which could be done easily enough in the US if anyone without a permanent residence in a particular state, were interpreted by federal law as not being "of" any state, but still a US national, and therefore a person the federal government has a duty to take care of directly — basically the same as how the federal government does insurance, postal delivery, etc. for actively-serving members of the military); and then
2. use that funding to start offering social-welfare programs for homeless people in places that don't already have large homeless populations, with the aim of creating more, smaller attractors, dispersing the homeless population, so that it's not all having to be dealt with by just the one or two natural attractor cities per country.
Yes, both of these things are big political lifts. I see it as something like the federal highway system, or for that matter, like military bases: cases where it's in all our best interests to relinquish local NIMBYesque control, in favor of top-down eminent-domain use of land for serving the needs of the country as a whole.
X% of the population will always need some gov't help and Y% will need gov't help at some point. I think we need to stop negatively viewing these groups as sponges on society. Ability is a spectrum, and we don't criticize someone w Down's Syndrome, and so I don't think we should be so harsh on people who are homeless / have trouble holding down a job / low-ish IQ / and even those who fried their brain w drugs / etc.
Yes, we want to avoid perverse incentives and incentivize people to be productive members of society, but we also need to recognize that some people will always need some help, and as a society, I think we should help them, striving for a future with little to no involuntary poverty.
This is why most countries' border services will ask short-term visitors the address of the place they'll be staying while they're there: no country, no matter how open its borders, wants you to visit with the goal of becoming a beggar on their streets.
(And this is also a large part of why particular passports only let you visit particular places without a visa. The EU has internally-open borders for EU citizens, because they have mostly equalized levels of social-welfare "pressure" between countries. But no EU country will let you in from a non-EU developing country that has high levels of homelessness, if you can't prove income; and that's something the EU enforces on its member states, so that no country becomes the de-facto homeless ingress point for the whole of the EU.)
Because of these measures, each country (or open-bordered region of equal-welfare countries) is mostly just dealing with its own homeless problem, not with other countries'/regions' homeless problems.
Look at all the different things it covers:
1. Chronic homelessness: This refers to individuals who have experienced homelessness for long periods or repeatedly over time. They often struggle with complex issues such as mental health problems, substance abuse, or disabilities, which make it difficult for them to maintain stable housing.
2. Episodic homelessness: Individuals experiencing episodic homelessness go through multiple episodes of homelessness throughout their lives. They may face challenges like unstable employment, lack of affordable housing, or inadequate social support systems.
3. Transitional homelessness: This type of homelessness is temporary and occurs when an individual or family faces a crisis or life transition, such as job loss, eviction, or escaping domestic violence. With proper support, people in this category can usually regain stable housing.
4. Hidden homelessness: Hidden homelessness refers to individuals who do not have a permanent residence but are not visibly homeless. They may be temporarily staying with friends or family, living in overcrowded conditions, or residing in places not meant for habitation, such as cars or abandoned buildings.
5. Youth homelessness: Young people who have left or been forced out of their homes, often due to family conflict, abuse, or neglect, experience youth homelessness. They may face unique challenges such as lack of life skills, education, or employment opportunities.
I think the fact that there are habitually antisocial people in the first category (chronic homeless) sours the voting populace against the whole idea of 'homelessness' because there isn't enough distinction in the term. And that is a shame because while the chronic homeless may be the most visible and difficult to address, the majority of homeless people fall into the other categories, and they (and we!) reap huge benefits from social programs.
It's very hard to a voter base who feel financially squeezed that their taxes should be going to people who, usually, are not holding down a job. They're "doing everything right" and feel the government is robbing Peter to pay Paul as it were.
There are a lot of sophisticated answers we can give as to why the above line of reasoning is wrong (multiple analyses show that, basically, if you're unwilling to literally murder people for being homeless it's cheaper to help them) but it's a hard sell.
But we spend 100s of millions a year on one public high schools sports budget.
The government is the party that should be responsible, and I'm tired of the onus of the responsibility being put on the citizens. Why else do we PAY taxes for if not for these social services?
Where is this?
The quote came to mind while I listened to a Radiolab episode on police surveillance [1]. We usually take it to mean opposing tyranny, even when convenient. But that might be too simple.
For every Patrick Henry there are dozens who prefer not to die. If we let the security situation devolve out of sympathy, or inequality increase in pursuit of efficiency, those people will snap and prompt a brutal backlash.
I’m not suggesting we re-criminalise homelessness. But the status quo, with the permanent homeless population, isn’t working. I don’t know how much one quashes one’s sympathy for the less fortunate and sense for technological progress to achieve these ends, but it’s becoming clear we have to explore toward that boundary. Open-air hard drug use, theft of non-essential goods, aggression and refusal to receive psychiatric screening (note: not treatment); these seem like low-hanging fruit to target zero of. Hell, make it part of a grand bargain to improve the transient homeless population’s wellbeing.
We have the fifth highest prison population per capita (behind El Salvador, Rwanda, Turkmenistan and Cuba), and you want to consider adding potentially another 600,000 (40% more) people to that population?
That would put us at the highest prison population in the world, and it would be not even close. That would be twenty per cent higher than some of the world's most despotic, dysfunctional countries.
And the same people who are not willing to fund socioeconomic initiatives, not willing to fund access to mental healthcare, are also not willing to fund improvements to American prisons which, while not the worst in the world, are certainly not even close to the pack when it comes to humane conditions, improving situation and circumstance, and reducing recidivism.
How would such a person get to leave prison if they were there because they were homeless? They leave prison and they're still homeless (see: already vastly overwhelmed transitional support structures, and a huge influx of additional demand and suffocatingly small desire to improve that situation).
Sorry and thank you. I'll be more blunt: we should not criminalize homelessness, putting these people in jail for being poor or mentally ill or addicted beyond agency is inhumane, and maybe if we deal with this problem we'll be less afraid of dumping the millions of Americans wrongly jailed and withheld from career development by the state back into the world.
If we continue to provide zero solutions between doing nothing and jailing, however, jail it will be. That's the political reality I'm pointing to.
I think I’m okay with my tax dollars being spent on the following:
1. Social services for the homeless.
2. Police suppression of the homeless.
3. Hygiene discrimination on public infrastructure (with showering and laundry covered in point 1).
4. Much more aggressive fare enforcement. I mean if you have to install kouban in all the BART & Muni stations and train cameras on the gates, that isn’t the worst place to do it.
I don’t want to be heartless, but not all homeless people are the same either. Give them the help they are willing to receive and for the rest that aren’t willing, that commit crime or show up on the bus covered in their own shit, I am A-OK with the police you know, policing. If you have a creative solution that will actually help more people? Great! We’ll try it out and see if it does or doesn’t help in the way that we want, but as an also, not instead of policing.
The issue most people have is the degree to which it's happening.
Very few people literally want homeless people to just die.
But some people might not want to spend 10% of their taxes on the homeless when it doesn't appear to be improving the situation, and does - to some people - appear to be making the situation somehow worse.
Some of the people in that group might be glad to spend 10% of their taxes on the homeless, if it actually worked. In fact, I'd wager many would be willing to spend much more if it would actually work.
But it appears to be a problem that can't be fixed by throwing money on it.
It just feels somewhat inhumane to take something away which is a marginal cost and at best and doesn't cause harm.
I mean, Libraries themselves do not need to exist, they are a service, they don't earn money, under pure capitalism they can't exist. But we know as a society that it improves social mobility and education.
and I mean, you can't do a lot these days without access to internet.
Because one group denies it to others. In New York, the potent image is that of a homeless person obviously going through a mental health issue, who hasn’t bathed in what smells like weeks, sitting in a subway car on their own. (When I was younger and naïve, I went into one such car and tried to talk to them. I had a handful of what I’ll pretend was a smelly sauce tossed my way.)
Genuinely curious: how is the mental-health and drug addiction nexus dealt with when one has an unwilling participant?
I don't know–I'm asking what "other developed countries" do.
Don't get me wrong. I think we should make massive investments in trying to solve the homeless problem, but giving away our public commons is utter stupidity.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” ― Anatole France
The cleverness of Anatole France's famous quote is that he framed it in a way that the answers to those questions were automatically obvious, by emphasizing the massive difference in agency and scope of action between the haves and the have nots.
I grew up in a very bad place in the UK and I knew many homeless people (different than homeless people in the US for sure, much lower propensity for mental health issues for example) but they avoided shelters because many homeless shelters aren’t safe. Any possessions you have will be stolen while you sleep. Women are molested and raped. Lice are all over. There are limited beds so giving up your "sure-fire" place in an underpass for a potential bed is not ideal.
You have to leave at 7 am and can’t return until 5pm at the earliest, and they’re first come first serve. Some shelters make you attend religious services.
Some shelters will "encourage" you to pay a fee to go to them.
It's very easy to become homeless and very difficult to get out of it (I mean, who has the finances to have 2 months rent, a deposit and enough to cover a failed background check), so it's not good to tar all homeless people with the "drug-use" brush.
In this case that service is being deliberately sabotaged for one of the most vulnerable groups in society.
Internet access is so necessary in modern life that it should be considered a citizen or human right.
Even if you subscribe to the ideology of the homeless being lazy leeches, the counter-effectiveness is quite obvious. Homeless people could be using the WiFi to access online banking, job, and housing applications. Things that would help get them off the street.
They are paid for by taxpayers. If the people funding the projects are unable to use them or they are being abused, then it makes sense to ensure that those that pay for the service are able to use them.
I was, for 4 weeks, and my local libraries wifi is what helped me stay in touch with my parents when my phone data was shut off for nonpayment. It helped me secure a job back at home.
You need to rethink your idea of what homelessness is. It's not antisocial drug users. It's also LGBT kids thrown out of their home. It's families being evicted because the parents lost their job. Even if they were antisocial drug users, sympathy, support, and assistance do more help than turning a blind eye and hoping they go away.
After today seeing 4 (customer-less) kiosks scattered across my medium-sized AZ town attempting to give away free cell phones, free tablets, and free cell service (presumably to those who qualify on the basis of need, presumably funded by the Federal Government), and then returning home and reading this thread in which it is frequently claimed that open WiFi is providing more or less the last comm link between homeless people (who evidently have phones but not cell service?) and the wider world and the possibilities it might offer, I find myself wondering "[why] don't the homeless qualify for these free [cell phones and] cell services?" Is this simply an oversight by Federal legislators (i.e. requiring a recipient to have a fixed mailing address (or: documentable proof of poverty?)) If so, why is nobody mentioning a need to agitate to remove the legal requirements preventing those most needing this help to be eligible to receive it? Simply providing free (voice & data providing) SIMs (which the Federal Govt already seems to be willing to provide) to homeless persons should obviate this entire sub-issue? Or would this (essentially handing out SIM's to anyone who asks for one) risk destabilizing the entire for-pay cell-service industry sector?
Correct, it's a service for everyone - including the homeless. A world where library doors are closed to some people is a world that has lost its way.
Do homeless people have the same rights as everyone else? Granted, they may not readily afford lawyers, but some of the restrictions you're implying trample in their freedom of movement.
In your hypothetical example, if you were inebriated, aggressive, and unhygienic, I'd strongly support you being removed from the subway circuit, because you'd similarly be denying access to it to others.
Homelessness is a complex subject but the impact of homeless people is not spread evenly. The people that live in that neighborhood (I used to be one) don't want it concentrated there. A few homeless people might be tolerable; a major camp is not, and free wifi at night acts as a magnet. I don't blame them at all for shutting it off.
How many people would look the other way if we were talking putting homeless into death camps and mass murdering them, that I have no idea about.
The progressive attitude of "any opposition to a left wing idea is a right wing talking point" is so problematic towards finding *effective* progressive solutions. We NEED to critique our ideas and programs. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And SF is on that road if we don't figure out something more effective.
SF spends more per homeless individual than most other US cities. It's not a matter of "we could solve this if there wasn't as much opposition to spending taxpayer money". Whatever we are doing now isn't working, and it's not some right wing talking point to acknowledge that. SF has wasted billions on bandaids to our housing crisis, it's time we find solutions that actually work on getting homeless people housed with access to the care they need.
Governments have functions and services beyond homeless services they are obligated to provide. Saying that no public services will be provided until homelessness is solved is not a sustainable approach.
Yes, you can read that quip both ways.
I don't think that this is unusual.
Staving off the obvious retort - I don't have some sort of silver spoon upbringing, my parents and childhood peers are supermarket workers, bus drivers etc.
People I know and socialise with just spend within their means, live in places that aren't hilariously expensive, have an emergency fund etc. They plan their lives around being able to provide for themselves and not burdening others.
Very few people I know could afford to live a normal life somewhere like SF.
I don't think that homeless people are subhuman as some people here mention, that's clearly a strawman. But I don't consider them to be my peers either. Their life choices, both past and present, are completely baffling to me.
We're talking multiple stabbings/shootings per month, people shitting on the sidewalk, a significant risk that you'll be be harassed in an unpredictable way (e.g. a homeless person swinging a hammer and screaming in a way that's impossible to deescalate), high risk of fires or exploding RVs, and even mundane/"harmless" things like methheads uprooting literally every flower from your garden (this happened to me).
We're talking about a situation where these people are literally terrorizing neighborhoods. There will be maybe 50 homeless people and ~5000+ neighbors, and that small group can ruin the place to the extent that kids can no longer walk to school.
After these experiences, I'm a lot more skeptical about homeless services. I don't want them to die, but at some point forced drug treatment or forced incarceration would be more humane than providing "services" and letting them all OD and die on the streets.
No bathrooms, no wifi, no housing, no policing, no medicine. Pull yourselves up from your own bootstraps like the rest of the self-made billionaires. And do it out of our sights.
As is typical with SF stories about homelessness. This article either seems misinformed about the facts on the ground, or can't seem to wrap its head around the fact that SF goes above and beyond to support the folks living on the streets here.
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Issue 1: Redundancy. The article seems to completely ignore the SFWiFi program that exists along Market St, and in nearly all public parks: https://sfgov.org/sfc/sites/default/files/San%20Francisco%20...
Here, using the Eureka Valley (Castro) library wifi is fairly redundant, as the library is 250 feet from Market street. Most of the folks I see on the street in the immediate area (north side of 16th) should be able to access #SFWiFi where they are.
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Issue 2: Location. The area directly adjacent to the library in question is very tight, and very, very residential. Pond St and Prosper St which flank the library can best be described as residential allies. They are tiny, quite streets, with narrow sidewalks. It would be pretty unreasonable that folks staying up using the wifi on these streets wouldn't be a non-negligible disturbance to the residents there. https://goo.gl/maps/UYsq79P5WXfhCJ8m8
The area where I do see people regularly congregate at night are on the north side of the street directly west of Dinosaur Sandwiches. I know this because I live by the panhandle, and this my preferred walk back on nights I'm out to late in the mission. The encampments in this location can range from small to making-the-sidewalk-impassible, but generally speaking, I could see how the noise could be an issue for the people on Pond St.
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Issue 3: Crime. This quote from the story piqued my interest:
>Legislative aide Jackie Thornhill told The Verge in an email that “obviously the presence or lack of all night wifi isn’t going to make a huge difference on its own,” but she believes it’s one of many reasons the library is so attractive to criminal activity. Thornhill also sent a spreadsheet of 911 calls that she says shows crime has been down for the last nine months.
I have personally witnessed multiple actual drug deals go down inside this library. I brought it up with the staff there, and they basically shrugged with a "it sucks, but what are you going to do?" It's the only library that I've witnessed actually crimes happening while I worked. Which is saying something, as I am a bit of a SF library fan, as I work for myself doing computery things. Even the civic center library, with all it's eccentricity seems to not be dealing with the issues that the eureka valley library is. (Aside: the best library in town is the UCSF Parnassus library, however it has been closed to the public since the start of covid)
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In all, this article seems to be a classic case of well meaning, but probably mostly uninformed blog-as-journalism writers putting together a story weighted to find outrage where it may or may not actually exist.
Do I think turning the WiFi off is a good thing? Probably not. Do I understand why local residents are calling for it? Sure. If I actually knew if late night noise, (with a generous) etc, have become a problem, I'd probably support them.
Do I think turning the WiFi off is some sort of huge problem for folks living on the street? No. There is easy access to public WiFi within a block of there. So much so that I've turned off auto-join #SFWiFi from my phone because it can have a weak signal an interrupt my browsing-on-foot all over the city.
I mean, if they can't afford it, we should provide it to them at tax payer expense.
Rather than change the criminalization model, decriminalized drugs makes it more accessible than ever. Makes it so much harder to treat. What should happen is that we change our criminalization model to come health and safety first. Treat the crime almost as a juvenile offense, keep it as a different record non-impactful. The lack of broadening our criminalization system is the problem.
For those with mental health you obviously can not criminalize this. You would want to move toward a home where people live and manage together.
Standard and normal homeless would then get exactly what is needed. Treating every problem as if it was the same is how we wound up with so many people on the streets. Every problem needs a human solution and not a one fits all category.
For those with mental health you obviously can not decriminalize this
Criminalization of drug use was never about crime or drugs. It is to install a pipeline for people in poverty to be directed into a for-profit prison system in which they are used as legal slave labor under the 13th amendment.
Drug use is not ever a criminal issue. It is a health issue full stop.
Mental health is a serious thing I am not sure where you got the aspect of criminalize from the whole paragraph though my type-o should've been visible.
Mental health homeless often need people around them to help them get their life in order.
Drug use is a criminal issue. It is like be an accessory to a crime. You are not criminalizing their homelessness which should never be criminalized. You are criminalizing substance use, you can arrest someone for being drunk and disorderly on the streets. You can't touch a meth head. The problem with addiction is that often it drives people to lower their inhibitions and do things that which in their right state of mind not do. But here is the thing you are all caught up looking at CRIMINALIZE! like how we treat all criminals. I'm saying that umbrella needs to be bigger and welcome different approaches to criminalization as opposed to throwing everyone and anyone into a jail cell. Specialized help is needed and when it is optional it is more expensive on tax payers.