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It's not a shelter and it's not meant to be converted into one. To me it's an indication of an overworked and failing system that leaves people in bad situations because it has nowhere else for them to go.
Sure, you could argue that because there's currently no obvious major problems, that you could just leave it as is and be entirely unconcerned with it, or even go so far as to suggest that anyone who does want to fix it is doing so in bad faith. I think that's cruel and lazy.
The actual problem? These people need _real_ shelter.
A library levy recently passed despite being in a deep-red political jurisdiction. If families couldn’t use the library without contending with people using it as a residential facility, it wouldn’t have passed.
Insisting that we charge everyone a bus fare because we think otherwise it might make it eaier to homeless people to use the bus is not only uninformed, but also heartless.
If you have problems with homeless people on buses, then figure out why those people aren't in a better shelter and solve that problem.
In Ithaca we recently built this place
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/115398619308992584
which is all low income housing on top of a conference center with maybe 1/4 of the units for people who had been unhoused. I think most of the people there are not criminally minded and keep to themselves but there are a few people there who are starting fires, dealing drugs, and causing damage. (Note a few windows in that image are busted out) Many homeless people have dogs that are important to them and wouldn’t be housed if they couldn’t bring their dogs, but… last year they had an outbreak of parovirus because dogs were having puppies and the puppies weren’t getting shots. A friend of mine got bit by a dog across the street from that place and thought it belonged to someone who lived there.
Some of it is people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder can be almost impossible to live with if they aren’t getting treatment and I’m worried that deinstitutionalization will have a even more profoundly negative legacy seen 50 years from now than it already does. Not least, a 20 year old today spent many years of their life in a classroom where a ‘special’ kid sucked all the air out of the room and will probably be highly receptive to the notion that if we ‘get rid’ of 5% of people we can live in a utopia. If being in public means being in a space dominated by someone screaming at the demons they hallucinated then people will move to the suburbs instead of the downtown, they will not support public transit, they will order a private taxi for their burrito instead of eating out. They’ll retreat to Facebook.
EDIT to atone for the snark: Good candidates for such alt institutions already exist; "just" need to test their policies on an expanded student body. Bonus, some (myself included?) consider these "conservative":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45598371
U.S school admin acted like the kind of "manager" who judges you by the lines of code you produce and the number of commits you make. DOD school admin were the kind of people who judge you by the impact you made.Not an issue for cheap / free public transport in many other countries mentioned.
Perhaps the manner in which the US deals with the distribution of income and basic human needs could use a few tweaks.
Here good faith curiosity would have led you to where peer replies are pointing you: that free transit in big metros tends to come with loitering issues, and if they become too extreme, it can make the transit system pretty inhospitable and uninviting for the families and working people meant to be using it, undermining the purpose of making it free.
It's a genuine challenge that metros of a certain scale need to address, although the OP is maybe (or maybe not) wrong in assuming that it would be an issue in a fairly small/high-trust college metro like Iowa City. But, in best interpretation of their comment, that's why they were asking it as a question.
that is exactly what homeless people be doing.