This article has a great deep dive on how we have so few “free” or community-sourced places in the US that they often get used as a catch-all for any and all social problems we have. See: libraries as homeless shelters. From the article:
What’s happened is we’ve stigmatized our public spaces, because we’ve done so little to address core problems that we’ve turned them into spaces of last resort for people who need a hand. And as we do that, we send another message to affluent, middle-class Americans, and that is: If you want a gathering place, build your own in the private sector. So we have a lot of work to do.
That’s a great point – by making public places the only places you can exist while poor, you push all the homeless there and everyone else ends up avoiding it and going to places they have to spend money at. Enforced consumption.
Picnic in the park? Sorry, tent city there. Better go to a restaurant instead.
Baseball at the diamond? Needles and excrement, let’s go bowling instead.
Grab some books from the library? Someone’s smoking crack in the bathroom, I’ll just buy the book from a store. Or Amazon.
Ideally these public spaces would be for everyone, but more and more they’re repurposed for social services.
Full disclosure: I work in a library shelving materials.
This take overlooks one of the factors that really needs to be addressed: mental illness. I have seen people without full control of their faculties outright refuse assistance because for whatever reason they believe that what they are being offered isn’t good for them. Some of them want help, but some of those also want help on their terms, which is not how a lot of social/outreach programs work. And that’s not even getting into the issues of substance abuse that act as a black hole for any material gain. Granted, there are people who will jump through any hoop to escape being homeless, but many who suffer the most really need more than just a place to live; they need to completely overhaul their lives, and our social system isn’t currently designed to do that.
This article has a great deep dive on how we have so few “free” or community-sourced places in the US that they often get used as a catch-all for any and all social problems we have. See: libraries as homeless shelters. From the article:
That’s a great point – by making public places the only places you can exist while poor, you push all the homeless there and everyone else ends up avoiding it and going to places they have to spend money at. Enforced consumption.
Picnic in the park? Sorry, tent city there. Better go to a restaurant instead.
Baseball at the diamond? Needles and excrement, let’s go bowling instead.
Grab some books from the library? Someone’s smoking crack in the bathroom, I’ll just buy the book from a store. Or Amazon.
Ideally these public spaces would be for everyone, but more and more they’re repurposed for social services.
Obvious solution: stop making people homeless.
Full disclosure: I work in a library shelving materials.
This take overlooks one of the factors that really needs to be addressed: mental illness. I have seen people without full control of their faculties outright refuse assistance because for whatever reason they believe that what they are being offered isn’t good for them. Some of them want help, but some of those also want help on their terms, which is not how a lot of social/outreach programs work. And that’s not even getting into the issues of substance abuse that act as a black hole for any material gain. Granted, there are people who will jump through any hoop to escape being homeless, but many who suffer the most really need more than just a place to live; they need to completely overhaul their lives, and our social system isn’t currently designed to do that.