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this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Seriously public housing and universal basic income should make sure that I do not have to see some improvised shelters on public squares. This should not happen.
I hope that's just bad phrasing. You are not the victim. The problem is not that you have to see the improvised shelters. The unhoused people in that photo are the victims - of economic injustice, of discrimination, of the myriad social failures of our society and government. Their problem is lack of shelter. They solve it with improvised shelters in public spaces.
I want to emphasize this because it's a way of thinking that's very hard to maintain in a society so prejudiced against homeless people. Tent cities and improvised shelters and unhoused people sleeping on the streets are not problems. They are solutions, used by the unhoused, to the problem of lack of shelter.
Those solutions are suboptimal, obviously, and cause other problems, including your own negative emotional reaction to seeing them.
But if government and society see tent cities and improvised shelters as problems to be eliminated, instead of bad solutions to the deeper problem of housing inequity, government and society will implement "solutions" that merely relocate or eliminate the shelters to remove them from sight, and leave the unhoused even worse off than before.
Why do you think public housing and universal basic income would not solve the actual underlieing problem of forced homlessness. I have no problem with people camping and large tent cities are perfectly fine, but there needs to be facilities around, which provide some basic services like toilets, waste removal and so forth. So I rather have nomads living in places with some infrastructure to help them out, rather then some random street. However I suspect a lot of people would rather live in proper public housing then in a tent like that.
That's why I said I hoped I was misunderstanding you. And it sounds like I was misunderstanding you. Sorry!
I agree, the proper use of public facilities are to support the public, and when encampments form on public land, cities need to start by providing showers and toilets and other facilities to meet the immediate needs and simultaneously start working on the deeper structural issues causing homeless encampments to form.
In a limited way, that did happen in San Francisco during the pandemic. Shame they've decided to build a skatepark where those tents are located and drive out unhoused people now. But if the city thinks the problem is not homelessness, but people seeing the homeless in public, that's a "solution".