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I feel like a lot of this could be avoided if we had paid public toilets, like they do in Europe. But those are illegal in America, so we rely on private businesses to offer bathrooms as a weird public service, and that trust can easily be broken.
That doesn't help the issue of people with empty wallets and full bladders/large intestines. If there is no legitimate place in public where people can relieve themselves without spending any money, everyone else will have to navigate a bio-hazardous obstacle course on the side-walk.
My recommendation:
All I see here is the Road to Serfdom. The further growth of the State by involving itself in all matters to solve issues it has created itself.
Why not simply relinquish the silly ban on paid public toilets and enforce the law as it exists? I'm sure
I guess that doesn't create thousands of jobs in the bureaucracy to manage the whole situation. But then if that's what we want we might as well get the benefit of that approach and empower the State to intern vagrants. Using state capacity to manage the results of not using it to actually solve problems is silly.
Because I am trying to come up with a solution for the problem of 'providing restroom facilities to people who cannot pay for them'.
It is generally considered unacceptable (at least in the West) to put someone in a position in which they have no choice but to violate the law, and then punish them for doing so. As people do not cease to have bodily functions when they cannot legally perform them, there needs to exist places in which someone can exercise the Greater and Lesser Conveniences, even if they cannot pay to do so.
(I suppose one could allow private businesses to operate paid toilets, subject to taxation used to fund the free-at-point-of-use facilities....)
Homeless people aren't birthed into this world as penniless drug users at a corner in the business district. They chose to occupy that premium real estate because it affords them some other benefit. Typically the easy ability to harass people for money and targets for retail theft. He always had the option of staying where he is from where people know him and would let him use the bathroom. Or going to a shelter for the homeless and using that bathroom.
The important reframe of modern homelessness that will help just about understand what we are talking about is this: They are on premium real estate, and there is no right to use some of the best, most expensive land in the country in whatever way you desire. I cannot go to Lincoln Park and start a hot dog stand next to the lion's exhibit. There is no reason a homeless fellow should be able to occupy the same space and fill it with stink and feces instead of delicious Chicago dogs.
No, but they are birthed into this world as human beings, made according to the image of God, and bearing the inalienable right to be treated as an end in themselves, rather than as an inconvenient obstacle. (There, but for the grace of God, go I....)
But if you start declaring parts of a city as 'no poors allowed', you're opening Pandora's Jar; homeless people not allowed in 'premium' areas --> more areas adopting the same policy --> poor people confined to 'Sanctuary Districts' like in that Star Trek episode with the Bell Riots --> razor-wire fences, mass graves, and U. N. investigations.
No, they should do their $euphemism in a toilet; however, this requires that they be allowed to! If there are free-at-the-point-of-use toilets nearby, and a homeless person chooses to befoul the ground, it is justified to prosecute them.
Who said anything about them not being allowed to be a place? They are not allowed to be their while doing a thing no one else is allowed to: Permanently/Semipermanently occupying it. Often engaging in black market commerce. None of this has any things to do with bathrooms. It is fine for bathrooms in expensive areas and bathrooms in cheap areas to have different prices of entry. Again, the number of homeless people outside of a high end department store who are just walking to a job or a bus is approximately zero. They are there to peddle, steal, and commit various other legal infractions.
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