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Notes -
One of these is not like the others.
This is a recurring problem in the discussions around what to do about the homeless: mixing up aesthetic dislike of visible poor people with not wanting people committing crimes around you. I'm generally of the opinion, although I realize many city police departments seem to disagree, that being homeless should not prevent you from being charged with a crime. But that's different from simply being homeless alone being illegal.
Every traveling vagabond I've met was absolutely based. I'm not sure many would by default refer to those people as "Bums"... Though the dictionary at least does. There's still an argument to be made that they're benefiting from the plenty of society while contributing very little.
But every time I meet a guy crossing the country with nothing but his wits and a backpack and his charisma and the kindness of strangers-
Well. Yeah it just doesn't parse as the same thing at all does it? Maybe this is better modeled as a fourth category that no-one is really talking about.
That's not a bum, its a tramp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tramp
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There can be some incredible body odor from people who don't shower and have been living outside for days or weeks, and putting who-knows-what into their body. I can smell it upon entering the public library near me. (Public libraries are another casualty of homelessness - they're good places to sleep during the day, dry and warm and quiet and reasonably safe.)
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In the places I have lived they appear to be extremely strongly correlated.
Great! Then you can have the police deal with the criminals and you'll get rid of the drug addicts and bums for free. Why do you need separately send the police at the bums, then?
"Send the police at them"? For what? If you mean enforcing public camping bans, then I'm fine with that. Not clear in what other sense the police would be sent after them.
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In my very blue west coast city, the visible homeless are without exception all three of those things. We have a huge number of programs that will get anyone experiencing "homeless-by-misfortune" off the streets and into stable housing in under 24 hours. Those who decline such services do so because they do not allow you to commit numerous property crimes to fund your meth and fentanyl addiction and remain in your taxpayer-funded living situation.
The social safety net put in place to help fundamentally decent people who have been rendered destitute throughthe vaugeries of fate (God's Poor, to borrow the phrase of an earlier age) works. It really does. The problem is our bums are the Devil's Poor- complete shitheads who have burned every bridge in their lives and care only for their own sensations, fuck anyone else. They do not want help or redemption, and mistaking the latter for the former is the very simple answer for why the "homeless" problem has exploded recently. It's not a homeless problem, it's a shithead problem.
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Yes! I don't want to be around bums. Regular people don't want to be around bums. I do not want nice expensive public parks to be full of smelly, unwashed, dirty, mangy bums. I don't want to walk through a park and get harassed for change. My sister doesn't feel safe in public when bums are loitering around on the street. My mother won't even bother going to the park.
It's not about being poor. Poor people are not bums.
If you can't have nice public parks, nice parks will all be private.
The park is no place to be a bum. There's nothing illegal about being a bum. But the police station is also not the place to go when you're sick.
what is the right place to go to be a bum?
Normies would say "go to the homeless shelter, they'll give you the help you need." But that help usually comes at a high price, like: no alcohol, no drugs, no pets, no coed habitation, no noise, and strict hours.
Outside of the park, you can't just go and "hang out" because it's all owned by someone who will kick you out for loitering. Like I can't just go camp on some random person's lawn, even if it's otherwise empty and not being used for anything. You can maybe get away with it on a sidewalk, but you have to keep moving along constantly.
I kind of think what we need is to normalize favela's/shantytowns. Set up a space where the normal laws don't apply, and it's just a giant free-for-all. Something like Kowloon Walled City, but in every major American city. The bums get a place where they can stay for free and do whatever drugs they want. The normies can exile bums guilt free. Everybody wins.
I would have said at the church serving free all-you-can-eat warm meals every weekday, when they're serving, but it doesn't make a dent in the people panhandling outside the grocery store half a block away. I asked, and one woman thought for a moment and said that she'd lose her spot if she went to get the free food.
The trick is to find corporate-owned commercial properties, preferably part of a nation-wide chain. They don't want bad publicity, their standardized policies don't let them adapt to local conditions quickly, and the employees aren't motivated to do anything because they get paid regardless (until the entire store shuts down).
Seattle tried that. People got killed and raped. And the ubiquity of cell phone cameras means that everything bad will get posted to the Internet, and the city will be blamed for allowing it to happen.
Food is generally one of the easiest things to get when you're homeless in a modern american city. Between food stamps, charities, and dumpster-diving, there are all sorts of ways to get food. The problem is more... everything else. That church won't let you stick around after the meal, not even to sleep, and they're certainly not going to let you just hang out there smoking or turning tricks to earn cash.
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Everyone wins except those who don't want to live near shanties.
I mean, i dont really want to live right next to a freeway or industrial zone either, but it works ok as long as its blocked off, and presumably its also cheaper to live there. We make this sort of trade all the time. Its only with homeless that we put them right in the most valuable public property and forbid cities from doing anything about it.
A beggar/bum has a strong incentive to be as close as possible to the largest number of people with disposable income in their pockets (and places with free services, like public parks w/ restrooms, libraries, and charities.) This is in tension with most people's desire to be able to use the public goods their tax dollars pay for in the way they were intended, and their desire to be left alone while walking from place to place.
I became accustomed to a public library not being accessible. In the Seattle area, they were generally over-crowded and unpleasant to visit. I only accessed my library from the Libby app.
After moving to Indiana it took me six months to gather courage to bring my kids to the library and it turns out that when a library is used for its intended purpose it's really nice! They had toys for the preschool-aged kids (for them to be distracted with while their parent selects books.) When patrons only spend a couple hours there more people can visit without it getting crowded. It was how I remembered libraries when I was a child (except for all the Pride stuff, but that's impossible to run away from I guess.)
Man, can you imagine a Grand Experiment, almost like in The Wire? Rather than trying to force people out with the stick, draw them to an alternate, via the carrot. It's well-known that many of the folks who are, I'm not sure what the current descriptive term is, serially-homeless let's say, are willing to migrate for nicer weather and more of these types of things you describe. How much would it cost to set up a 'city', away from all the normal cities where people live, with some nice parks, some libraries, charities, maybe even some literal money fountains that kick out dollars at a stochastic rate too low to be worth sitting at for folks who can manage to hold down a regular job, but just high enough to be attractive to a guy who is used to sitting at an intersection near all those folks with disposable income. All the libraries/charities can be run by the same social worker types who normally deal with them in the city, anyway. Sitting at an intersection is basically a stochastic money fountain, so make a big push to tell the normies that they can assuage their conscience by donating to the charity's stochastic money fountains, still giving them literal cash, but in a way that draws them closer to helpful resources.
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so, when i proposed building a literal walled city, and you say the homeless people will still get out anyway... are you imagining a gaza situation where they build elaborate underground tunnels? Or is it just the nature of homeless to manifest themselves inside of public libraries, by teleportation?
If it's an impenetrable fortress type thing, why keep these people in a city at all? There's lot's of land in America that is undeveloped.
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Freeways and industrial zones at least produce something of value in addition to their negative externalities.
In any case, there's a reasonable argument that cities already spend too much land on cities and industrial zones. Adding a third kind of nuisance zone seems like a step backwards, especially since there's no obvious reason to put one in every city if you're blocking it off anyway.
The problem is that cities already have lots of homeless people. Lots of them. And they tend to cluster in the most valuable, desirable parts of the city. So in this example it would be like people are driving at freeway speeds through central park, and the supreme court is hearing arguments about whether there's some fundamental human right to drive as fast as you want anywhere you want, vs the proposed solution of making it impossible for any car ever to exceed a certain speed.
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Thats a function of geography and unwillingness to shoot invaders. Set up Libertopia as a totally inaccessible island, like a fully constituted Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and airdrop criminals there PUBG style, with regular drops of humanitarian ration packs and water filtration tablets. It'll be the ultimate relocation experiment, at minimal cost compared to maintaining vigilance over a perennial criminal underclass.
I'm just responding to the hypothetical of "Kowloon Walled City, but in every major American city."
I don't mean to disparage your statement, Kowloon in a US city is a losing proposition because rot spreads outwards. Kensington in Philly or South Side in Chicago or Tenderloin in SF are effectively nicer versions of your Kowloon model, and they have to be actively managed to stop the rot spreading.
The thing about Kowloon Walled City is that it was, you know, walled. Once you go in, it's not easy to go out. The homeless neighborhoods of American cities are just constantly leaking.
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G’day, mate!
I wish, but alas it doesn't seem to be true. Criminalizing debtors and vagrants and prostitutes to make up numbers for the mines is a reversal of what my posited state is. I think the early settlers were extremely happy to exile or execute criminals, so that really helped keep order. In our scenario of the middle ground the large body of criminals are actively violent types, not unfortunates rounded up.
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Well, we can just make it Portland. Or Skid Row. The problem comes when every downtown starts to look like Skid Row.
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