Why do cities like New York use “anti-homeless design” in their urban planning? 🏙️🚫 #cityliving #urbanplanning #homelessness #NYC
Understanding the Purpose of Anti-Homeless Design:
– What is anti-homeless design?
– Why do cities implement anti-homeless design strategies?
– What are the specific tactics used in anti-homeless design?
Reasons Behind Anti-Homeless Design:
1. Safety concerns for residents and businesses
2. Maintaining cleanliness and order in public spaces
3. Deterrence of homelessness and loitering
4. Economic interests of the city
5. Balancing public welfare with urban development goals
By exploring the motivations and implications of anti-homeless design, we can gain a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics at play in city planning. Let’s delve into this issue together! 💬 #urbanissues #socialjustice #citydevelopment
Because they don’t like homeless people
To convince homeless people to move to cities that did not introduce anti-homeless design.
To try to keep the homeless from ruining public spaces.
It’s for the benefit of the non-homeless people in the area who don’t want the homeless population to settle in there. It feels inhumane, but considering the trash/urine/feces/drug paraphernalia/etc that comes with a homeless population… I also understand it.
Because wherever homeless people gather, you tend to find things like used syringes. It’s also just a bad look for the city to have a bunch of homeless people on display. And they harass people for free money. So they try to force them into places with less foot traffic.
People who live there don’t want their public-spaces covered in feces and needles and trash and smelling of urine constantly.
To deter the formation of homeless encampments. Look everyone wants to help the less fortunate but that empathy disappears real quick when a homeless encampment pops up right by where you live.
Resolving the issue of homelessness humanely would be politically unpopular, in part because the visible threat of homelessness- and the social exclusion that comes with it- is one of the main pieces of leverage that keeps all the other New Yorkers going to work in underpaid, demeaning jobs. The working class must constantly see the danger and disgrace that await them if they stop working, lest they be tempted to reclaim their lives.
To better engineer this exclusion, we do everything we can to drive our unhoused people to situations of absolute extremity. This exacerbates their mental health issues, limits their options for healthy or aesthetically pleasant coping strategies, and creates a subpopulation that’s easy to alienate.
And so most of the working class, as you’ll see in the other comments here, very fluently participate in the mass-shaming of the homeless. In doing so, they emphasize to themselves that *they* have jobs and *they* are a *part* of society, and since the only alternative they know is the very disgrace that they throw unto homeless people, they cling to that promise desperately, even though it’s this very dynamic that keeps them under capitalist control.
Add to this the general eagerness with which humans pursue cruelty as soon as they’re given permission to do so. Cruelty is innately performative because it must be so in order to maintain social cohesion. Like ants marching in a death spiral, we castigate the homeless for shitting in the streets (because we’ve denied them all other ways of shitting) and using hard drugs (because we’ve foreclosed all other forms of comfort). And we just march march march along, following the trail left by the ant before us, largely too blind to see the spiral that forms among us and too resentful to listen to the people who point out its existence.
bcs they are to many
Because our country would rather pour excessive amounts of money into protecting the wealthy and all the empty homes (more empty homes than homeless by the way) and pour money into anti-homeless designs rather than show a modicum of compassion and love for their fellow humans by working towards assisting those who might need a bit more help in life.
Edit: Downvotes huh? Prove me wrong then.
I mean it’s pretty self-apparent, no?
It’s the easiest way to have them not be in public view. The alternative is spending money to give them somewhere to live, providing drug rehab, and employment services.
Because nobody knows how to fix the problem of homelessness, and anybody who says otherwise is selling something.
The thing is, it’s nice to have parks. It’s lovely to have pretty, comfortable public spaces, with benches and bike trails and little out-of-the-way glades to walk and talk in.
It sucks when people hijack those public spaces to live in, especially when their manner of living is squalid and awful. There’s a camp not far from my house that sprawls across a walking trail, has consumed two park benches and a number of construction signs from a nearby construction site. It has been there long enough to be clear that they’re not going to clear out any time soon, and it just keeps getting bigger.
My city, and surrounding cities, are spending literally billions a year on homeless services, with the result that there are, every year, more homeless people here, more packs of dilapidated RVs.
Most of the homeless here – most of the people of all kinds here – come from somewhere else. The reasons people have for coming here are as many and varied as the people themselves, but largely have to do with here being better than where they can from, at least for them, and for now.
It seems completely unreasonable that we should not be able to have public spaces that people don’t hijack to live in. It’s equally unreasonable that our willingness to be kind and to spend money and time on this means that we inherit the problems of every other city that won’t engage with their own problems.
We can’t get rid of them by running them out; we can’t seem to house them; we can’t…
So what do we do? We can make passive-aggressive bitchy little benches that nobody wants to sit on but at least nobody can sleep on.
Because nobody has a better idea.
It sucks, but homeless people tend to make public spaces bad for upper or middle class people, and those vote more :).
This county spends Billions of dollars annually on the Industrial Homeless Complex where most of the money goes to progressive ran Non-profits. Someone has to pay their salaries
Because humans inherently hate those less fortunate than them.
Because driving homeless people is somehow less offensive to conservatives than housing them, despite also being more expensive.
Because most voters don’t want to look at homeless people, but they also don’t want to do anything to actually address the things that cause people to become homeless.
To hide the homeless problem from tourists.
>especially when their manner of living is squalid and awful
Look, I’m not gonna say that a tent city is a great place to live, but I think you’re being kind of unfair in attributing this to their “manner of living”. The fact is that we’d all have trash piling up in and around our homes if we didn’t have someone coming to take it away on a regular basis.
Good they should, no one would give the homeless a hard time if they had an ounce of respect for anything
What people don’t get is that the vast majority of people who are sleeping outside (instead of in a shelter) are the ones that you don’t want around. They’re either violent, hopelessly addicted to a drug, or very mentally ill. Usually a combination of the three.
People *have* to get this image of the “down on your luck” unemployed out of their mind if we’re ever going to solve the problem and get them the help they actually need.
Because allowing vagrants to take over public spaces ruins them for everyone else, and there is a hell of a lot more ‘everyone else’ who vote than vagrants….
New York has a large and expansive shelter system that most homeless people don’t want to deal with. It’s to keep them more from congregating than anything, as you’ll see the occasional homeless person sleeping on the ground here and there.
Because cities like Austin don’t, and it ruins the entire urban area.
It’s okay to want social services for the homeless and to want them not to gather in your backyard.
Because no one likes drug addicts jerking off next to them while they’re waiting for a cab or the train.
People hate the homeless because they are two paychecks away from homeless themselves. People aren’t homeless because they use drugs. They use drugs because they are homeless. Can you imagine total dispare?
Because the solution to homelessness is housing, not comfortable benches in a park.
We don’t want bums in our cities.
I will get downvoted on this but where I live they tend to congregate near water ways the filth that goes into the waterways is unbelievable. They also pee, poop, where ever they are.
It’s not a matter of not wanting to see homeless as done have said or being afraid.
It’s sadly a very unhygienic lifestyle and
hazardous.for themselves and others
[https://www.newsbreakapp.com/n/0sU4r90J?pd=0Auxsq9s&lang=en_US&s=i16&send_time=1714194378](https://www.newsbreakapp.com/n/0sU4r90J?pd=0Auxsq9s&lang=en_US&s=i16&send_time=1714194378)
FWIW many don’t want to live any other way.
bcause its much cheaper than the alternative, to provide public sanitation facility, housing, mental health care etc.
Because heaven forbid the common folk must witness the failings of our society (/s)
We just call it winter.
They want to keep public spaces safe and available for the public to use, but the government hasn’t come to a good agreement with development companies about how to redevelop the area – whether that’s to actually build (affordable) housing or otherwise build stuff that drives homeless people out
It’s just a bandaid “solution” to keep people out in the meantime, until the demographic and economic status of the area changes. Not that it’s that effective.
Sometimes good governments will actually build affordable housing or mixed housing, but usually the goal is to invest in a new and upcoming hip area to draw working professionals, families, that kind of thing, which naturally displaces the homeless population.
You’ll notice there’s been a creep in pseudo-public spaces in many major cities (London’s Canary Wharf area comes to mind). These are plazas, green spaces etc which appear to be public, but are devoid of rubbish and also sometimes have human security guards standing around.
Since these places are not actually government-owned, they are allowed to have cameras and security to make you leave if they don’t like you, among other things.
Governments like this and sometimes subsidise construction if the new skyscrapers agree to build some greenspace or public plazas for the city.
to punish people. to make it as miserable and dehumanizing and humiliating and demoralizing as possible. to keep people desperate, specifically to work.