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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26781 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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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.

what is the right place to go to be a bum?

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.

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

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).

I kind of think what we need is to normalize favela's/shantytowns.

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.

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.

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.

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.

but it works ok as long as its blocked off

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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