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Yes, the alternative is prison.
There has been an ongoing debate between enforcement and cleanup.
Enforcement is mean. And it looks expensive on a per incident basis. But the main benefit over cleanup is that it stops additional people from adding to the problem.
Time and again people have opted to drop enforcement thinking that the current cleanup costs aren't as high as enforcement, only for them to be completely overwhelmed by cleanup costs when there is zero enforcement.
In the case of California cities they are now drowning in human shit on their sidewalks and streets as a result of this decision.
Well maybe they should have more public bathrooms so as to reduce cleanup costs. I don't get why you're considering the choice where we remove this option viable... I agree that there should be enforcement. It should just be enforcement of people actually using the public bathrooms and not smearing shit on the walls. This will be cheaper than imprisoning 100% of the people who lose their homes because you unilatterally refuse to provide bathrooms.
This would be a rather perverse system. The only benefit I can see is that it might make people too terrified to take any risks that might render them homeless. But that sounds like it will cause mental anxiety that will increase the number of homeless and reduce economic growth to me.
Imprisoning them all gets them off the streets, which might make sense as a stopgap measure. But if we don't solve the issues that created them we just get more homeless.
And also now you've removed all the public bathrooms. So. I don't really want to live in your city because I also need to poop sometimes.
Then we don't disagree with each other, but we do disagree with the policies some cities have chosen.
The rest of your post seems to flow from that misunderstanding, so I don't really feel that it applies to me.
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