Wealthy San Francisco tech investors bankroll bid to ban homeless camps
Why do homeless people camp on sidewalks? Because it works. The question becomes, &quot;works for what?&quot; The proposition appears to mean to make camping &quot;not work,&quot; by imposing risk and cost on campers. It&#x27;s responding to a symptom, but it&#x27;s like treating cancer with crutches.<p>What does the street provide an alley or park doesn&#x27;t? I&#x27;ve said before, the perceived security from non-underclass people walking by. Police protect non-underclass people from violence, and the homeless get this additional benefit by extension by being nearby. In shelters and tent cities, you are more likely to be targeted for crime.<p>Sure people without addresses have a right to safety and security of person like everyone else, but their behavior (often due to mental illness or drug use or factors outside of their direct control) makes it extra difficult&#x2F;costly to provide it.<p>Other people pay a lot of money in tax to the state to reduce their daily exposure to violence, regardless of the factors that might contribute to it. Tent cities are a source of risk, and they are provocative symbols of the limits of the ability of the local government to operate credibly. Governments, mainly for their own sake, must remove tent cities when they pop up, arguably because that&#x27;s what they were originally chartered to do.<p>Some may say that the homeless are &quot;just trying to live,&quot; but it could be said they are hovering around public services without any sense of responsibility to the local society that provides them.<p>They are human beings, but ones who take advantage of the lack of a continuous tribal identity in cities, where they can live with people believing they are someone else&#x27;s problem. People who don&#x27;t learn to get along get run out of small towns (or worse). Add a drug addiction to severe mental illness, and you basically get a municipal zombie problem.<p>To me, homelessness is only a complicated problem from the perspective of an ideology that cannot tolerate examples of the limits to its power. Everyone else has solutions, just not ones that reinforce the narcissism of maternalistic policymakers.