The ‘do something about homeless people in the Tenderloin’ crowd yelled about this a little too loudly before the elections and now the TL has surprisingly few homeless people. They’ve all moved into the neighborhoods of these people yelling about it. I would be laughing about the conservatives doing this to themselves, but I wouldn’t wish conservatives on anyone, and especially not homeless people who they are so cruel to.
There’s an unsurprising number of people in SF who believe if you ‘lock em up’ you can solve homelessness
There’s an even larger number of people in SF who seem to believe homeless people choose to reject shelter. You know, the shelter that we don’t actually have
@skinnylatte or that assume that people reject shelter where available for frivolous reasons. Something that’s stuck with me from years ago was an interview I read with a homeless woman living on the streets who was intending to stay that way until she could get a private unit. She felt safer on the streets than in most shelter options as on the streets she could be around trusted people for protection in places she understood but in a shelter environment she got shoved in close quarters with unsafe people
@joannaholman yeah. Sadly the same here
@joannaholman they also make you leave super early and you have to queue again to enter for the next night, leaving them with no room to leave stuff and like, look for a job
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io Or the shelters that are left to groups like the fucking transphobic Salvation Army, where it's literally safer for people to be on the street than in one of their shelters.
@skinnylatte Some days I think the phrase or concept that lingers most with me from 80s cyberpunk is the idea of the consensual hallucination, and boy do some people have that as their baseline so they don't have to think about things...
@skinnylatte
This is why the Bell Riots happened in September of this year.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots
I only recently fully realized that the writers in the 90s were witnessing these dynamics and weren't entirely writing about the future. Dystopian visions are as much about the present after all.
@skinnylatte I'd have some time for this idea if it was cops going along on snowy nights, happening across homeless people and then "whoops, looks like we're going to have to take you in overnight [MASSIVE THEATRICAL WINK]"- even though that doesn't solve anything, at least it shows the tiniest amount of humanity.
Such a shame that isn't what's being called for.