[unethical_ban]

Except they shit on the sidewalk, piss on the shop steps, beg for food and cigarettes and get belligerent when turned away.

If a vagabond or drug user can keep their habit from interfering with my safety and health, they are more welcome to do as they please.

[vkou]

If you'd like to let them shit in your bathroom, or fund public bathrooms, you can be part of the solution.

> their habit from interfering with my safety and health

Needing to shit isn't a habit. If you weren't aware, its a basic life function, like eating and breathing.

Its telling that you're piggybacking that on to your complaints about drugs (and also ignoring the untreated/poorly treated mental illness and straight up poverty legs of the homeless tripod).

[saulpw]

I agree, I think public bathrooms are really important. Feces on the sidewalk is a health issue and impacts economic value too.

But we have to acknowledge that the instant you make a bathroom "public", it becomes a place to do drugs, turn tricks, and sleep. Even if you're fine with a bathroom being occupied for hours for non-bathroom tasks, it makes the public bathroom a toxic area, with drug paraphernalia (including needles and other waste products) and used condoms as discarded litter at best, and clogged infrastructure at worst.

We need to provide these services for any human who needs a toilet, *and also* figure out ways besides incarceration to effectively deal with uncooperative drug users.

[unethical_ban]

I welcome you to point to the part of my comment that says they don't deserve public bathrooms, public housing, or human dignity.

I'm not ignoring a thing. If you follow the thread to which I'm replying, it starts with someone discussing the "homeless by choice" and follows with someone suggesting there is not difference between the impact of a homeless person and a housed person on the community.

[abeppu]

I think the sad part is I think most people would be ok funding more public bathrooms if we had confidence that they would be used only as bathrooms ... but in the places that need them the most, people have the expectation that they will be used for other purposes.

[vkou]

That same standard isn't applied to most other public services.

Nobody says: "Well, I'd stand behind funding public roads, but I won't since people don't follow traffic laws on them."

[abeppu]

I think that's an unfair comparison insofar as a person speeding on the highway generally passes you by quickly and doesn't prevent others from using the highway.

But a person who tries to camp out in the bathroom because it's an indoor place and their tent was taken/destroyed by the police etc, does functionally prevent others from using it as just a bathroom. Similarly if someone locks themselves in to get high. The bathroom then not only doesn't give the broader public a place to pee, but also becomes a liability where whomever is responsible for it periodically has to have confrontational interactions. People and organizations seem to have a strong preference for avoiding such interactions and will go awkwardly out of their way to avoid them.

It's like once your city has a bad issue with homelessness, a bunch of public services get distorted around making them not be encampments. A couple examples:

- At one point SF was considering fare-free public transit and the mayor basically refused on the grounds that unhoused people would just use buses/trains as a place to hang out indoors rather than to go anywhere in particular. It's not that she hated the concept of public transit in particular so much as that having the ability to exclude the homeless was viewed as a way to keep transit as transit.

- The closest library to me got some press for shutting off its wifi after hours, not because anyone using the wifi was bad per se, but because a semi-permanent encampment was erected around it, so the unhoused population could access it.

[vkou]

> I think that's an unfair comparison insofar as a person speeding on the highway generally passes you by quickly and doesn't prevent others from using the highway.

Insane drivers doing dangerous shit are by far the biggest threat to my health and personal safety on a day-to-day basis. And next to nothing is done about them.