San Francisco library turning off WiFi at night to keep homeless from using it • Hacker News Board

Re: San Francisco library turning off WiFi at night to keep homeless from using it

#181

Post by abeppu » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 4:08 PM UTC

bloody-crow wrote: post #172

abeppu wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't get anyone off the street, it just nudges them away from this specific building. What's juvenile is people trying to displace the problem into just slightly different part of the same neighborhood and imagining that it's accomplished anything.

Clearly, the goal here is not to solve homelessness but to reduce exposure to homelessness. You don't have to hate homeless people to not want to be around them.

But it _doesn't_ reduce exposure to homelessness. It _moves_ exposure to homelessness by a very short distance. It's one group of neighbors pushing those people to sleep on another block, where other very similar housed people will encounter them. Even if you fully don't care about homeless people and only think of them as a nuisance, this is the equivalent of shoveling the snow on your patch of sidewalk and throwing it on your neighbor's patch of sidewalk and saying, "I don't hate snow I just don't want to be around it."

I walk by this library frequently (it's on 16th just east of Market) and I _have_ seen that there used to be a bunch of people there most nights, and this often isn't true anymore. But as someone who lives in the area, my "exposure to homelessness" has not in any way been reduced; I just pass tents in slightly different parts of the neighborhood.

Re: San Francisco library turning off WiFi at night to keep homeless from using it

#182

Post by bb88 » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 4:33 PM UTC

joenot443 wrote: post #178

FireBeyond wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that compare to say, Boise, where the city was recently sued because they enacted criminal ordinances that said it was an offense to sleep on the street if a shelter bed was available? Sounds reasonable. Then you hear the nuance. A shelter bed was always "available" because one religious shelter would say that one was always "available" even if it didn't in fact exist, and in order to stay there, even if it…

I'm no expert at all on the subject, but my reading is that it's a system which can pretty easily be implemented poorly, and needs some considerable oversight from the state to work correctly. If it were up to me, religion would have no place at all in the administration of homeless shelters, but this is a big country and different regions face different challenges. I think the Boise example is probably a good case o…

There was a constant homeless encampment here in Boise under the I-184 overpass over 16th street a while back. The city of Boise (to their credit) let those people be there for maybe two years or so as they didn't really cause any issue. Then a murder happened there. And now it's a skate park.

https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/local/homeless-camp-under-...

The right answer is to house the homeless.

The wrong answer is for Boise to be the homeless Mecca from Portland, Spokane, SF, and Seattle -- who seem to be actively working to get their homeless to move to other cities.

Re: San Francisco library turning off WiFi at night to keep homeless from using it

#183

Post by sporkland » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 8:12 PM UTC

warent wrote: post #7

This is such a lazy approach to social issues. Being poor and homeless is so hard. The system is built with countless chicken-egg problems that make it almost impossible to climb out of poverty. On top of this, elitists who are so disconnected are arbitrarily enforcing this kind of amoral depraved nonsense. Should we just keep stripping the needy of more and more resources until eventually maybe they'll just disappea…

people are shooting up and shitting in front of schools, houses libraries leaving their empty needles and feces for the rest of us. Good grief, it's way beyond inconvenience. It's deeply damaging the safety and quality of life for a large number of poor and rich people to keep allowing people to freely chase their addictions without constraint (and I have a lot of empathy for the pain those people are carrying that is pushing them towards drugs). I have no idea if you actually live here or are just another out of touch out of towner looking down our noses at us.

I do believe that the homeless are getting an unfair share of a blame for the actual crime happening in San Francisco, but they are deeply contributing to the overall levels of lack of safety and the knock on effects of shootings related to turf wars related to supplying them with illegal drugs.

Re: San Francisco library turning off WiFi at night to keep homeless from using it

#184

Post by reaperducer » Fri, Jun 16, 2023, 1:25 PM UTC

bb88 wrote: post #182

joenot443 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no expert at all on the subject, but my reading is that it's a system which can pretty easily be implemented poorly, and needs some considerable oversight from the state to work correctly. If it were up to me, religion would have no place at all in the administration of homeless shelters, but this is a big country and different regions face different challenges. I think the Boise example is probably a good case o…

There was a constant homeless encampment here in Boise under the I-184 overpass over 16th street a while back. The city of Boise (to their credit) let those people be there for maybe two years or so as they didn't really cause any issue. Then a murder happened there. And now it's a skate park. https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/local/homeless-camp-under-... The right answer is to house the homeless. The wrong answer i…

who seem to be actively working to get their homeless to move to other cities.

It's probably not "seem." A number of cities have been caught, sometimes repeatedly, buying one-way bus tickets to other cities for homeless people.

It's immoral, but not illegal. When they get caught, there's a brouhaha in the local newspapers for a bit, and then everyone forgets and it starts up again.