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I also like clean safe unobstructed sidewalks and parks but along with benches, we've made a decision. We've decided that putting the mentally ill in a facility and arresting people for public drug use is not something we're comfortable with at the expense of those other things. I don't personally ageee with this decision but it is apparently the consensus.
> it is apparently the consensus
And what a strange consensus it is. The prevailing belief seems to be that preventing people from slowly/quickly killing themselves on the street (or, more accurately, dying from addiction) is somehow not "progressive" and the moral thing to do is to pretend like these people have made the choice of their own volition and that we cannot judge them for this choice.
In reality, the people who are just rotting away on our streets would be better served if they were brought somewhere against their will and kept there until they were better. Society would also be better served if we did this. The government choosing to involuntarily constrain people isn't something that should be done lightly, but sometimes it is the lesser evil. We've completely abandoned these people and somehow done so in the name of compassion. It's really depressing.
What a strange false dichotomy. Either we do absolutely nothing to help people, or we involuntarily incarcerate them?
The actually progressive option is to provide meaningful public support programs, and also make housing affordable (by building enough housing). The US mostly doesn't do either of those, but it should.
I think a big part of this queasiness comes from the fact that a lot of the institutions we would put addicts and mentally ill people in really were nightmarish.
And ignoring the whole issue of the sanitariums being full of abuse, I don't think you can argue that sticking a drug addict in a regular prison full of criminals is good for them either.
Yes, I don't think that arresting people for the crime of not having money is a good idea.
We also cannot seem to fund any actual drug programs, because US citizens hate the idea of anyone getting something for free.
Them staying in the sidewalk is free. Or the cost is so indirect that nobody is responsible for it.
Facilities like asylums and jails are super costly though. And extra expensive to operate if you don't want to treat the inmates as cattle.
> We've decided that putting the mentally ill in a facility and arresting people for public drug use is not something we're comfortable with at the expense of those other things.
We've decided this about every kind of health care. Instead of providing treatment for people who can't afford its bizarre, artificial prices, we prefer to leave them on the street or warehouse them in prisons. After leaving them in prison for an arbitrary amount of time, we then release them into the streets again, with nothing, more screwed up than when they went in, to murder you.
I have no idea what the "tough love" advocates are advocating for. Locking them up in prison is like hiding rotting meat in a freezer; it only works if you're willing to do it forever. The only answer that seems compatible with the spoiled upper-middle class worldview is to shoot the homeless (which often happened* in a lot of South American countries through semi-official paramilitaries), or to drive them into the wilderness outside of town to hopefully die on their own.
As the layoffs of programmers continue, I predict there will be a lot of changes of heart that won't matter at all, because they will be coming from homeless people. Middle-class culture is all about only being interested in issues that harm you directly, even if that issue is somebody dying too loudly nearby.
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[*] Happens? My info is out of date.
This postulates that policy is set by consensus.
Now I haven't done any scientific polling, but my informal anecdotal experience is so overwhelmingly to the contrary that I'm comfortable believing that consensus isn't determining policy here.
This.
Even an extremely small population of homeless/junkies is enough to "taint" benches.
The same with parks.
There are other options that are more effective than either of the things you mentioned, but people's feelings get in the way.
but it is apparently the consensus.
Not everywhere, fortunately.
This sounds like it's from someone who say a video on the two square blocks in SF or Philly and has let the propaganda make them believe this is common everywhere in every American city.
What's wrong with both? Why can't we have public benches, and also not arrest drug users if they are sitting on the benches and smoking?
I'd add that we also chose policies that made housing expensive. It used to be much cheaper to live in NYC for example, but housing options included what was essentially a dorm room with shared facilities. Those were outlawedes for various reasons. There are also a lot of other policy factors that push up housing prices.
Cheap housing isn't a panacea, but if there was sub $500 dollar rent in NYC you'd see a lot less homelessness.
Single-room occupancy (SRO) housing was effectively outlawed by tenant protection laws. The only way that housing with shared facilities can possibly work is when the landlord enforces strict rules and immediately evicts tenants who misbehave by making a mess, hassling other tenants, or not paying their rent. But in many cities it can literally take years to evict a tenant, and the city will even pay for legal aid for the tenant to fight it in court. This reduces rental housing availability and increases prices for everyone.
Idk about NYC but the people I see on fent in west coast cities’ homeless encampments couldn’t pay a $500 rent any more than they can the $5,000. They’re strung out all day long and can’t pursue any goal besides getting more drugs.
On the other hand though, a lot of who’s technically homeless at any given time aren’t that chronic, mostly hopeless, and very visible set. It’s people who did lose their apartment just barely after an unexpected job loss or medical expense. Those ones could be helped by cheaper rent! But that group isn’t very visible, doesn’t bother anyone, and often couch surfs, sleeps in their car and showers at the gym for a couple months, etc. and most importantly, they use the many safety net resources to get back on their feet (getting a job usually).
I had a wild conversation with a co-worker who was here as a Ukrainian refugee where he was asking wtf was up with all the homeless people. He was legitimately baffled that they are poor and at war but still didn't have nearly the same level of problem. What was funny is he described what amounted to a soviet version of an SRO being pervasive and I was like "oh those were outlawed and torn down in the 50s"
This has little to do with the homeless and everything to do with a society that's shifted from seeking to facilitate positive things (e.g. the comfort of some random person on some random occasion) to one that wouldn't invent fire or sliced bread if it thought that doing so would be good for the wrong kind of people.
This is intensified in spaces administrated by government due to the incentives of government and the type of people who are best retained and fill out the org chart of such organizations and it is obvious because these spaces are most public but it's a thing everywhere, for example your hospital has security that could kick out "bad people" (whatever that means) but it still has a crappy waiting area not because they don't want to make it inviting for people who care about you to stick around lest they be there to raise a stink in the event you are mistreated.
There are comparable examples of this sort of "make things worse for people who are doing fine things" in all sorts of public and private contexts beyond just seating. I wish it was just the benches.
why was the comment below this censored? didn't know people disliking things could flag content, I get it though if its a blatant slur, racist or harmful remark. but, feels off-putting to me because a couple weeks ago I shared a personal story about an experience with the CIA and rather than engage seriously it got downvoted and I was attacked Ad Hominem + straw manned by accounts.
I want to hope this is an inclusive supportive community and not one where tribal group-think wins.
Urban spaces can be kind or unkind, and benches are a good way to judge.
A week ago I decided to explore a new part of town. I mean, I've only lived in this town for a few years, but I'm not into big cities, and I live in a country where even the capital can feel inordinately leafy and forested if you come from a town in India. I don't come from India, and my dad saw to it that I got acquainted with the ticks and the brambles from a young age, so short of true jungle or a dense mangrove swamp, I consider most places fair game for a leisurely stroll or a rowing. So I was talking with my mom on the phone, relating to her the greens of a small prairie and the reeds demarcating the swampy shore, and counting the many rabbits that were scattering at my passing, when, at a turn of the dirt trail, I found a stark reminder that I was still in town territory: a perfectly normal bench.
I recently took a trip to Salamanca Spain, the sight of a regular bench, in the city center, without hostile anti sleeping measures. It was funny, something so plain could so be jarring to see. Could very well have been an elephant on the via.
This is one of the cases in point of Hostile Architecture.
Or, you get benches that are horribly uncomfortable. Or with awkward bars (prevents sleeping). Or spikes.
In this case, there is nowhere to sit. That's 100% intentional.
It's becoming harder to find a place to sit down in London (UK), too, especially one without hostile features like bench partitions or spikes.
Having no public restrooms within a 15 minute walk is worse than having no public benches. Cities shouldn't be allowed to exist without either of them. Also, ground-level restaurants and supermarkets should not be allowed to reject non-customers from using them.
Bulk urine is a good source of urea/ammonia which has commercial value, especially considering the global fertilizer shortage.
> Also, ground-level restaurants and supermarkets should not be allowed to reject non-customers from using them.
The single biggest reason why there are no public restrooms within a 15 minute walk in many American cities is because the visibly homeless fuck them up, through crazy vandalism, deliberately dirtying them with their bodily fluids, doing drugs in them, etc. Businesses being legally compelled to let non-customers use their bathrooms would exacerbate this problem.
> Bulk urine is a good source of urea/ammonia which has commercial value, especially considering the global fertilizer shortage.
It's not cost effective to set up systems to capture the ammonia from the urine of people using public restrooms in urban areas, or else people would be doing that. There are municipal sewage treatment plants that sell some of the byproducts from treating human wastewater as fertilizers, because that is cost-effective at their scale and level of centralization.
Every public toilet eventually becomes and ad-hoc homeless shelter.
These are likely good litmus tests for the distinction between a city and "people storage".
Urine can contain too much sodium, and pharmaceuticals.
Yup. Public trash cans too.
You can tell which countries have and haven't experienced urban bombing terrorism by the style of public refuse receptacles. Before: concrete, rock, metal, and wood; after: minimal material hoops supporting transparent bags.
Also, public drinking fountains I think are better signals of community commonwealth infrastructure than benches because they take more planning, infrastructure, investment, and maintenance to deliver.
Another problem is the privatization of formerly public spaces, often with an essentially mandatory retail consumption component that didn't exist previously. People aren't as free to simply exist in spaces without buying shit than 50 years ago.
America is not known for caring about public infrastructure if they can avoid it once upon a time most cities actually had a public work department that actually tried to keep you know the public places clean they don’t anymore if you want clean public places you have to go someplace else in the world. Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea.
Most of that stuff has been farmed out to subcontractors in America and that includes what your kids eat in most public schools, the school cafeteria is just one big vending machine these days.
Thats normal..poor countries do not have public infrastructure, because if they had it would become a settlement.
Was in a bigger city in the weekend, and they don't have many benches. But it was nice in a way because people just sat anywhere every stair case step, every curb, grass patches, next to a tree, train station floor,...
Where there was a bench 5 people would sit, where there wasn't 15 did
Of course it was a pleasant weather otherwise...
Can’t say it’s a problem in Chicago, we still have benches just about everywhere I can think of
Gosh, if only there was some way we could solve homelessness!
Don't worry about it, as at least we can drop tens of billions of dollars to show the Iranians how big and powerful we are.
SF spends more per capita than anywhere in the world on homelessness. And it’s barely made a dent. The solution is upstream of money. It’s policy decisions derived from cultural values. In other places in the world, where homelessness is vanishingly rare, these people are made to choose: “you will get treatment or you will go to jail, but we will not tolerate the destruction of the commons.”
Is there a $10 billion "fix everything easily" button you have in mind for homelessness?
The way to fix it is to have the right incentives and also the right deterrent. If you simply enable a drug addict lifestyle or corrupt nonprofit grift, that isn’t the right incentive. And yet that’s the reality in west coast cities.
My best friend built two public benches for his eagle scout project in the late 90s.
Here's one of them, can't remember where the other is (in the same park): https://maps.app.goo.gl/kSFyikeerp7i77oZ8
I think the reason most people do not sympathize with this argument is that most HN readers are programmers, and many of them are still in a relatively secure class position.
Traditionally, programming has had a high barrier to entry, but it has also been a profession where compensation has remained relatively strong. As societies become harsher under pressure from high housing costs and economic displacement, they tend to become more aggressive and violent. But many people do not sympathize with this issue because they are not personally in that situation. They mostly experience the visible disorder: aesthetic damage, drug use, and the social harms produced by deeper structural failures.
But if we compare this to HN debates about LLMs, an irony appears. In labor-market terms, LLMs are similar to hostile design.
LLMs are not installing benches for programmers. They are closer to removing the benches.
In the past, there were lower-level tasks where junior developers, non-traditional developers, non-native English speakers, and small open-source contributors could remain inside the profession. CRUD work, documentation fixes, test writing, small bug fixes, simple UI, repetitive glue code — these were not glamorous tasks, and they were often inefficient. But they functioned like public benches inside the profession. They gave people a place to sit long enough to learn.
LLMs attack exactly that layer.
From a company’s point of view, this is rational. Code that might take a junior developer several days can now be drafted by a model in minutes. Documentation, tests, boilerplate, simple screens, and repetitive API wiring no longer seem worth preserving as training grounds for humans.
As a result, the market may look more efficient. But that efficiency resembles the history of removing benches. It is not only the “problematic” people who disappear. Elderly people, children, travelers, disabled people, and ordinary people who simply needed a place to sit are pushed out as well.
Software has a similar problem. If we remove low-level work, low-quality work may appear to decrease. But at the same time, we also remove the space where beginners can fail, receive correction, observe others, and slowly acquire the instincts of the profession.
So LLMs are not merely productivity tools. They can also function as a force that removes public seating inside the software profession.
That is why I find it difficult to reconcile the logic of people who argue that public benches should be removed, while also arguing that LLMs should not be accepted.
They are already sitting inside the profession. They already have experience, English, networks, code review experience, and existing project history. For them, LLMs look like a faster tool. But for people trying to enter from the edge of the profession, LLMs are not just a tool. They are a change in the structure of entry itself.
The lower seats where people could once sit and learn are disappearing. Newcomers are expected to start from a higher level of abstraction and with stronger verification skills from the beginning.
In cities, the logic for removing benches is usually expressed in the language of order, safety, aesthetics, and maintenance cost. In software, the logic for adopting LLMs is expressed in the language of productivity, efficiency, cost reduction, and quality control.
But behind that language, what disappears is the buffer zone through which a community receives people.
A city without benches may look cleaner, but it does not become more public. Likewise, a software market without entry-level work may look more productive, but it is hard to say that it has become a healthier ecosystem.
When I read HN, I often see this kind of irony. And perhaps we all live inside such ironies. That may also be part of what makes communities interesting.
People do not seem to have a consistent attitude toward publicness itself.
Instead, they show completely different moral intuitions depending on where they are positioned within that public space.
I always find that interesting to watch.
Your comment sounds like half LLM slop, half confusion
I believe expensive housing is at the root of many societal problems, it's not even funny. We don't have park benches because we've adopted hostile architecture to keep out "undesirables". This mostly means "homeless people". But why are there so many homeless people? The primary reason is housing unaffordability [1].
One of the funny things about China is that there are a lot of "experts" who insist on reading the tea leaves and assign secret, nefarious motives. The truth is that China is pretty open about what they're doing. If you take everything China says at face value you're going to be ahead of 95% of the China talking heads on TV. That's not hyperbole.
Property speculation was a common way for Chinese people to accumulate wealth. This has made property expensive in the Tier 1 cities in particular. The CCP had tried to cool this with various reforms but it turned property into a Ponzi scheme. Basically, developers would have to sell new units and then use those funds to finish a previous project. This is a big factor in the Evergrande default [2].
Xi Jinping took power in 2019 and had some policy priorities that include cracking down on corruption, reforming the housing market and ecological living. In 2019, he famously said "houses are for living, not for speculation" [3]. So the real estate market has been in decline for years. Some might view that as a failure but it was an intentional popping of a real estate bubble for the greater good. China makes it difficult and expensive to own more than one home. Likewise, foreign capital can't be parked in real estate like it can in the West.
One of the good things about the Internet is that people can see for themselves how modern, clean and people-centric Chinese cities are, particularly Tier 1/2 cities.
Instead of investing in society, we militarize and overfund the police, start pointless wars, create homeless people through unaffordability and build our cities around various profit opportunities for mega-corporations (even having to have a card is to the benefit of corporations). And of course we can't forget what role racism played in how our cities evolved and were planned.
[1]: https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/default-delisting-evergr...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...
You're spreading a common misconception. No one really "owns" a home in China. What they're usually purchasing is a 70-year lease on the land. The hope is that the lease can be renewed on favorable terms but there's no guarantee.
Why'd you say xi took power in 2019?
Our society is sick and it's not getting better anytime soon. We're past the golden era of civilization and barreling towards dystopia now.