Designing out homelessness appears to be part of a wider ambition to make consumers and investors feel secure, while avoiding direct human intervention. [...]
It is an indictment of our communities that we have come to identify street homelessness as a form of “disorder” – a sign that something is amiss or dangerous in our public spaces. Yet the reality is that these kinds of design and security measures are put in place because of the breakdown of these very communities.
— theconversation.com
This piece by Rowland Atkinson (Chair in Inclusive Societies) and Aidan While (Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies and Planning) at the University of Sheffield gets at how exclusionary design towards the homeless and so-called "rough" sleepers (those who sleep in the city's streets) is a sign of increasing societal rifts, as income inequality and austerity measures press down hard on London.
More on homelessness and design:
8 Comments
Since we aren't allowed to have or enforce vagrancy laws anymore, we have to resort to ludicrous things like this in order to maintain the safety and order of public spaces.
Isn't this another example of a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place? No one has a problem with an old man napping in the park on his daily walk, but if that man doesn't have a home to go to suddenly the nap becomes an affront. Why aren't we solving the lack of a home problem instead of making naps illegal?
^ Can't afford it. The homeless are not job creators and spending on corporate welfare, wars for strategic resources, tax breaks for the rich, etc. is far more important and takes precedence.
Aside from that they bring down property values and smell bad.
Heard a story a while back, from a US city, in Minnesota, I think. The city found the cost of services incurred by core homeless/indigent outweighed the cost of providing free housing. It was a small scale living situation if I recall. One man was an alcoholic and self-destructive behavior was permitted (if not illegal) with the primary objective being a reduced costs to the city budget.
This was thought to be a successful program.
http://www.rwjf.org/en/library/articles-and-news/2009/03/housing-for-homeless-alcoholics-can-reduce-costs-to-taxpayers.html
I don't think this is what I was thinking of but something similar
I thought it was Utah that decided to give homes to the homeless last year because it was cheaper.
"The Homeless Task Force reported it costs Utah $19,208 on average per year to care for a chronically homeless person, including related health and jail costs. Pendleton found that to house and provide a case worker for the same person costs the state about $7,800." (Source)
A lot more out there if you google it.
Providing space for homeless is something that is being experimented from a lot of angles. As JeromeS has mentioned, free housing is being provided to individuals above and beyond shelters.
An article written by Malcolm Gladwell told the story of a homeless man in Reno who cost the city an estimated million dollars- along with similar stories in other cities.
A program in Washington DC, just give the individuals/families keys w/o any immediate onerous expectations and they have had positive results. I believe in Seattle there was program that provided housing to "less than model" citizens and had encouraging results regarding the extent to which people have detoxed themselves and enrolled in substance abuse organizations voluntarily.
Here's the scary thing I learned yesterday. I just had a conversation with a friend who has degrees in Urban Design/planning and Social Work about this topic. If I recall correctly, she explained to me that after 5 years of being chronically homeless, an individual starts loosing the ability to function beyond a day to day crisis mode- making them unable to contribute to the economy. At the same time, housing becomes something that is uncomfortable, let alone unfamiliar.
one of the key (and more successful) approaches over about the last decade has been the campaign/focus on Housing First.
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