But at the end of the day, US citizen always seem to agree when asked if taxes are too high and the government is wasteful, and that opinion does not correlate with actual taxation or spending. The result is the decay of public property.
A nice comparison that I recently came across, illustrating the last point: The government spends just about half as much on IT per office worker compared to the private sector.
I'm not saying I prefer private, but I understand how they could gain popularity if the city isn't doing it's part to keep up it's own areas. Your IT stat doesn't surprise me, and is definitely a good point.
On the whole it would probably be cheaper just to have kept the revenue and made a park.
Drug dealing and use, drinking on the street, prostitues loitering, homeless people begging, women being catcalled and harassed, groups of youths congregating, littering, etc. are all commonplace in truly public spaces.
Many of these 'pseudo-public spaces' (think Granary Square, More London, Canary Wharf) are enormously popular with families and businesspeople precisely because they have security personnel who do a good job of tackling these things.
> Drug dealing and use
> prostitues loitering
> homeless people begging
> women being catcalled and harassed
> groups of youths congregating
> littering
> Many of these 'pseudo-public spaces' (think Granary
> Square, More London, Canary Wharf) are enormously popular
> with families and businesspeople precisely because they
> have security personnel who do a good job of tackling
> these things.
1. Reduce taxes / enforcement of taxes on large corporations
2. De-fund and generally decrease the quality of public service
3. Shift the burden of responsibility for providing said services onto said large corporations, who now provide a facsimile of the commons, minus inconvenient concepts like civil rights (right to assemble, speech, etc).
4. Use people's growing discontent with public services to argue for lower taxes. Go back to 1 and repeat.
This is then propped up by a "Broken Britain" narrative like your own, which is, forgive the bluntness, tabloid-fueled bullshit. Despite the the government's diligent efforts to undermine public services, London remains one of the cleanest and cities on the planet, and is certainly doing better than at any point in its history.
> Drug dealing and use
Literally every day. There's a man who sits on the next doorstep that I call 'Mr Subtle' as he is continuously 'reading' a newspaper. He has many friends who stop by for a quick chat. Then they smoke drugs that he has sold them.
> homeless people begging
Every day. Also stealing from Primark, sleeping in tents on the street, pretending to fall in front of traffic, pretending to read maps then asking for change, etc.
Certainly different parts of London have different homeless populations, but Camden and central London are not great.
I'm puzzled by what kind of psyche underlies a statement like this. I'm sorry to frame it in these terms, but honestly it seems... evil to me. Do you not understand that for many people, sleeping on the street is last remaining alternative to death? Take away the ability to sleep on the street, and you are killing people. If that is your intention, there are faster and more humane ways to do it.
Or do you believe that that were it not for the myriad comforts of the streets, the homeless would simply go back to paying off their mortgages or at least crashing on friends' sofas? Because if that's what you believe, you're simply wrong. Homelessness is a last resort. (And no, the government services which one ought to be able to avail oneself of are no longer always available. Particularly if you are a working-age male, it is often virtually impossible to prove to a social worker that you are not "voluntarily homeless", which then disqualifies you from receiving help.)
I'd like to believe that nobody participating in this discussion is that malicious or that ignorant. If you can show me a third way, I'd genuinely appreciate it.
That sounds like a horrible way to grow up, and yes people on the streets do die from exposure. Presumably they also get infections that can kill them, get beaten to death, get in to fights over who stole whose lighter, etc.
In the London that I live in, the homeless are there for all sorts of reasons - poverty, mental illness, addiction, running away from a bad situation, and so on - and not all of these people will die if they are not on the streets. They might be in all sorts of worse (to them) situations - low paid menial job, mental institute, rehab, back home with abusive parents.
Most of the time, they have little choice. Or the alternative choice is worse. Forcing them off the street would not just be morally wrong, it would be largely ineffective. Unless you privatise the whole world.
The main issue that I see with private spaces is that it shifts the responsibility of low-level policing of the space from the public to security guards. Obviously the first people to come up against this will be the homeless, as they are most likely to be breaking whatever hidden rules these spaces have.
Anyway, I don't have the time to discuss this. Good luck with the infrastructure software, it looks well made.
Yes, apologies for building too many assumptions; I guess this is a bit of a hot-trigger issue for me. I've seen people genuinely believe that if one makes life sufficiently difficult for the homeless, they'll just go away. In London this has lead to appalling incidents like [1]. I thought that was where you were coming; I see now that it wasn't. Sorry again!
In any case, I haven't got time to discuss this either -- gotta get back to work!
1: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/police-seize-poss...
I've lived in various areas, currently a bit further out in Zone 3, which means I should add rampant fly tipping and unlicensed/uninsured/abandoned cars to the list.
Eliminating these nuisances from an area is a costly business. It requires round the clock security, extensive CCTV monitoring, constant maintenance and adherence to the "broken windows" philosophy.
It is essentially a luxury, which private property owners bestow upon their 'pseudo-public' spaces. The public would be outraged if councils sought the funding, through taxes, to apply the same to truly public spaces.
Canary Wharf is busy in the week because it's full of skyscrapers. But I live just round the corner from it, and it's dead in the evenings or at weekends unless there's a special event going on, despite the relative safety. Other public areas in the surrounding neighbourhoods tend to be a lot busier. And actually, there's a large group of young drug dealers that regularly hang out in the west area of the Canary Wharf development.
That said, the private security forces do indeed do a good job of keeping these areas safe, and free of threatening homeless people and such. Still debatable whether or not that's a thing we should be solving by privatising public spaces...
For the price of developing that infamous fighter jet, how many parks could be upkept for how long?
Not a citizen, but paying taxes, and I think that maaaaybe some savings could be made by not having a military force that's five times bigger than the next three combined. Maybe 2x is enough?
That said, I do appreciate that pax americana has been very beneficial overall. So maybe it's not as wasteful as it sometimes sounds.
They have trash cans in the dog park but no one was collecting them. I had to flag down the trashmen a few days ago and ask them what needed to happen for them to get it. They thought the dog park was a locked area.
A lot of the nicer streets in the more neglected areas are nice because residents go out and pick up the trash. I've given people shit who I've seen littering in my neighborhood, but at the same time, there aren't trash cans on every corner for them to use.
What especially irritates me are smokers throwing their rubbish everywhere. Why is practically every smoker a full on retard?
Round Falls, while not an official park, is an open area along the Jones Falls trail that runs through Baltimore that is in complete disarray (see http://thebaltimorechop.com/2012/06/26/round-falls/). Riverside Park was also pretty dirty when I visited, though it has good reviews online, so maybe I went on an off day.
For example, I've been disheartened by some of the parks I've visited in Baltimore. There's trash everywhere and sometimes I wonder if the city even knows the park exists.