I don't see them as a dehumanizing thing. Shoot, nearly all construction workers use them as their office toilet, is that unacceptable?

Construction workers are going to go home, shower, change clothes, wash the clothes they wore all day and worked hard in.

You seem to be taking it for granted that one can get cleaned up again after being exposed to a port-a-potty. This is not a given for homeless individuals.

If you are in good health -- which many homeless people are not -- and have regular access to showers, laundry service, etc, using a port-a-potty may be no big deal. But this is generally not the case for people on the street.

Regardless you still are making portapotties out to be disaster zones, some are for sure, I've opened some up and there is human waste covering the entire thing and I wouldn't suggest that people, homeless or otherwise, plop down and use that. But portapotties are relatively sanitary places, they're a totally fine, emphasis on fine, way to keep human waste off of the streets. Having pooped in a lot of places I would 100% choose a portapotty over an alleyway or my apartment building's stoop. I'm a little surprised by your opinion as well, I can't speak for every homeless person by any means but the ones I do know would definitely prefer to see an unlocked and clean portapotty if they needed to go vs. having to go in an alley. Sure, a bathroom in their own home would be better...but that isn't what we're talking about right? We're talking about a public health crises and it is inhumane to suggest we take no action and instead shout, "These people deserve homes!", even though they do, when they're literally dying of Hep A.

I'm actively working on this problem space myself and have been for years.

I personally run multiple websites that help address the problem. I do my best to get that information into the hands of homeless people wherever possible, both via internet participation and handing out fliers to local homeless services and the local police department.

(Here is an edited version of what I am distributing locally: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L5CsLmHLPUV1uehvRtu17H9y...)

I'm also involved (very part time) with two local non profits who do urban planning and economic development type work. Some of that I get a little for. Most of it is done pro bono.

I cannot afford to just give all my time away for free and such interests tend to not pay. I blog. I do freelance writing. I edit resumes. I do a little website work here and there.

Still, I continue to struggle to get by. I suck at promoting my Patreon. People on the internet routinely tell me to go get a real job and stop trying to monetize my online work and yadda.

I'm a woman. I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard of HN. But being a woman closes a lot of doors for me. People here occasionally give me a few bucks out of compassion when I'm especially broke. But I can't, for example, get much support for my Patreon.

There are no doubt myriad reasons for that. But I don't know how to readily solve it. I am not willing to create a non-profit homeless services thing. That approach is antithetical to my beliefs about how to actually fix things.

I'm just saying that I have done substantial research on the problem space. I wanted to be an urban planner before life got in the way and I have taken a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy through SFSU when I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area as a military wife.

I think I have a good outline for what works. I am interested in promoting real solutions. But unless I can get an actual job in urban planning or economic development, the odds are poor that I can find a means to monetize my efforts to address this problem.

Some of those reasons are inherent to the problem space itself. Among other things, poor people don't have a lot of money to give you to fix their problems.

If you want to get your city to build proper public bathrooms with a 24 hour attendant, I would be all for that. I don't support a policy of more port-a-potties. I'm okay with you being all surprised and what not about that.

I'm tired and I think I left my best comments much earlier. It's probably all downhill from here. I plan on trying to step away from the discussion. I think I've made whatever useful points I can reasonably make. People can do with the info I've already posted as they see fit.

One solution may be to construct "alternative portas" with a different name, that look and feel more like a european or asian home-model toilet+shower combo. I think this might cause people to abuse them less, if they think of them more like their own bathroom.

This doesn't solve things like the laundry issue, or, well, housing. But most other developed nations have decent public toilets, and we should too.

You, me and other others here have no idea what the right thing is. We can guess, but many of those guesses will have very unexpected side effects. (People using locked showers for things other than showering, for example.)

Homeless kids need hope, they need time with people who will actually stick with them and really help them see the benefit of a job, going to bed on time (the shelter's had a curfew), how to be respectful, help getting off drugs (or staying off them).

If you give homes to homeless people as they are, I think most of them would get trashed and abused until they are no more liveable than a park bench.

Then what, evict the homeless people from their free homes? Give them another free home all fixed up?

It really is hard work without a simple answer.

"Throwaway" children are a hard issue to resolve. There are no simple solutions once things have gone that far.

But I'm talking about focusing more on prevention generally. One side effect of that will be to have more per capita resources for those hard cases who do land on the street.

One of the problems with most conversations about the issue of homelessness is the mantra of wanting to "help the homeless." It tends to lead to a sense of hopelessness. The problem seems too big and thorny to resolve. It's also not the most humane approach.

I'm talking about creating a world where people are at less risk of homelessness because their lives aren't being suddenly and completely derailed by high medical bills, because they can find housing within their budget that works for them even if they have no car, etc.

Such a world should generally see fewer throwaway kids as well. We really don't do enough to support parents in America today. It's dreadful.

I think we could _easily_ provide shelter and food for every single homeless person in America right now. But I can tell you that most of the homeless people won't take that shelter. Because you'd have to remove weapons, drugs, violence, etc... to make the shelter safe. So then you have a jail system.

I don't use recreational drugs and never have. I have no criminal record. I carried no weapons while homeless.

I am not really for expanding the current shelter system. I am for improving supply of the right kind of housing, as well as providing adequate healthcare. Health issues and cost of healthcare are major factors in the equation here.

But if it weren't for a shelter, I would not have been able to stay clean and get a job.

And if you can't get a job and maintain an income, you can't afford housing of any kind.

There's a chicken/egg problem with housing/job. But you can't house people that won't/can't work in the same housing as people who will work.

There's so many obstacles in the way that I think the focus should be on the people that recently became homeless and help them get back off as quickly as possible. It's the lifers I think that really may be beyond ever taking care of themselves, no matter how much help is given.

I'm leery of answers that entrench the problem. A lot of people want to "help the homeless," which is a very different goal than reducing the incidence of homelessness overall in the US. Focusing exclusively on "helping the homeless" has a tendency to entrench and even grow the problem by ignoring the need to solve other issues.

It tends to create a situation where the only way you can help is to wind up on the street and there is no help available before the problem is that severe. Lesser problems don't count or get any assistance.

I'm personally focused on those other issues.

I don't deny that we will always need some emergency services, such as shelters and soup kitchens. I just am very leery of cries for more shelters and more soup kitchens and more port-a-potties as the only approach to the issue, thereby not bothering to address some of the root causes.

I'm not trying to argue with you and I'm not trying to "win" some argument here. I'm trying to communicate my position clearly. I'm trying to let you know that my position isn't a threat to people getting the help they need once they are in crisis.

You can have soup kitchens and homeless shelters and also affordable healthcare and affordable (missing middle) housing. It doesn't have to be one or the other.

I just would like to see enough resources put into solutions like universal healthcare such that the homeless problem actually begins to shrink without anyone being "rescued."

I'm trying to step away from this discussion.

Have a great day.

(Do I need a sarcasm tag here?)

That still leaves them wearing the same filthy clothes. It doesn't remotely solve the problem. Furthermore, homeless showers tend to be as horrible as most homeless services.

Either you have no privacy -- because why the hell should your dignity matter when you are homeless? -- or it has mold issues, etc.

All services specifically designed to service the homeless population tend to be really, truly terrible in a "you would get sued if this were aimed at middle class people" kind of way. The general attitude is "beggars can't be choosers" and "don't be so uppity -- show a little gratitude for the shitty service you are getting for free, you ungrateful whiner."

So, no, that's not the solution. Missing Middle Housing is The Solution here. Or one part of it.

There is no single cause of homelessness. There is no single solution.

This is really important to emphasize.

I've never been homeless, but I did spend two years hanging out with homeless people while making a documentary film. The range of people on the street is almost as broad as the range of people off it. I met homeless people with Ph.D.'s. I met homeless people with florid schizophrenia. I met homeless people with substance abuse issues. I met homeless people who were perfectly ordinary but had some bad luck (ranging from losing their job to losing their entire family in a car crash). I even met homeless people who chose to live on the street (or in their car) because they wanted a nomadic lifestyle.

But no matter how you slice it, the only real solution to homelessness is housing.

http://www.graceofgodmovie.com/

If the point of the lives we lead is some seemingly positive direction for the human soul, individually or communally, maybe the single cause of homelessness is that we have lost our way, perhaps irrevocably.

But maybe we can be optimistic and imagine things becoming so horrific in the future that the survivors stop doing the things that led us to build a world that either wears down the people or the living ecosystem or both.

It's hard to walk past a homeless person without condemning the society you live in. It's even harder to do anything substantial to change their situation, especially yourself. But to not blame anyone is just morally disorienting. Eric Weinstein, in a podcast that was posted here a day ago, kept harping on "there are intentional causes and emergent causes."

But maybe people are just basically hypocritical lying jerks.

In the city, you can find proper bathrooms. Big cities sometimes have public bathrooms open 24 hours and with an attendant. San Diego had at least two that I knew of.

You can also use the library bathroom if you haven't been banned from the library by staff for behaving badly. There are bathrooms at homeless services. There are bathrooms in malls, grocery stores, homeless services, etc.

If you aren't in the big city, if you are camped in a patch of woods, you poop and pee in the bushes. It's vastly more sanitary than a port-a-potty. If you grew up in a semi-rural environment with a culture of folks who did things like go hunting in the woods, relieving yourself in the bushes isn't a weird idea at all. It's only in recent years that anyone seems to think it is. It certainly wasn't when I was growing up.

http://missingmiddlehousing.com/

Just as one data point, we have torn down more than a million SROs in recent decades while population has risen. SROs used to be a normal form of market rate housing that worked well for people just starting out who didn't have much money and didn't need much space because they were single and childless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy

We also need to resolve the health care coverage issues in the US. Health insurance eats up a high percentage of the US GDP. Most homeless people have serious health issues, either physical health or mental health issues.

This is a significant contributing factor to homelessness. There are studies that show that when people get affordable health coverage, it reduces the risk of eviction.

https://www.benefitspro.com/2018/12/14/one-side-effect-of-th...

We don't need "homes for the homeless." We need homes for the people. We currently tend to build homes for rich people only and basically shrug and say "not my problem" when the rest of the US can't make their life work.

Then we act like homeless individuals are simply defective individuals and weren't screwed over by a broken system. No, they just need to stop drinking/using drugs, obviously. "It's just a personal issue."

Never mind that new housing has more than doubled in size since the 1950s and added substantial additional amenities at the same time that the average number of occupants has declined. These changes in housing pushing up housing costs couldn't possibly be related, no. Ask anyone with a good income and cushy life.

I'm curious if you have any short term solutions to give the people that keep pooping in front of my office at night a place to poop while we try to implement these solutions.

I've suggested just handing out key fobs and the key for the first floor bathroom of our building but it was turned down by management. I'm not sure what we can do but I'm sad that the best option for a poo for whoever is doing this is our doorway.

If it were me, I would create a "homeless map" for the area. I would list all bathrooms nearby that are reasonably publicly accessible. I would probably also include other useful information. I would print multiple copies and hand them out liberally.

If you want to do this:

If your city has actual public bathrooms, make sure to specify where those are. List park bathrooms. List mall bathrooms and grocery stores and department stores, like Walmart or Target. List hours available if possible. Highlight anything available 24 hours.

Put a blurb on the bottom half of the page about cleanliness and health and the rise in disease among the homeless population caused by unsanitary conditions. Recommend that they carry hand sanitizer and spray peroxide to clean up after toileting. (Spray peroxide is available at Walmart and CVS Pharmacy -- it's cheaper at Walmart).

Do not put the info on the internet. I have reason to believe that publicizing such things online just attracts more homeless to your area. Instead, make it a paper handout and hand it out.

Give it a few weeks and then start calling the cops on these people if it doesn't stop. In nearly six years on the street, I never pooped in anyone's business doorway. Some homeless people intentionally do assholish things like that because they are mad as hell at how the world treats them and they want to express themselves.

This is a sanitized version of the flier I have been giving out to local homeless services and the local police department. I removed the paragraph with local information. Anyone here is welcome to adapt it for their own use.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L5CsLmHLPUV1uehvRtu17H9y...

Oops. Updated the link to a "shareable" one. Let me know if you have any problems accessing it.

On the other hand, I also wouldn’t want to live in an SRO, so why should I accept that for homeless people?

When I was in college, I loved living in the dorms. I don't understand why that isn't more of an option for people. It's a community in a building rather than along a street.

I totally 100% agree, but your suggestion for SRO's sort of seems to counteract your statement above. Why would we build tenements for homeless, if no reasonable person would want to live in one?

If we want people to not be homeless, shouldn't we build them homes. Like real homes (where "real" means that at minimum, it meets all the same legal requirements that a 'market-rate' 1-bed or studio apartment would?)

If we need "homes for the people", shouldn't we actually build that? And not tenement/dormitory/SRO things that aren't really housing?

To my mind, SROs work just fine. They weren't always perceived the way they are currently. Our current American expectations for space, a full kitchen, etc etc etc is not the historical norm.

It isn't even the norm from around the world. In Japan, which has much more affordable housing than the US, from what I gather, it's common to room with other people in a two room rental where one room is a bathroom with only a sink and toilet and the other room is where everyone sleeps. Japan has public bathhouses. They related differently to various things than we do.

From what I gather, ovens are an oddity in Japanese kitchens. They typically have a wok and maybe stove top, I'm not sure. They usually don't have an oven.

When I got divorced, the two and three bedroom apartments I inhabited with my two sons had fully outfitted American-style kitchens. We often kept sodas in the fridge, not because we needed them cold, but because the fridge was too big for our needs. If we didn't keep something extra in it to keep it full, the milk would spoil because it didn't stay cold enough.

I don't think our standard American housing expectations are currently serving us well in a number of metrics. Our expectations are rooted in the assumption of a four or five person household consisting of a stay-at-home mom, two or three minor children and a breadwinner father. It was dreamed up in the 1950s post WW2. In the years since, our demographics have diversified and such families are much less common while single young adults, childless couples and single parents have become more common.

I have also seen on TV shows that when you house hunt in Japan, they tell you the time it takes to walk to the nearest public transit station, not the time it takes to drive various places. I have heard a lot of good things about how Japan handles housing. They seem to generally do a much, much better job than the US.

SROs are best considered temporary housing, but it absolutely is still housing. Additionally, this style of housing is often far cheaper to build than even tiny studios, enabling more units to be built on a faster timeline. Some would even consider the social aspect a positive, as living completely alone can be very isolating.

I don't think it's the only solution, but there should definitely be a place for very low-cost housing options like SROs even if we can build more studios or 1-bedroom units in the future.

I did list it as "just one data point" in my above comment. I am generally promoting the idea of Missing Middle Housing, not SROs. SROs are simply one form of many that we largely no longer build. I provided a link to the Missing Middle Housing website that defines the various forms of housing we largely no longer build.

The website doesn't even list SROs, though I think they could reasonably be assumed to fit under the heading "residential above commercial" in most cases.

Of course I have (I explicitly mentioned them in my first comment). But are you volunteering to move back into your college dorm room right now? No? Why not? Reasonable people do live there, right?

> SROs are best considered temporary housing, but it absolutely is still housing.

So, I partially agree. Calling an SRO "temporary housing" is totally fine by me. But if, by your own admission, they're 'best considered temporary housing', then it's not really housing, is it?

If my home burns down, so I move into an extended-stay hotel, I'm still homeless, despite being in a hotel room. That hotel room does not mean I am no longer homeless, just because I'm living out of it. If I run out of money for the hotel room, so I start living out of my car, my car does not count as "housing", just because I'm living out of that instead.

> but there should definitely be a place for very low-cost housing options like SROs even if we can build more studios or 1-bedroom units in the future.

This is where I wholeheartedly disagree -- the studio and 1-bed units should be those very low-cost housing options.

It's one thing to use SROs in places where we don't want to fully respect human autonomy (like College Dorms, or Hotels, or similar). But these are not replacements for housing, they are only temporary placeholders at best.

Port-a-pottys work because they are temporary toilets. We don't use port-a-potty's as a long-term solution to sanitation, we build real bathrooms instead. For the same reason, why would we burn money building SROs for poor/working-class people, when what we really need is long-term housing?

Or in general, why is everyone so quick to devalue the importance of quality housing? As the OP put it, why are we so quick to push ideas that "no middle class person would accept".

https://apodment.com/capitol-hill-apodments/videre/

In practice, it still needs clarification on preventing sprawl and allowing car-free transportation:

1. This type of housing (various mid-level multiplex housing) seems to pragmatically fit in the area between urban (high-rises) and suburban (single-family homes) for cost and accessibility. To prevent sprawl, more people would have to choose middle housing over detached (single-family) housing, and there would need to be more of a geographic cap to the suburbs. There needs to be some compulsion to discourage developers from buying cheaper rural land to push the suburbs out further with more detached homes and McMansions for people who want to be further removed (thus having an unintended consequence of more sprawl).

The US in particular has so much damn land its been crazy to see new suburban developments pop up in just a few years. Conversely, in Europe (or Japan), it would be astounding to see suburbs being built the way they are in the US where there always seems to be a supply of land.

2. Public transportation needs to seriously catch up to allow for car-free middle housing. US cities have had so much planning around cars that public transportation is still a greater inconvenience in various cities. Buses and trains need major improvement to be cheap and reliable. Bicycles (and mopeds) also need to be less of an afterthought to appropriately integrate with the other forms of transportation.

I don't know how to fix this without city grid changes and/or more transportation investment (or incentives to use it). Relying on a $10 metro ride, or 2 hour bus ride, or 3 hour walk is not convenient to get across town on a daily basis.

In some ways, SROs may be more immediately impactful than middle housing. SROs can house more people for the given real estate in urban areas, and could offer shorter/easier commutes to work. Perhaps they are also cheaper to maintain if they are in high rises setups.

In NYC, there are "Projects" buildings next to newer, "luxury" apartments in various neighborhoods. If that kind of setup works, why does adding SROs not?

Bungalows are basically small houses, not trailers.