Private businesses see a lot of abuse of their restrooms — from people using them and not paying for anything, but also because they make good places to do drugs, and it's common for homeless to overstay their welcome and/or damage the facilities. As a result, many businesses put locks on them and require that paying customers ask for a code.
There are a few publicly provided restrooms, but they tend to be few, far between, and in pretty sorry disrepair. In SF for example, you can find restrooms in parks and libraries, but they're often a mess. There are some single use restrooms on the street that were designed to provide autonomous self-cleaning public facilities, but because of abuse, nowadays they're mostly either out-of-order or have a full-time worker to babysit them (also, there's not many of them, and there throughput is very low).
It might be worth reviewing why Americans turned so harshly against involuntary commitment to mental health care institutions. It was a parade of horrors that made Abu Ghraib look like Disney World. Convincing people that we'll get it right, reliably, at massive scale this time around is something of a daunting task.
But I would hope that with knowing what we do now about mental illness we would have many layers of intervention before we get to that level.
Imagine if theirs a kid getting into trouble regularly at school because of their mental health status. Rather than wait until that turns into a violent episode that gets the kid in jail or committed the court could assign that kid a mentor. Someone they have to spend 10 hours a week with and who they can call on for anything. That can change the trajectory of a kid's life. We know this because the number one difference between people with mental illness that succeed and those that fail is whether they have a support network.
Court mandated mentoring, support networks and counselling before, not after a major incident are all relatively low touch interventions that would be hugely beneficial. And we do some of this now. It just mostly comes after the criminal justice system has already begun to see the person as a criminal because it usually follows a significant crime.
Of course this cuta against the American psyche. We want to have 100% all our rights with no government intervention until we've proved we shouldn't. Then the government should have radical powers to shape our lives.
But maybe if we could come to see government more like the way doctors see medical treatment. The more unobtrusive it is the more we should allow. And the more intrusive it is, the more we should be nervous of its application.
I completely disagree as a person who suffered involuntary treatment for 2 months and was drugged against my will for a psychological disease I didn't suffer. I'm a transgender woman that was going to university getting bullied constantly. One day it turned into an incident where the bullies fabricated a story to campus police and where my account of the situation wasn't listened to. Anyhow, I ended up with a psychiatrist that didn't ever treat gender dysphoria but believed it just has to be schizophrenia. They billed my insurance provider $58k USD. Needless to say, I also don't pass as a woman because of the religious abuse in that community and with unaccepting parents. I've never been able to save 58k to pay for surgeries unrighteously classified as cosmetic towards the illness gender dysphoria. Anyway, I tried to find legal representation for the wrongs and nobody in any civil rights institution for victims would help.
In the past families would look after their own disabled members. Of course this is easier in large non-nuclear families. But maybe something like more like community centers in every town rather than imposing "Insane Asylums" run by scary officials would help?
That isn't "simple" at all.
The diagnosis is simple. We have a cycle of sympathizing and then cracking down on marginalized people and it stems from having a one size fits all approach to social problems.
The solution of course is terribly complex. It stresses some of the most difficult questions of Western social philosophy. Such as how much should we respect the individual will vs. the collective need? And what is our obligation to the needy? And how much power over others should we place in the system or delegate to people?
Another is zoning and NIMBYism. Others here have explained this in detail far better than I could. But to put it simply, most of the public services that homeless and mentally ill people depend on are located in urban areas. When people say things like, "there's plenty of cheap housing in ____" they don't understand that no matter how much oversupply of affordable housing there is in that place, these people can't live there because they don't drive, there's no public transportation, and there's no clinics there.
Seattle and King County judges have been bringing social services to the court house, to better serve their clients. Our courts see the consequences of our inadequate safety net first hand.
While innovative, these reforms are far from ideal or adequate. But the judges feel they have no other choice than to try to fill the void.
I guess you mean some better modern version of them deserves more funding?
Lifting people out of crisis is tremendously difficult and I actually don't know how we deal with the number of people we have in crisis now.
And yes such an institution would be totally hamstrung if we don't address costs through zoning and permit reform.
The reason people keep looking to law enforcement to solve these problems is because they can. Take away that and institutions (government or otherwise) will eventually spring up to solve the problem. Visible homelessness running rampant in the time it takes for that to happen is simply the penalty communities will have to suffer for being so economically dysfunctional as to have the problem in the first place. This is the phase some west coast cities are in now and of course there's some backlash and people who want to go back to strict law enforcement.
As long as someone acting on behalf of the government can tell a homeless person to move along from a public space the problem will not go away. It will just move to the next street over for a few hours then come back when it gets kicked out of there too. These people need either better options that are so much better they take advantage of them (i.e.) better shelters or to be institutionalized against their will and I don't think the latter is compatible with our values.
This was true thirty years ago, but is much less true today. The fraction of people that have serious mental illness is relatively constant, but the number of visible homeless people on the street has risen dramatically. What you're seeing today is a fraction of mentally ill people and then a larger fraction of drug addicted people stemming from the opioid crisis.
It's not the 80s anymore and that person screaming to no one on the street corner is more likely to be in meth psychosis than schizophrenic.
The reason I point these out is because I think the different groups need different solutions. Affordable housing isn't going to do anything good for something in the middle of meth psychosis. They'll just trash the place which is a complete waste of funding.
Don't confuse the two. Breaking down a working system that was evil without creating a replacement, without gradual transition, can (and did) result in a more evil system.
They were motivated by compassion but not right minded.
We have eliminated virtually every government intervention besides police power. We have also seen our social institutions significantly divest their social contributions.
Therefore the criminal justice system has become the catch all. It is expected to handle the mentally ill, the homeless, the drug addicted, problematic families, neighborhood disputes and more.
Every now and then, we see the consequences of that divestiture and it shocks us. We see people who only really need mentorship, medical care or friendship being treated like hardened criminals and we see how that treatment corrupts these people with otherwise fairly socially benign failings.
So we pull back on the leash of the criminal justice system. These people begin to rejoin our society but with no assets, no standing, little to no mental healthcare. And unsurprisingly this influx of invested citizens gets people's attention. And regardless of whether crime genuinely increases these people are newly visible and easy to associate with any anecdote of crime and violence.
So people predictably turn against them and against the pull back. But to fix this problem you have to do two things Americans are loath to do. You must tax and spend money to build institutions that are not police. And you must give those institutions some power to intervene sometimes against the will of those they are intervening with. And I have no illusions. Involuntary commitment to mental health care and drug treatment and community involvement are often ugly but Americans make it clear over and over that even though vagrants and homeless are generally not a problem that much affects those other than the vagrants and homeless themselves we will never collectively tolerate their presence.
The options seem to be building institutions to specialize in the assistance and care of these people or continue to use one monolithic system and continue this cycle.