Aside from housing, a lot of homeless people are in need of mental healthcare, and that's something no particular city is equipped to deal with without backing from the state.
Where else can they go? One of c. 2 dozen 'pit stops' that mostly close by 8pm?
That's the reason you've lost empathy for them, because they are humans who have to shit and are denied access to toilets?
Its totally fair, and expected that people lose sympathy when they have to clean up shit.
Yes, if there were safe, available, places to shit then that'd be a good step to avoid this issue. But the root issue is that people no longer have sympathy because its so disruptive and so gross and has been going on for so long.
> I find it so weird that people blame homeless people for defecating on the streets.
They're blamed because they did it. They did it because there is no alt, but they did it, and "it" is gross and not desirable. SF has been talking about the issue for years, and its not resolved, so your tolerance and sympathy drops over time.
Violence is an event and inherently ephemeral. Poop is a thing and it will sit there until removed giving me much more time to see it.
Maybe that's why?
I'm sure violence _would_ get on me pretty quickly, but I just don't see that much violence in the homeless in my local area.
Btw, it feels pretty disingenuous that your example is this group of perfect angel homeless people sleeping and praying on the corner. That rhetoric pretty much immediately loses anyone who has regular contact and they think "welp this person doesn't know what they are talking about"
EDIT: To be clear. I realize shit is gross. It's the most toxic thing a human regularly encounters.
But the implication of the grossness of shit being a 'bright red line' for lost empathy is that no reasonable human would EVER deal with someone else's shit, when that is demonstrably untrue.
We choose to empathize with babies and not homeless people. That's fine, I guess, but feels sort of gross on the cosmic scale.
Oxytocin--the hormone critically involved in empathy and social behaviors--has been linked to toxin-elicited and socially-mediated disgust [1]. If that link holds, it suggests why public defecation is the emerging turning point of the debate.
Rhetorically, this means trivializing the problem is unlikely to be successful. People will lose empathy for people who shit on their street. On the flip side, this offers a well-scoped beachhead. Solving the public defecation problem could rebuild empathy for San Francisco's homeless and give political oxygen to the broader, more-intractable problem of homelessness overall.
(I'm honestly shocked nobody has run for office in San Francisco on a vision zero-esque pledge to eliminate public defecation.)
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/gbb.12...
There is a lot of research on this. It's a deep, fascinating rabbit hole and I don't know its contours well enough to flag the entrances. But it touches subjects like mammalian postpartum depression, infanticide in great apes, why the characters :) make one go "aww," cute aggression and a host of other matters.
To address your point a bit more head on, I imagine public reactions to a publicly-defecating child would be very different from those to an adult.
Are you so out of touch with basic human desires that you don't see the difference between having _your biological baby with your genes_ and a random homeless person? That people love their baby _despite_ their poop, because of the joy they bring, and because it satisfies the most primary of biological drives (reproduction).
And you think it's weird that I'm okay with my baby's poop and not the poop of a random adult.
I've admitted that I don't like homeless people, but I put forth an authentic point of view and my engagement is a form of earnest attempt at solving the problem despite my personal dislike. I've noted the types of things I would be willing to vote for and what is less likely to win me over.
What do you think you are adding to the situation? You put on this position of caring so much about the homeless population yet all you seem capable of is burning bridges for nothing in return.
And despite your implication, it's actually not controversial to have the opinion that people generally care more about genetic heirs than adopted ones. God bless those with enough patience, understanding, and resources to adopt, but there's a reason why 99.9% of people on Earth have their own babies. Or are we just cretins in your view?
Maybe rather than caring so much about the quality of discourse online, you should look into those feelings. Damn.
So, I'm not so sure that the baby/dog to encampment dweller connection makes the most appropriate vehicle for mentally dealing with the poop. Or, maybe, it is the right vehicle. I really don't know.
When I rationalize my poop scooping duties by juxtaposing them with the duties of parents and dog owners, I end up placing the babies, dogs, and adult poopers in the same category. I don't know if that categorization actually reflects reality, and therefore I can't tell if that kind of rationalization will actually help me react to the poop in a constructive way.
If I, as an adult, can clean up your poop for you, then it escapes me why you, homeless but also adult, can't pick it up and put it in a dumpster. The logical conclusion is that you do not wish to.
Nope, I lost empathy because in Seattle the homeless are exempt from prosecution and commit crimes with impunity. People like Francisco Calderon (https://komonews.com/news/project-seattle/warrant-issued-for...) or Travis Berge (https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/meth-mental-illness-murder-...) are repeatedly released to commit crimes and harm others.
I think the problem with this angle of argument is that it pretty much solely relies on extreme empathy holding from current homeowners (aka those with power). And when that empathy is worn down, such as the example woman in the oliver segment who has to pick up human poop on a regular basis, then the argument just falls completely flat. Like it basically goes like this "Look how bad these ppl have it, don't you care?" and the answer is "No." - then what do you do? There's no avenue for follow up or iteration - you've just made a assumption just completely breaks.
You can criticize the housed-first perspectives, but at least they try to find win-win common ground between the interest of the house (not picking up human poop) and the homeless (get a home). I'm also a big fan of the tax/finance forward methods and oliver had an example during his segment of a way to save $ per homeless per year spending.
To me this article reads as the epitome of 'bleeding-heart' syndrome, and lacking critical thinking toward actual problem solving with multiple stake holder interests in play.