For those of use who live close to these camps, "deal with" is the correct phrasing. As much as I want to be empathetic to people who need treatment for addiction or mental health support, there's a point where the camps begin to severely damage the community.

Examples I've dealt with personally: human shit on the front steps of my building, almost daily. Kids can't play outside because there are needles on the ground. Multiple neighbors' catalytic converters stolen, sometimes multiple times. Stolen cars without license plates. Entire encampments catching on fire. Bikes stolen from locked garages. Neighbors threatened with guns.

Where I live, there's a large part of the homeless population who refuses help from social services and won't go to shelters. I get it, shelters are shitty, but these people prefer to do drugs. I'm not the type of person who wants to call for forced institutionalization, but that almost feels like it would be more humane than the conditions these people are living in today.

This isn't a NIMBY issue, and until you've experienced it right outside your own house, you may not understand how bad the conditions can be.

It is quite a NIMBY issue when someone like PP wants encampments but not in their backyard

No, my point is that these encampments are so bad that they shouldn't be allowed anywhere. (I'm talking about the big encampments with 5+ tents or RVs, not 1 dude with a sleeping bag.)

> all you're worried about his how it's an aesthetic inconvenience

Stolen property, burglary/robbery, biohazard in the form of feces on sidewalks, and potential unprovoked violence are hardly just "an aesthetic inconvenience" in minds of most people.

You cannot talk me or GP out of disgust. Once you see an obviously insane person sitting in a puddle of their own pee, on the front step of a recently closed shop you used to go to, you see the problem as a problem.

There are only so many times you can step over a potentially dead person on a running trail. Only to have them get up and run away when you look closely even from a distance.

There's only so many times you can watch a huge person crawl out from the canals and start following people around the neighborhood before you consider moving your wife and kids away forever. Don't get me started on the actual assaults and threats that he's made.

Or how about the guy who was standing beside my car with a can of gas, just looking at it swaying back and forth when we were leaving the beach. Where do my kids go when I go confront him and try to retrieve our ride?

How many times can you shrug off a break in to the mail room where all the mail is just ransacked.

That's only a couple years.

You can have empathy in abstract. But when you're in the middle of it, the 99% sob stories don't matter, the lack of public safety does. And what's most infuriating is that it's not a 'place'. these problems drift like garbage on waves, collecting in random locations, esp 'safe' neighborhoods, until they are scattered away again, usually not by police because God forbid they risk actual protests from people who don't live in the affected area. (see echo Park protests).

as automation continues improving life and we become less dependent on jobs life will become more hedonistic. a homeless dude sits on the beach and drinks beer cause he got nothing better to do everyone freaks but a millionaire doing same thing nobody bats an eye lash. just saying i been on both sides. something gotta be done at least everyone agrees theres a problem! i think if we just had basic toilets and showers and designated camp areas with bus stops would go a long ways and wouldnt cost $100k/head. kowloon city!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

>” Weird, starving people stole”

I have never seen an emaciated homeless person. I do not excuse “stealing to eat” when soup kitchens, food banks, and food stamps are available as alternatives to crime.

You're making some very strong assumptions about the beliefs of the person you're replying to.

> I'm just observing the common framing of these two issues and the contradiction therein.

You are just stating the left-wing version of the common and tired right-wing "but protesters were spreading covid, despite caring about covid" trope.

Exact same type of a "i just observed an interesting contradiction" statement, just a different theme/reason used as a justification for the dismissal.

Both are rather pointless, as they bring nothing valuable to the discussion and just derail the conversation into a flamewar on those topics used in the "observations", rather than the actual topic at hand. Seen it way too many times in covid-related threads last year on HN.

> You are just stating the left-wing version of the common and tired right-wing "but protesters were spreading covid, despite caring about covid" trope.

Yeah, you're right. I think it's time for me to turn on "noprocrast" and get back to work.

> walking around maskless and unvaccinated in a pandemic is freedom

I mean, I am double-vaxxed with a booster, and I never threw a hissy fit when establishments required masks, I wore them. So yeah, you are making a rather strong assumption about me there.

> never mind how many well-off pet owners leave their dog's poop on sidewalks

I would be extremely delighted if there was more enforcement regarding this one as well, so I don't know why you are saying this as if it was some "gotcha" moment.

Rather curious why you ended up hyperfocusing on the "biohazard" aspect of my comment, as opposed to the rest of the "aesthetic inconveniences" (which, to a lot of people, would be a bit more problematic than the "biohazard" one).

Apologies. I tried phrasing that in the least accusatory, most general way possible but clearly failed to get my intention across.

Whenever I see discussions of the unhoused brought up online poop is frequently mentioned (and often called a hazard or biohazard). I just find that this is ironic given the gnashing of teeth that happened over mask and vaccine mandates over the past 2 years. That's why I focused on the biohazard aspect - it seems as though we as a society have decided we're ok with endangering each other with airborne viruses, why the double standard for the unhoused?

I think your other points are, overall, stronger.

I'd personally much rather get breathed on by someone with COVID than step on someone else's poop or used needle.

Kind of an unproductive response, I'd point you to the site guidelines about reading charitably.

As someone who spent some time homeless during the peak of a past heroin addiction, I can tell you that the comment you replied to comes across a lot more grounded than yours.

From my point of view, seeing you harass and troll people in this thread by constructing uncharitable straw men, then hawking an overpriced product, makes it seem like you’re trying to drum up anger, then profit off of it.

overpriced product? What would that be? The free ones?

I think you're overloading 'dealt with' with your own assumptions. Providing support for these people so they don't need to be there is a valid way to deal with the problem

If you read the comment in good faith, which you should, I don't think they are saying they are the victim. I think they're saying that it's a problem on both sides, which is true. Having empathy for one side doesn't detract from the other.