Right, but bedding down outside the library at night so you can get free wifi is antisocial behavior. Why should we invest this much in our public spaces and then effectively give them away? I wouldnt want somebody sleeping next to my house so he could get WiFi. Public spaces are ours.

Don't get me wrong. I think we should make massive investments in trying to solve the homeless problem, but giving away our public commons is utter stupidity.

> Why should we invest this much in our public spaces and then effectively give them away? I wouldnt want somebody sleeping next to my house so he could get WiFi. Public spaces are ours.

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” ― Anatole France

The law in practice doesn’t prohibit it. You’re seeing a debate about whether it should, a debate to which this quip adds nothing.

It directly addresses my excerpt of the comment I responded to. The author asked why access to public space should be "given away" and then wrote "public spaces are ours" (emphasis mine).

The cleverness of Anatole France's famous quote is that he framed it in a way that the answers to those questions were automatically obvious, by emphasizing the massive difference in agency and scope of action between the haves and the have nots.

There were a few hundred shelter beds available last night in SF to anyone who wanted to sleep indoors. The problem is the people who sleep outside the library don't want to sleep in shelter, because the shelters don't allow drug use. The people sleeping outside the library want to get high and we do not have an effective means to compel people into shelter or treatment.

There can be many reasons that homeless people avoid shelters, it's not entirely fair to say that it's only one reason.

I grew up in a very bad place in the UK and I knew many homeless people (different than homeless people in the US for sure, much lower propensity for mental health issues for example) but they avoided shelters because many homeless shelters aren’t safe. Any possessions you have will be stolen while you sleep. Women are molested and raped. Lice are all over. There are limited beds so giving up your "sure-fire" place in an underpass for a potential bed is not ideal.

You have to leave at 7 am and can’t return until 5pm at the earliest, and they’re first come first serve. Some shelters make you attend religious services.

Some shelters will "encourage" you to pay a fee to go to them.

It's very easy to become homeless and very difficult to get out of it (I mean, who has the finances to have 2 months rent, a deposit and enough to cover a failed background check), so it's not good to tar all homeless people with the "drug-use" brush.

> Why should we invest this much in our public spaces and then effectively give them away

I think you mean give them away exclusively to one group. The point of public services is to give them away.

Why not provide wifi for the homeless as a service, with its own line item, instead of doing it via the Library?

Why segregate an existing service that's already meant for everyone? Would we need another wifi network for Veterans and yet another for retirees?

> Why segregate a service that's already meant for everyone?

Because one group denies it to others. In New York, the potent image is that of a homeless person obviously going through a mental health issue, who hasn’t bathed in what smells like weeks, sitting in a subway car on their own. (When I was younger and naïve, I went into one such car and tried to talk to them. I had a handful of what I’ll pretend was a smelly sauce tossed my way.)

How about shoring up the social safety net like other developed countries? The length at which Americans go to ignore the homeless (until they are in close physical proximity) is astounding. And most "solutions" are to keep the homeless out of sight without doing anything about their circumstances.

> How about shoring up the social safety net like other developed countries?

Genuinely curious: how is the mental-health and drug addiction nexus dealt with when one has an unwilling participant?

Participate in what exactly? You won't find many takers if the intervention is automatic institutionalization. There are a lot of areas the US has not explored between commiting people to mental asylums and letting them roam the streets.

> Participate in what exactly?

I don't know–I'm asking what "other developed countries" do.

San Francisco, where this article is about, is spending more than 75k USD per homeless person per year on homeless services. The issues is not a lack of compassion of city residents or the collective residents of the city shouting "pull yourselves up by your bootstraps" to anyone in a precarious position. We have been increasing taxes and spending every year as long as I have been here to help "fix the homeless problem" and it keeps getting worse. At the limit, I would prefer we spend our marginal incoming tax dollar on education and schooling for the children of the city, not on non sober permanent housing for out of town meth heads who just want to get high. Doubling down in this issue, you have a huge portion of the non chronically homeless people who are just on tough times who completely avoid the homeless services in the city because of the legitimate issue that a single insane violent drug addict can have on on an entire homeless shelter or an entire 500 unit permanent supportive housing building. SF housed a few hundred people in the pandemic in an old 300 unit hotel and a few of the residents caused 20 million dollars in damage.

This is a better idea. New York does it on the street. (I would advocate high-speed internet at and around all shelters, if that isn’t the case already.)

The problem with the status quo is it’s going to prompt a backlash which results in losing libraries.