• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Because these encampments can pop up anywhere, it’s not always practical to provide trash receptacles/dumpsters before it becomes a big problem.

    Precisely because they’re impermanent. It’s a problem that results from cities pushing people out rather than bringing them in.

    There’s a bus stop on my block that will, from time to time, just drop off someone in medical scrubs. Basically no cloths, no place to go, no cell phone, no nothing. Just someone a hospital ejected into the wild, because he was poor and they didn’t know what to do with him.

    So my neighbors and I have to figure out how to support Random Person who just crops up on our street, how to keep them safe from police, and how to get this person back on their feet.

    We’ve done it four times. Two of them were just traveling cross country and had medical emergencies. One ran off. One was looking for family in the city but had never been here before and just kinda got arrested for vagrancy and then dumped at a hospital after leaving lockup.

    This is just how our city handles indigent people. They snatch you up, fling you through a bureaucracy you don’t understand, and if they don’t know where to put you, they put you on a bus to anywhere but here.

    And we wonder why we get encampments popping up randomly