I’ve been to places that had free municipal wifi, mostly at libraries and bus stops. It seems like a small service that is generally helpful to people without access to their own wifi. I think the better solution is to have more places with free wifi at night so people don’t have to congregate in the one small area.
There aren’t many places the unhoused are allowed to exist in public and cutting them off from essential services only makes it harder for them to better their situation.
to better their situation
Well, that is, assuming they want to. Some, definitely. Long term loiterers, not so sure.
People who are addicted or who have given up to that degree are less likely to want help if they think real life can only be totally miserable for them (like, “the world is unbearable, there’s nothing good left for me except [drug name here]”). Same reason people who are depressed turn to drinking. Making the lives of unsheltered people even worse, thus making drugs more appealing in comparison, is counterproductive. And the longer they’re stuck in that, the more that’ll just feel like what life is to them.
Maybe people who don’t want to, or don’t act like they want to, better their situation actually would if they could see any hope for it, and if the path looked more doable and less like scaling mount everest with a broken leg.
I think anybody can think of times they didn’t want to do something that would benefit them - clean a house, do their homework, go to work in the morning - and other times that the situation was different and so it was much easier to do.
So we should take away something that is necessary to someone helping themselves (have you tried to apply for a job or take a class without using the internet recently, it’s required), just because some people don’t care about living in squalor?
If all they are doing is “loitering” to use the internet, then they aren’t doing anything wrong. It sounds like the problem is simply the number of people and the neighbors didn’t approve. In that case, the truly win/win option is to provide greater access points to free wifi so people don’t have to congregate in one small area. This outcome only hurts people.
California wants to help the homeless but they also don’t want to pay for drug treatment, safe injection sites, or psychiatric centers.
California does, right wingers in California do not and they pay MASSIVE amounts of money for advertising campaigns to misrepresent drug treatment, safe injection sites, and psychiatric centers as free drugs and won’t somebody think of the children???
Do you want one of THOSE people to be getting help next door to you? Oh the horror! Don’t you know that junkies sneak off in the night, into your homes in order to stab your children with drug filled needles??? Do you have any idea what it’s like to be near a psychiatric center? I do. My brother’s nieces cousins uncle twice removed on her mother’s side told me that the crazies like to kidnap your children and vandalize your house.
Where did I put my pearls? I’m in desperate need of clutching them.
/Dripping Sarcasm Also source: I live in CA
There are so many problems with this.
Far too many homeless people, there is so much wealth in this nation, there is no reason we cannot provide ample shelter. This probably is going to continue to become worse with the disproportionate wealth distribution and the continual increase in use or automation and AI.
Additionally, we should have broader access to wifi, specifically for those who are homeless and need access to online resources, so they can eventually no longer be homeless. Seems like a great federal program opportunity, if we actually want people to be able to recover from being homeless. No one is going to become homeless or stay homeless because of the badass government subsidized wifi.
This seems incredibly self perpetuating on the cities behalf. It’s like making places uncomfortable to sleep upon… Why not invest that money into someplace people can goto sleep and get the assistance they need to exist in society.
Yeah the treatment of the homeless is crazy as hell to me, why kick someone when they’re down? You try finding a job when you can’t find a good place to sleep, a decent place to take shelter from rain or heat, restricted access to the internet and restaurants refusing to give you leftovers. Shit sucks. It was hard enough to find my next job after I got laid off and I fortunately had a month off expenses saved. Imagine if it took me just a little bit longer to find a job and that I didn’t have any friends with room in their house. I would be homeless.
I agree internet, shelter, food and basic medical need to be considered a human right, if you want a productive society wouldn’t you want to help the people getting left before so they can contribute?
Publicly funded but not for the public.
And before anyone makes a comment about the unhoused probably not paying taxes … neither do any of the children or retirees who use the service every single day of the year.
We’ve pretty much just abandoned any concept of citizenship or civic responsibility…
getting a “protect my property value” vibes from this policy. Governing systems should focus first on lifting up our most vulnerable, and people selling houses just isnt it.
It’s only getting turned off at night, not completely disallowing them from using it. I don’t see what the problem is. I can’t go and take out a book at 1am, I shouldn’t also be allowed to use their WiFi.
you could check out an ebook using their services if you had access to wifi
Exactly this. A housed, or unhoused person, can’t use the library 24/7, so why should there be an exception for Wi-Fi at night?
because it costs $0 and unhoused people deserve access to education and resources at night same as those who are housed and have their own wifi?
this isnt about the wifi anyway, it’s an attempt to chase homeless people out of populated areas bc rich people are scared to be confronted with the human cost of their actions.
you’re fucking disgusting. i wish you the worst things.
Please don’t attack and insult each other. Give the other user the benefit of doubt and assume good faith even if it comes alongside ignorance. You’re free to ask questions to get them to clarify their point if you think they’re spreading hate speech but please wait for unambiguous intolerance before launching off on someone 💜
i’m like the barest thread away from homelessness. i don’t think it’s fair to tone police me down when people are expressing disgust about people in a position i’ll probably be in when i’m too old to pay my bills with unwanted subsistence sex work. when people are supporting measures designed to make life more hostile for people like that.
people who express disgust about unhoused people, and believe it’s okay to throttle their already super limited access to society, are lost causes. that’s violent instigation against people who can’t defend themselves and these attitudes get. people. killed.
it’s weird how even spaces on fedi require that you Politely and Respectfully Debate people who lead with genocidal intent. think about who was impolite or intolerant first. think about whether anything i said was “unprovoked.” anyway speaking of tolerance i have none for environments that aren’t safe for poor and unhoused folk and it’s, all things considered, unsurprising that a model based on reddit ended up being, predominantly, another That.
best of luck and goodbye i guess. you can have the genocide people or you can have their victims but you can’t have both.
I’m not sure if you’re already gone and I tried to make it as clear as possible that I didn’t think you were wrong. I understand this can read as tone policing, I was just asking for you to drop the very final part of your post because the other person didn’t directly attack you and could have been coming from a place of ignorance. It’s not on you to educate them either. To be clear I wasn’t going to take any negative action on you and I didn’t remove your post either because I believe both of those would be tone policing. But it’s also really hard to have a place where people feel welcome and think it’s nice while also explicitly being a safe space- in fact this is proof that for some people it might not work. My read on this person was that they were uninformed, not that they were necessarily attacking you. Their post consisted of nothing more than a question which comes from the ignorance and privilege of never being homeless. Yes, they might be an asshole worthy of scorn, I’m mostly just asking we confirm someone’s a Nazi before we start punching.
If you’re still around and want to talk in more depth about this let me know. I’m sorry I failed you 😔
Why not? It cost them next to nothing to leave it on. It actually is more work to turn off and on the router every day. I don’t see why not being to check out books had to do with internet. Why does it have to be all or nothing?
I would guess all commercial routers and access points hae the option to automate something like that. So you only have to set it up once and it’s not really much work (unless something breaks)
Yeah but that requires even less effort to automate than manually turning it off and on. But the point is why put in the effort at all to do this? I mean rhetorically because I know everyone just wants to push the homeless to “anywhere but here”
