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If you live in a hustle and bustle, homeless people have been a problem fro decades.

However, the problem seemingly everywhere is that a lot of people no longer know how to act in public anymore. They act r-slurred, neurodivergent, and like no one else exists.

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Homeless people have been around forever but it definitely seems like they're more abundant and worse behaved these days. It's exacerbated by libs' insistence on treating them like urban wildlife, where you ignore them the same as you would a coyote.

The library stuff especially bothers me because it's a perfect example of how fricked up everything has become. They're basically treated like de facto homeless shelters, with social workers on staff and everything. But at the same time there aren't enough actual homeless shelters or people to staff them, and so you can't push back on how insane that is, and as a result nobody uses a library for library shit anymore because they'd rather not deal with multiple homeless people jacking off on the free internet.

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I'm glad I haven't been in a bustle zone library since before the Internet became ubiquitous so I never had to deal with hobos jerking off openly on a computer.

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Libraries around me have actually expanded the services they offer in some cool ways, like access to 3D printing and recording spaces, but idk if it's enough to make me want to deal with piss-covered fent zombies.

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The library around where I live now has cool stuff like that, too. And thankfully almost zero hobos

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there aren't enough actual homeless shelters

If libraries are treated as defacto homeless shelters, then maybe they need to have the same intoxication rules

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:seethejak: Noooooooooo! You can't expect homeless people to behave themselves and respect the people around them! You have to pretend they aren't there and not make eye contact with them!

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After desegregation society slowly adopted the idea that restricting people's access to public goods for any reason was wrong. The noble idea that people shouldn't be restricted because of their race slowly melted into you can't restrict severely asocial people without being a bigot. They refuse to realize that by giving these asocial people unlimited access to public areas, they are actually restricting these areas from the 99% of society that won't go to a place that allows violent drug addicts, mentally ill racists, or public fetishist.

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I was reading a fascinating post-mortem of the mall as a pillar of American culture. One of the major arguments the author gave for the explosion of malls in the 60s onwards is that their rise coincided with the American legal system, driven on by idealistic naivety of certain civil rights groups, basically eliminating any power the state could have to police any sort of antisocial behavior in public. Faced with parks, libraries, mass transit, and other such shared institutions becoming places that could no longer be enjoyed in relative peace, quiet, and safety, the American public turned to the mall. It became the anchor of a community, featuring places to walk and sit, entertainment venues, and the amenities needed to become a hangout spot, all protected by mall security equipped with the right to eject and exclude antisocial individuals.

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But at the same time there aren't enough actual homeless shelters or people to staff them

Wrong.

Law enforcement has been slacking, so you'll get more dregs in your society acting up. Pretty simple.

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