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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

The homeless aren't going away from society, but if I close my restroom, they go away from my area.

This isn't "shortsighted" at all for the individual restroom operator.

That's why there's a need for public bathrooms. We are de facto privatizing bathrooms in a way that ends up being an anti homeless policy.

Merchants understandably don't want to provide free bathrooms to the general public even where homelessness is not the driving concern. It costs them money while not making any money, so they limit bathroom access to paying customers if they provide bathroom facilities at all.

The way I'd solve this politically is allowing construction of vastly more new housing in cities.

Then the currently homeless can have an indoor toilet where they live.

This isn't actually a discussion of homelessness. It's a discussion of delivery drivers lacking bathroom access.

I'm all for more housing, but solving homelessness doesn't actually put a full stop to a need for public bathrooms.

But it does make public bathrooms much more manageable.

Solving homelessness would make a lot of things much more manageable for society generally while being a kind and compassionate response. There is substantial evidence that homelessness is very expensive, to the point where it's just cheaper to give people housing than to, say, keep treating them constantly in the ER.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-hospitals-hou...

Good luck getting them to stay there. No doubt there are those who are willing and good you housed them.

The rest of them will either get thrown out for drugs/mental illness or ruin the place they move into. And I need my neighbors to be quiet at night so that I can keep my job. That is hard when you need to have the TV on at max volume because you need it to drown out the voices in your head.

I'm thinking primarily from a local government perspective here. You can either provide for the basic human needs of your citizens, or you can hope businesses in the area do it for you. If you choose the latter and they don't, well...

That said, if you close your restroom, they only go away from your area if there are other restrooms nearby. If there aren't, you're just making it that more likely that you'll find urine and feces outside somewhere near your business, and that older people and people with medical conditions avoid the area (and thus don't spend money at your businesses, by the way). Classic coordination problem: while it may be in your selfish interest to close down your restroom and push people to your neighbors, if everyone does that you're all worse off.

...and that's the situation we're in right now.

If we're talking bigger picture, the important basic need here is housing.

Legalize housing in cities, and this problem mostly goes away, along with many others.

As DoreenMichele mentioned in a sibling thread, remember that the issue that spawned this discussion was about the lack of bathrooms for delivery drivers. Solving the problem for the homeless doesn't remove the need for public restrooms.

...and I also mentioned the lack of bathrooms being an issue for people with certain medical conditions. I mean sure, I have easy access to a bathroom while I'm at home, but a big appeal of living in the city is being able to walk or take public transit to get places. That also means you're potentially 30-45 minutes away from home, though, not to mention the 30-45 minutes that it took to get there; if you're like me and you don't know for sure that there will be a bathroom you can use somewhere along the route, it's a huge disincentive to go there.

Well, I think solving the homeless situation will open up a lot of of public restrooms that are now closed because they become overrun by desperate vagrants.

But I also agree that I'm sidetracking the discussion :)

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