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Comment by notaustinpowers | Hacker News Reader

I hope you never become homeless.

I was, for 4 weeks, and my local libraries wifi is what helped me stay in touch with my parents when my phone data was shut off for nonpayment. It helped me secure a job back at home.

You need to rethink your idea of what homelessness is. It's not antisocial drug users. It's also LGBT kids thrown out of their home. It's families being evicted because the parents lost their job. Even if they were antisocial drug users, sympathy, support, and assistance do more help than turning a blind eye and hoping they go away.

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Correct, ~75% of homeless people are "invisibly homeless", don't have drug use issues, aren't criminals, take showers and don't practice antisocial behaviors. The problem is that the 25% of homeless who are drug addicts and are extremely anti social completely destroy the system for everyone else. We don't have a good vocabulary for this. The issue is that the street campers at the library were meth heads who shit in the street, screamed at each other in the middle of the night, and caused a huge amount of disruption for the people who live near the library (I live 1 block away from here). We need to have far less tolerance for anti social behaviors in SF, including within permanently supportive housing and nightly shelters. The other issue is that when you spend a ton of money to support the invisibly homeless folks, and tolerate the anti social chronically homeless, you create a giant magnet that pulls in drug users and anti social homeless from the nearby communities and state and you become the dumping ground for everyone's chronically homeless. It is not my problem as a resident of SF to pay for the permanent supportive housing of a chronically homeless meth head from Humbolt county who moved here for a 700 dollar monthly check, reliable street sleeping, passive police force, and steady supply of drugs.

Same boat, there was a time for me when if it wasn't for a library computer I could use for free, I wouldn't have been able to get a job

> my local libraries wifi is what helped me stay in touch with my parents when my phone data was shut off for nonpayment.

After today seeing 4 (customer-less) kiosks scattered across my medium-sized AZ town attempting to give away free cell phones, free tablets, and free cell service (presumably to those who qualify on the basis of need, presumably funded by the Federal Government), and then returning home and reading this thread in which it is frequently claimed that open WiFi is providing more or less the last comm link between homeless people (who evidently have phones but not cell service?) and the wider world and the possibilities it might offer, I find myself wondering "[why] don't the homeless qualify for these free [cell phones and] cell services?" Is this simply an oversight by Federal legislators (i.e. requiring a recipient to have a fixed mailing address (or: documentable proof of poverty?)) If so, why is nobody mentioning a need to agitate to remove the legal requirements preventing those most needing this help to be eligible to receive it? Simply providing free (voice & data providing) SIMs (which the Federal Govt already seems to be willing to provide) to homeless persons should obviate this entire sub-issue? Or would this (essentially handing out SIM's to anyone who asks for one) risk destabilizing the entire for-pay cell-service industry sector?

As I said in a different comment to another user, compassion fatigue is real. Maybe this makes me cold-hearted, but where I live, sympathy, support, and assistance enable these people to voluntarily continue their lifestyle. 90+% of the homeless people I encounter are addicted to drugs and/or have a significant, untreated mental illness, to the point where they'd prefer to stay on the street as opposed to working. These people don't use the library to look for jobs, they use the library to sell stolen shit on craigslist in order to fund their drug use.

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