We’ve all seen them. Beneath highways, on streetsides, between alleys—corners packed with makeshift shelters. It’s a common sight, a reminder that homelessness is very much part of people's reality.
But once in a while they seem to vanish, only to reappear elsewhere.
The reason? The city sometimes orders those encampments to be taken down and cleared out, often destroying what belonging and personal space the people living there had.
As you might imagine, these kinds of raids only serve to shift the problem elsewhere. It’s nothing but a Band-Aid fix. After all, the homeless don’t just disappear when nobody can see them. However, that’s not the only method cities try to use to deal with the problem of homelessness.
Another anti-homeless tactic cities use is through designs of new architectures. Ranging from making benches impossible to lie down on or putting rocks to discourage camping, these are how they redirect the homeless to places where people can’t see them.
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| A strangely excessive number of bike racks. |
Rather than treating the situation like hiding dust under the carpet, there needs to be another approach to the problem. The solutions should be long term changes at the root—proactive methods rather than reacting. (Learn more)
Creating affordable housing and providing financial support to at-risk people to prevent homelessness is better than handing out help after someone ends up in the streets. It will remove the need to spend more resources and time on ‘fixing’ a preventable problem. By having a larger safety net, we can hope for a less bleaker world for everyone involved. (Learn more on the effect of criminalization)
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