Those evil socialists are hiding their homeless in homes : memes

[–] [email protected] 11 points 15 hours ago

I'm hiding a homeless person in my home, which is risking eviction to keep someone off the streets. Here, most tenancies don't allow you to "sublet", the landlord legally gets the final say about who lives in their property.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 21 hours ago (3 children)

wait I'm confused how is the top middle picture anti-homeless architecture

[–] [email protected] 38 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Homeless people sleep on the vents for warmth.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

The vents are still accessible though? And you have these near mannequins to hang your stuff?

Edit: honest question, possibly unnecessary joke.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Let them eat cake. Try sleeping on them and report back to us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_architecture

[–] [email protected] 24 points 19 hours ago (3 children)

I feel like we're talking past each other. I'm wondering how the weird human-shaped things added on top of the vents constitute hostile architecture - how are they meant to to discourage people from sleeping there? This is me trying to learn, I'm very aware that sleeping on vents isn't exactly comfortable but how do these things make it less so?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

I see what you're digging at, I was confused by them too. Hostile architecture meets just plain terrible design?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Right? It looks like there was an attempt (gold star) at hostility but they still wanted it to look somewhat aesthetically pleasing and mostly forgot about the hostile part? Or maybe I'm just not seeing most of the hostile part, that's what I'm trying to figure out.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 12 hours ago

Nah I think you got it. Veiling art as hostile architecture is fairly common so I think the artist lead took over and they forgot the intent of ruining someone's ability to sleep haha

[–] [email protected] 7 points 16 hours ago

You'd probably have to lie between them instead of just looking at a photo, to assess if it's still possible.

Clearly they were put there with the intention of making it difficult/uncomfortable to lie down on the subway vent. If they were installed incompetently that doesn't make them unhostile though, it just makes them ineffective for their obviously intended purpose.

[+] [email protected] -9 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

how do these things make it less [comfortable]?

You already answered your own question:

weird human-shaped things added on top of the vents

It’s hard to believe you’re not trolling.

https://www.azuremagazine.com/article/unpleasant-design-hostile-architecture/

I also came across some inventive designs that I haven’t seen elsewhere, such as metal silhouettes soldered on top of warm ventilation exhausts at a CTrain station (below), a place where you could consider camping for the night.

Metal silhouettes prevent homeless people from sleeping over these CTrain grates in Calgary.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

I really doubt they're trolling, it's a real question. A person can clearly fit between the gaps and sleep.

It would block things like tents and mattresses, but it's reasonable [edit: even if ignorant] to ask how it works if it doesn't obstruct a sleeping person. For what it's worth, in my city, it's rare to see tents or even mattresses, usually just blankets and shopping carts.

Try sleeping on them and report back to us.

No need for that kind of talk, it's as pointless as saying "Go there and prove you can't sleep on them".

[–] [email protected] 15 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

It’s hard to believe you’re not trolling.

I swear I'm not. It's entirely possible that I'm being slow, but I'm really just trying to understand so I can identify these things better in the future. Because I seriously don't get it, there's still plenty of room to lie down between them?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago

Part of the hostile architecture is the hostility you receive by asking about how it is hostile.

I immediately wondered the same thing so, it's not you. The angry replies are because some people are just always looking for something/someone to be mad at.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 18 hours ago (3 children)

I think you’re confusing real life homelessness with a cartoon of a drunk who lies down to sleep it off for the night.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

I assume what you're implying is that you can't put a tent there. Okay, why not fucking say that then? Homeless people around here rarely use tents, for reasons that I do not know because I am privileged enough to not be homeless, and they could probably just arrange their stuff around those shapes, put their mattress between them and go to sleep - which is why "tent" isn't the first thing that popped into my head.

Thank you for making me jump through hoops to understand a thing.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 18 hours ago

That guy is tripping.your questions are along the same as the ones I have. A lot of unhoused people I have seen don't have tents either.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 17 hours ago

Even so, you could drape a blanket over 3 of them and you've got yourself a free tent, so your question still stands. The dude's just an asshole

[–] [email protected] 7 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

I have seen a lot of homeless in downtown Toronto who have a cart or backpack of belongings, and sleep directly on the subway vents with no tent. I get what the other guy is asking, I also don’t see how these metal silhouettes are going to stop someone sleeping on that grate.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours ago

They won't necessarily stop someone from sleeping on them entirely. It will certainly limit how they can be slept on. I imagine the point is to make it just uncomfortable enough for homeless people to look to sleep elsewhere. I also imagine that they would completely block these off if there was a quick and reasonably aesthetically pleasing way to do so without much cost. This is simply the compromise they've come to.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours ago

One of the examples of hostile architecture in the OP is bars on a park bench. Is that to prevent pitching a tent too?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 21 hours ago

Folks lie on those vents in the winter because they're warm. Putting stuff in the way makes that harder

[–] [email protected] 9 points 21 hours ago

They look human like, maybe they are meant to cast a shadow or something to make people uncomfortable like somebody is watching?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 19 hours ago

There’s a literal glowie downvoting every socialist thing 😂

[+] [email protected] -6 points 11 hours ago (3 children)

then why has china got so many homeless people?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago

huh?

However, the people of China can afford to buy these extremely expensive properties. In fact, 90% of families in the country own their home, giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

Because China is capitalist, despite being formally led by a communist party. It has private property on means of production, and it is defining Chinese economy just like any other capitalist one. Socialism, by definition, requires social ownership of means of production, which is not the case in China; the term was appropriated and wrongfully used by US and several other countries to define economies with more state control and/or social policies, but this is simply not what socialism is.

Interestingly, China has entire ghost towns full of homes ready to accept people in - but, as in any capitalist economy, homes are seen as an investment, and state subsidies are low, pricing out the homeless. They have more than enough homes, they just chose to pursue a system that doesn't make homes and homeless meet.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago

China is demonstrably not capitalist, and people who keep repeating that it is are utterly clueless. If China was capitalist then it would be developing exactly the same way actual capitalist countries are developing. You will not see any of the following happening in a capitalist country ever

The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf

From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China%E2%80%99s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4

From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&amp%3Blocations=CN&amp%3Bstart=2008

By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html

https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience

[–] [email protected] -2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Not actually democratic, thus not socialist.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago

seems like people who actually live in China disagree with you champ

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