Publicly funded but not for the public.
And before anyone makes a comment about the unhoused probably not paying taxes … neither do any of the children or retirees who use the service every single day of the year.
We’ve pretty much just abandoned any concept of citizenship or civic responsibility…
Yeah, what the fuck are we paying taxes for if not to help those who aren’t or can’t?
getting a “protect my property value” vibes from this policy. Governing systems should focus first on lifting up our most vulnerable, and people selling houses just isnt it.
It’s only getting turned off at night, not completely disallowing them from using it. I don’t see what the problem is. I can’t go and take out a book at 1am, I shouldn’t also be allowed to use their WiFi.
you could check out an ebook using their services if you had access to wifi
I live in a rural area without broadband access. Any quality broadband access. During the pandemic, kids sat in their parents’ cars (typically after they got home from work) to do their remote-learning homework in front of the public library to get free access to decent connection speeds AND access the library files electronically (for California check here https://www.library.ca.gov/services/to-libraries/ebooks-for-all/ - every state has an equivalent ). People, including kids, check out books (and periodicals) electronically 24/7.
Why not? It cost them next to nothing to leave it on. It actually is more work to turn off and on the router every day. I don’t see why not being to check out books had to do with internet. Why does it have to be all or nothing?
Exactly this. A housed, or unhoused person, can’t use the library 24/7, so why should there be an exception for Wi-Fi at night?
because it costs $0 and unhoused people deserve access to education and resources at night same as those who are housed and have their own wifi?
this isnt about the wifi anyway, it’s an attempt to chase homeless people out of populated areas bc rich people are scared to be confronted with the human cost of their actions.
you’re fucking disgusting. i wish you the worst things.
Not the person you are replying to, but that’s really uncalled for. It’s a difference of opinion and none of us are in the position of decision making for the San Francisco Public Library.
A better policy would be for the city to provide universal Wi-Fi access across the city, instead of putting the burden on one public entity in one part of the city.
To be fair, several of these responses have been pretty disgusting in their disregard for homeless people. Also, why is it “unhoused” now and not “homeless”. Seems like the semantics are something George Carlin would have fun with.
I’m not sure what their preferred would be. Homeless, unsheltered, unhoused, I guess it would be important to find out from them. Homeless might be a misnomer as some of them may find that anywhere is their home? Not sure, not my space
what people call you and how you’re referred to affects how you’re treated, directly. this is why propaganda works. i’d like to think carlin would understand that fucking around with marginalized groups trying to better their perception and situation is probably not super cool, and that it’d be much more chill to go after the powerful assholes doing the marginalizing. but who knows.
the word homeless has stigma attached thanks to movies, tv, politicians, news. unhoused drops alot of that stigma. removing that stigma is important in the interest of allowing people to feel empathy for those affected rather than fear. i still slip every now and again but the rationale makes sense and i’m trying to do better.
I’m guessing you’ve never seen the bit where Carlin goes from Shell Shocked -> Battle Fatigued -> Operational Exhaustion -> Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The whole thing about changing these terms is it tends to undermine the seriousness of the issues being discussed. And the marginalized people that are effected.
I was with you until the end there. Really uncalled for to call someone disgusting and wish harm upon them because they have a different opinion than yours.
If you read the article, it’s not about rich people seeing homeless folks, it’s about vandalism and open drug use on the sidewalks. You don’t have to be rich or white to feel uneasy while stepping over bodies sprawled out on the sidewalk or walking by human waste and needles in the bushes the next morning.
Perhaps there’s a middle ground like keeping the Wi-Fi on but requiring login with a (free) library card.
if your opinion is, it’s correct to chase homeless people out of the few spaces they have access to, being told you’re an anti-social monster who doesn’t deserve anything good until you fix your revolting black heart, is getting off super easy.
opinions on how to best reorganize urban settings to promote access to parks and public transportation? i’ll be respectful. “opinions” that displace and kill people? they create complicity in murder and violence and you deserve to be absolutely and firmly cast out of any meaningful discussion.
if you’re uncomfortable with unhoused people existing, go do some activism. when enough of you murderous clowns come around and something gets done to house these people, great. we’re good. until then, shut the fuck up you monster, they hang out in populated spaces as means of survival, not to inconvenience dumb privileged slobs like you.
there’s no middle ground or space for debate here in ethical or pragmatic terms. your behaviour is disgusting and violent. it doesn’t matter that you’re too stupid or selfish to know or care.
Just a reminder that Jello Biafra from the San Francisco group Dead Kennedys wrote a song called Kill The Poor, satirizing the heartless attitudes even back in 1980. He also ran for mayor of SF. Part of his platform was businessmen in downtown would have to wear clown suits. Would have been great if he had won.
hahahahah i know little bits about biafra’s delightful weirdness. i’d rather see a well-meaning bonkers ass joke mayor than a serious one who gets a bunch of people killed on purpose
The reason the library isn’t open 24/7 is that it’s expensive to keep paying people to staff it for so many more hours, plus those are hours you’d have to pay even more because working at night sucks. The WiFi access point doesn’t have those issues. You can leave it on and help people for almost no money.
What crime is being committed while unhoused folks are online? Cybercrime? Are they pretending to be Nigerian princes?
Read the article, the problem isn’t their online activities but the wifi attracting them to cluster outside the library building. The residents don’t want the homeless hanging around outside the library and turning off the wifi would reduce their incentive to be there.
Maybe instead of taking things away, we should be providing tax funded public wifi in more places. The internet isn’t a luxury anymore, and those without homes still have a right to access it (yeah even at night).
brilliant. it’s practically a utility at this point; i hate going places and seeing weird shitty scam ‘freeATTwifi’ everywhere. public internet now.
The residents don’t want the homeless hanging around outside the library and turning off the wifi would reduce their incentive to be there.
i mean bluntly, sucks to be them? but get over it. homeless people are people too! the obvious solution is to provide them with social services first if this is the objection (which, to be clear, it generally isn’t–it’s that homeless people exist and aren’t out of mind)
classic nimby bs. what they dont realize of course is that getting rid of wifi isnt gonna stop them from congregating, theyll just congregate elsewhere
Which is the point. That’s a win for the NIMBYs who got this policy enacted. It’s literally no longer in their backyard.
The actions of the library are cowardly and the justifications of the residents in the area are abhorrent. God forbid we do something to help those in need, let’s just push them out of sight instead.
This article has a great deep dive on how we have so few “free” or community-sourced places in the US that they often get used as a catch-all for any and all social problems we have. See: libraries as homeless shelters. From the article:
What’s happened is we’ve stigmatized our public spaces, because we’ve done so little to address core problems that we’ve turned them into spaces of last resort for people who need a hand. And as we do that, we send another message to affluent, middle-class Americans, and that is: If you want a gathering place, build your own in the private sector. So we have a lot of work to do.
That’s a great point – by making public places the only places you can exist while poor, you push all the homeless there and everyone else ends up avoiding it and going to places they have to spend money at. Enforced consumption.
Picnic in the park? Sorry, tent city there. Better go to a restaurant instead.
Baseball at the diamond? Needles and excrement, let’s go bowling instead.
Grab some books from the library? Someone’s smoking crack in the bathroom, I’ll just buy the book from a store. Or Amazon.
Ideally these public spaces would be for everyone, but more and more they’re repurposed for social services.
Obvious solution: stop making people homeless.
Everything is pay for use.
There are so many problems with this.
Far too many homeless people, there is so much wealth in this nation, there is no reason we cannot provide ample shelter. This probably is going to continue to become worse with the disproportionate wealth distribution and the continual increase in use or automation and AI.
Additionally, we should have broader access to wifi, specifically for those who are homeless and need access to online resources, so they can eventually no longer be homeless. Seems like a great federal program opportunity, if we actually want people to be able to recover from being homeless. No one is going to become homeless or stay homeless because of the badass government subsidized wifi.
This seems incredibly self perpetuating on the cities behalf. It’s like making places uncomfortable to sleep upon… Why not invest that money into someplace people can goto sleep and get the assistance they need to exist in society.
I’ve been to places that had free municipal wifi, mostly at libraries and bus stops. It seems like a small service that is generally helpful to people without access to their own wifi. I think the better solution is to have more places with free wifi at night so people don’t have to congregate in the one small area.
There aren’t many places the unhoused are allowed to exist in public and cutting them off from essential services only makes it harder for them to better their situation.
Internet should already be a human right at this point. It’s a treasure trove of information that really catapults someone who has access to it ahead of someone who doesn’t, meaning internet access is definitely an index of (in)equality.
to better their situation
Well, that is, assuming they want to. Some, definitely. Long term loiterers, not so sure.
People who are addicted or who have given up to that degree are less likely to want help if they think real life can only be totally miserable for them (like, “the world is unbearable, there’s nothing good left for me except [drug name here]”). Same reason people who are depressed turn to drinking. Making the lives of unsheltered people even worse, thus making drugs more appealing in comparison, is counterproductive. And the longer they’re stuck in that, the more that’ll just feel like what life is to them.
Maybe people who don’t want to, or don’t act like they want to, better their situation actually would if they could see any hope for it, and if the path looked more doable and less like scaling mount everest with a broken leg.
I think anybody can think of times they didn’t want to do something that would benefit them - clean a house, do their homework, go to work in the morning - and other times that the situation was different and so it was much easier to do.
Seems like the white thing to do
Not quite to aggressive architecture levels of dickishness, but still.
it’s the exact same thing imo :(
For all those times I was going to commit a crime, but the WiFi was out.
nothing drives me more insane than artificial restrictions placed on digital technology that could otherwise be infinitely helpful
I just want to say Mission Local is pretty freakin cool for being one of the last remaining newspapers that does their own independent journalism.
Well written piece. Homelessness is a multifaceted issue.
I do know that if you have no cell service, having internet / Wi-Fi is essential to stay in touch with others. More communities should offer free Wi-Fi.
this is symptomatic of how genuinely subhuman American society at-large treats homeless people, even though it is trivial in American society to become homeless. one wrong bill, one bad week, or one day of being in the wrong place is enough–and yet it is completely accepted that something of that sort happening to you places you into a class unworthy of rights and basic services afforded to others. it’s absurd!
I am not American so I can’t claim to know about the causes of homelessness there, but I think this is because the homeless can generally be sorted into two categories. One is, as you mentioned, the people who unfortunately encountered financial trouble and lost their home. These people are legally homeless but usually invisible, because they move in with their friends and family or live in their car. They are generally able to financially provide for themselves and will eventually have a home again. Society is very empathetic to this group and there is a lot of support for them, but they’re not what people think of when homelessness is discussed.
The public perception of homelessness is the second type of visible and persistently homeless people, the ones you see on the streets. They suffer from mental disorders and drug addiction, so they lack a support network, cannot provide for themselves normally and will often turn to crime to survive. It’s not unexpected that people see this group as “assaults people in public”, “attracts crime”, “leaves trash and needles around” and lose empathy for them. Now I’m not an expert on this issue and this categorization is obviously a generalization, but it helps to understand why people hold certain perspectives in this debate.
this is less of a dichotomy than i think is described here, though: almost all people in the second category were at one point people in the first and end up there because the support described in the first category disappears. when you become homeless, that frequently means you lose almost everything–and it’s really, really hard to build up from nothing in modern society because the expectation is that you have money to survive, and there’s only so far people are willing to pay your way forward with that expectation.
(there’s also the reality that even if you have something, there’s only so long you can make that last without a job–and for a homeless person getting one can be functionally impossible, no matter how menial. housing is also catastrophically expensive, so even if they clear the job hurdle once they’re down, the housing one may be likewise impossible to clear. this treadmill is a big part of why so many people become visibly and persistently homeless)
As someone who deals with homeless and near homeless a lot you’re absolutely right. Our system constantly fails the most vulnerable by not providing then with support when they have none. I do my best to provide them with contacts to resources and social workers but those resources are incredibly limited and I’m sure most end up without help regardless.
The problem unhoused people face is not nighttime library access it’s housing. We all know that the reason they’re shutting their wifi off at night is because while for some homeless people this wifi is a lifeline, for some others it’s where they get their porn or where they hang out to do drugs and browse the internet. But the fundamental problem remains the same, because they have no where to go home to, whether someone is fapping or connecting with helpful resources, it’s all done in public.
If you think turning off the wifi is going to stop people from masturbating…
I kind of took it the other way. If they think because I have a roof over my head I’m not watching porn and doing drugs, they would be very mistaken.
That’s exactly how I meant it! Lots of people watch porn and do drugs, it’s not a problem to watch porn in your own house. That’s why I’m saying the problem is housing. The solution isn’t allow people to watch porn and do drugs in public, it’s housing so they can do it in private like normal people.
Yeah but building housing is expensive and difficult and takes a long time. But turning off wifi is easy and cheap and has an immediate effect.
Probably too tired of cleaning up human shit from around the library. This is SF we’re talking about. There’s literally a poop map
You’ve gotta think that these people would rather use a toilet. Is the public toilet situation in SF really that bad?
Do you live in the states? I’ve never really been to a city where public restroom access is well advertised or even convenient. You’re expected to go inside places of business.
It’s bad everywhere.
There are no public toilets in the vast majority of San Francisco.
Do you think people who don’t have access to a bathroom are going to stop shitting?
Sounds like a great place to take a piss
