Today’s photo is ugly. If you follow me on my main twitter, you’ve already seen it, but I’m just so incensed about it that I have to rant for a bit.
I want to make clear I’m not mad at the park goers who put the trash here. In fact I appreciate that they at least tried to throw their trash away, but were simply hampered by the city’s absolutely pointless anti-homeless policies.
How are two things related? Well it is part of anti-homeless “hostile architecture” planning to reduce the number of public trashcans. The assumption is that homeless people congregate near trashcans, so fewer trashcans=fewer “unsightly” poor people. For fuck’s sake, I KNOW it doesn’t make sense, but here we are.
There is a legit tent city behind the restrooms at the park, by the way. I refuse to take a photo of it because I do not want to invade what little privacy those people have right now, nor give the city an excuse to kick them out. So we can see how well these policies are designed to make homeless people even more miserable, because that’s how a healthy, successful society treats its citizens. /sarcasm
Back to my point: there used to be twice as many trashcans in the park. I should count how many there are now (I’ll do that tomorrow) but I could give anyone a tour and point out exactly where trashcans USED to be. Even back then the trashcans would get full over the weekend, but not to the point where people could not even throw anything away.
Trashing up the joint to “own” the homeless people, amirite???!?!?
This is absurd. Give us, all of us, the trashcans back.