[ExI] what would you do?

[Kelly Anderson]

On Tue, Oct 10, 2023 at 6:04 PM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> Did it not occur that homeless people are often victimized, and are much
> more often than not poorly served by the police?

About a year ago, I moved away from Las Vegas. Interesting place with
regards to homeless because it rarely gets cold enough to die from
exposure there. Henderson passed a city ordinance that no homeless
people were allowed within some number of feet of a city park, then
built so many city parks that there were no spaces in between where a
homeless person could legally set up business. It worked well in
reducing the homeless population in that city.

Las Vegas, on the other hand, has so many homeless people that it is
difficult to go five minutes without encountering them. They set fire
to my shop dumpster a couple of times while I was there. They loved
stealing ice from the next door neighbor's trash (he had a business
selling snow in Vegas... awesome... but a different thread.) and
generally loved stealing things from local businesses when they could
get away with it.

I went down in the tunnels a couple of times to visit with the
permanent homeless that live down there. Despite the occasional flash
flood death, it's probably one of the better places for homeless
people in the USA. They are largely out of sight of the tourists
there, and enjoy the good weather underground. It's obviously too hot
to be upstairs much of the summer.

The thing that made me want to post though was the stupidity of the
government there. Some enterprising bleeding-heart types built about a
hundred tiny homes and made them available to the homeless. Since they
didn't meet the zoning requirements for a minimum sized house,
however, the city bulldozed them... quietly... after a group of
demonstrators stood in front of the dozers Arthur Dent style... I
can't quite understand the hate for tiny homes for the homeless. It's
like denying cancer patients drugs because they aren't tested. The
government is putting up a great fight against the fundamentalist
Christians to decide which is more idiotic.

-Kelly