Falling asleep on a bus is a great way to get victimized. The homeless are most likely to be victimized by other homeless. It almost never gets reported to the police.

It's not a shelter and it's not meant to be converted into one. To me it's an indication of an overworked and failing system that leaves people in bad situations because it has nowhere else for them to go.

Sure, you could argue that because there's currently no obvious major problems, that you could just leave it as is and be entirely unconcerned with it, or even go so far as to suggest that anyone who does want to fix it is doing so in bad faith. I think that's cruel and lazy.

The actual problem? These people need _real_ shelter.

Whilst it's not a crime not to have a house, providing housing via free buses is a very poor way to address people who don't have houses, and it has an unfortunate side effect of pushing people who would otherwise use public transportation away from using it.

It’s not easy to shelter people.

In Ithaca we recently built this place

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/115398619308992584

which is all low income housing on top of a conference center with maybe 1/4 of the units for people who had been unhoused. I think most of the people there are not criminally minded and keep to themselves but there are a few people there who are starting fires, dealing drugs, and causing damage. (Note a few windows in that image are busted out) Many homeless people have dogs that are important to them and wouldn’t be housed if they couldn’t bring their dogs, but… last year they had an outbreak of parovirus because dogs were having puppies and the puppies weren’t getting shots. A friend of mine got bit by a dog across the street from that place and thought it belonged to someone who lived there.

Some of it is people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder can be almost impossible to live with if they aren’t getting treatment and I’m worried that deinstitutionalization will have a even more profoundly negative legacy seen 50 years from now than it already does. Not least, a 20 year old today spent many years of their life in a classroom where a ‘special’ kid sucked all the air out of the room and will probably be highly receptive to the notion that if we ‘get rid’ of 5% of people we can live in a utopia. If being in public means being in a space dominated by someone screaming at the demons they hallucinated then people will move to the suburbs instead of the downtown, they will not support public transit, they will order a private taxi for their burrito instead of eating out. They’ll retreat to Facebook.

Alternately, the US is simply much more tolerant of dysfunction and antisocial behavior.