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posted by Fnord666 on Monday October 09 2017, @07:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the crappy-situation dept.

The Guardian brings us a disturbing story from Anaheim California:

Somewhere in the southern California city of Anaheim, less than five miles from Disneyland, three porta-potties – two pink, one gray – are locked in a city storage facility. It's not where they're supposed to be.

They were meant for a dusty homeless encampment that sprawls along the west bank of the Santa Ana river, and is home to hundreds of men, women and children in tents and other makeshift shelters.

But the toilets are sitting unused after being confiscated by the city, and the residents have nowhere to relieve themselves except in the bushes, or in buckets, or in the cramped privacy of their own tents. Activists are up in arms over the primitive conditions in which camp inhabitants are living, and which, in their view, the local government appears to have sanctioned.

"This is a public health crisis for the homeless community," said Mohammed Aly, a homeless advocate and lawyer who helped install the toilets. Not least it was a case, he said, of providing people with simple human dignity.

[...] The closest public toilet to the Anaheim camp is over a mile upriver from where many riverbed residents live. So when the porta-potties arrived in May, after being purchased and delivered by local activist groups, they were a welcome alternative to walking half an hour or more to use the bathroom, or taking the more popular route of relieving oneself in a bucket and dumping the refuse in the riverbed.

But just 72 hours after the toilets were installed, there was bad news: the council of wealthy Orange County insisted the porta-potties be removed from their land, saying their presence was unauthorized.

Aly subsequently moved them about 300 yards, out of the county's jurisdiction, and onto city land. That lasted a week, until the city, too, ordered them removed, citing local ordinances regulating the installation of porta-potties. When Aly and other activists didn't remove the toilets themselves, the city government confiscated them, and took them into storage.

[...] Aly said he's not giving up on the toilets. And if he can't work something out with the city or county governments to get them back in place, he knows what he's going to do.

"Our next step is to proceed anyways," he said. "To leave the portable restrooms on a trailer, park the trailer adjacent to the riverbed, and move it around every 72 hours."

If the city of Anaheim doesn't want the homeless to use toilets, perhaps city council members could offer their bathrooms instead.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Monday October 09 2017, @08:22AM (5 children)

    by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Monday October 09 2017, @08:22AM (#579187) Homepage Journal

    Nice North Korean style solution there. Liberalism all grown up shows its true NIMBY colors and turns out worse than "National Socialism" of the 1930's. Way to go California. The other 49 states called, they want a divorce. Sad that other parts of the world model themselves of of this screwball state.

    Oops. The Orange County Government [wikipedia.org] is dominated by Republicans.

    Oops. And Anaheim is considered, by Republicans/Conservatives*, to be the third best city in the US for conservatives* [ocweekly.com].

    So why are you shitting on your own, AC?

    *This word is code for "radical reactionary."

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
    Starting Score:    1  point
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       Insightful=2, Informative=1, Touché=1, Total=4
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @10:48AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @10:48AM (#579226)

    ...in places.
    Hillary took the OC in 2016.
    Latinos and people of Vietnamese extraction tend to vote Blue and their numbers are rising in the OC.
    The county is shifting away from its traditional Red hue.

    Anaheim is [...] the third best city in the US for conservatives.

    Yup. Very business-friendly.
    I don't like to go near Anaheim.
    Seems like they're always tearing up something and replacing it with something else that's bigger.
    If you don't make an effort to find out about that stuff, you can run into roads that are blocked off|bus stops out of service|yada,yada,yada.

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by NotSanguine on Monday October 09 2017, @11:04AM (2 children)

      by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Monday October 09 2017, @11:04AM (#579232) Homepage Journal

      ...in places.
      Hillary took the OC in 2016.

      Yes. And those places that are still quite red include Anaheim.

      And go ahead and look up the "Orange County Board of Supervisors." It's dominated by Rs.

      The article is about the folks who confiscated the only bathrooms the homeless there had. And those folks are the radical reactionaries who (inaccurately) call themselves "conservatives"

      I pointed all this out for the benefit of an AC who probably blames "teh beaners" when his toast gets a little too brown.

      That the demographics of Orange County are changing isn't news. It's also not relevant to the issues in TFS/TFA.

      --
      No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @07:15PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @07:15PM (#579368)

        Oh, I'm fairly informed on the state of OC politics.
        http://www.orangejuiceblog.com#rss-17 [orangejuiceblog.com]

        (inaccurately) call themselves "conservatives"

        Amen.

        for the benefit of an AC who probably blames "teh beaners"

        OK.

        not relevant

        Maybe not at this moment, but changes to the representation rules plus shifting demographics will likely be pivotal to the direction things go in the (near?) future.

        -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

        • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday October 09 2017, @07:54PM

          by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Monday October 09 2017, @07:54PM (#579387) Homepage Journal

          Maybe not at this moment, but changes to the representation rules plus shifting demographics will likely be pivotal to the direction things go in the (near?) future.

          That's certainly a possibility. I wonder though, will that near future come before the next homeless person needs to take a dump?

          --
          No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @05:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @05:24PM (#579321)

    Hahaha I was waiting for an ignorant turd to try and blame liberals for this crap. Ignorant sucker, can't even use Wikipedia!