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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @09:13PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @09:13PM (#579430)

    Public housing erodes the incentive to work

    ...in the way that not having an address incentivizes getting a job?

    ...in the way that subsidies to megacorporations makes them less willing to produce?

    .
    ...and in the way that tax breaks for the 1 Percent causes them to create new USAian businesses and new USAian jobs? /sarc

    .
    Public housing that isn't just warehousing for the poor and which looks like other people's homes actually works out well.

    ...and, if we're going to keep Capitalism as an economic system, then when the boom-and-bust Capitalists YET AGAIN completely bork the economy, some Keynesian job creation on the part of the gov't would be apt.

    USA did this previously and, on FDR's watch, 15 million idled people were turned into consumers once again (saving Capitalism from itself).

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @09:46PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @09:46PM (#579445)

    See "ECONOMICS -- PUBLIC AND PRIVATE CHOICE" ISBN-13 978-1-111-97021-4 and ISBN-10 1-111-97021-1 Part 6, Special Topic 6 ("Lessions from the Great Depression"), page 627

    Basically, FDR prevented recovery. See the book for 14 pages of explanation with lots of nice graphs.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @10:02PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @10:02PM (#579452)

      ...because people without jobs and without disposable income are what gets an economy back on its feet, apparently.

      ...and I've already noted that the Capitalists weren't hiring.
      Keynes (FDR's advisor) had learned the lessons of the The Long Depression (1873 -1996): People idled by boom-and-bust Capitalism produce a downward economic spiral.
      (Dubya, O'Bummer, and Drumpf clearly all failed Macroeconomics.)

      -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @11:20PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @11:20PM (#579494)

        Businesses ("capitalists") were starting to hire again until government fucked things up, turning a short-term problem into a huge disaster.

        That book is a well-written college textbook. Get yourself a copy, open your mind a bit, see the evidence laid out, and learn.