This is one of those unmentionable topics in the US that confuse a newcomer to no end. Nobody speaks about the reasons for the car culture and everybody’s preference to live in a small town 30 miles away from any city center. Nobody mentions the purpose behind the absence of public transportation from cities to suburbs or of sidewalks.
The moment you figure it out you become a real American. Then it’s your turn never to say what the purpose is and pretend that you hate all this when it’s the only thing that gives you your safe, lovely, paradisiacal existence.
Clarissa's Blog 
It gets mentioned all the time by parents of school-aged kids, so long as the code words “good schools” are used.
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Uhh, I seem to have internalized the car culture without ever articulating the why, so I have no idea what you’re hinting at. Is someone going to admit to it here or are we going to let unmentionables be unmentionables? 😄
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Oh, I didn’t click on the twitter link.
Well, of course!
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People want to be far away from the crime-ridden, dysfunctional, chaotic areas. And they want to be unreachable to the inhabitants of those areas.
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And those people don’t have cars?
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Ever wondered why bus transit is so unpopular in the US?
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I traveled from Montreal to Indiana and back by a Greyhound bus many times.
Oh, to be young again….
I’m not recommending this to anybody not very fresh and healthy.
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I used the city buses for years when I lived in the big urb. Then I finally got my own car and I never did it again. Not once, not even for the sake of nostalgia, and even though parking was terrible everywhere and I hate driving in snow. Still not as bad as the buses.
They don’t have a doorman, and all you have to do to get a free unlimited bus pass is walk into the city office and show your “mentally ill” card. Or maybe just swear a lot and yell loudly at invisible enemies.
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Oh, it’s right up there with people talking about pedestrian traffic deaths in my town. We have a lot of them. Highest rate in the state IIRC.
Yeah, we have bad drivers and poor pedestrian infrastructure. Not really worse than other places I’ve lived.
The part you’re not allowed to mention is that we also seem to have the highest proportion of brain-damaged meth addicts living in our urban forests. That’s very highly correlated with the pedestrian deaths.
But the solution is obviously more pedestrian overpasses or something. Definitely not arresting panhandlers.
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From the state rankings, latitude seems to be more important than how drug-addled or insane tthe people are. https://smartgrowthamerica.org/dangerous-by-design/state-of-the-states/
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Uh. I don’t know where you live, but here in FL you become deeply familiar with the connection between latitude and vagrancy. Drifters tend to drift southward, and home in on beach towns like iron filings to magnets. It’s much easier to sleep in the woods all year down here than up north where you lose fingers and toes doing that, and it’s easier to beg in tourist corridors.
So, latitude, crazy, drug-addled: not intuitive I know, but those things are related.
If you’ve ever wondered where the “Florida man” trope comes from… that’s part of it. Part of it is sunshine laws, which mean arrest reports are public records and anybody (including the press) can access them. But the other part is that we just have more crazy people per capita, because they import themselves from all over the country, drifting south until they hit a coastline.
I understand there are always a few crazy people who go the opposite direction and end up in Alaska, but it seems to be a different brand of crazy. Like that guy who got eaten by bears along with his GF.
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“in FL you become deeply familiar with the connection between latitude and vagrancy”
There are other factors too… I grew up on the SW coast but no beach and brown water in the harbor (trees growing in a river inland dyed it before it made its way to the big Gulf it was actually very clean). Not many tourists but full of snowbirds and retirees and homeless people were scarcer than hens teeth (there was a local town drunk). I left before homeless people were really a thing, so…. maybe things are different now.
Gainesville on the other hand was a magnet. Partly because of proximity to Starke (center of the prison industry in the state) and partly because of the university (university towns are always magnets for weirdos and that’s the only university town in the state). Local police were generally not that strict (because they had to make allowances for student excess) which also didn’t help things at all. The main consequence (apart from learning to recognize and avoid the worst cases) was _lots_ of petty crime.
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Yeah, I recall the bicycle situation there was ridiculous. Everybody had had multiple bikes stolen/dismembered, and very strong opinions on bike locks.
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My relative in rural NY state reports: there is *one* homeless dude in their town. Everybody knows him. Coincidentally, the town also has no homeless resources, but does have mind-numbing amounts of lake-effect snow.
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“Florida man” trope …we just have more crazy people per capita, because they import themselves” from all over the country”
My working theory is that East of the Mississippi crazy people drift down to Florida and West of the Mississippi they’re magnetically drawn to California.
Most people who don’t spend a lot of time there have no idea how deep the crazy runs, I’m not talking just about the drug addled but also lots of ‘spiritualist’ and ‘psychic’ types and groups that fall a bit short of cult status. Lots of ‘seekers’ (people who don’t like mainstream religions but are looking for ‘spiritual’ fulfillment….).
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My dad’s theory on that is that they’re such difficult people, that everywhere they go, they become intolerable to everybody and eventually have to leave. Climate determines the general direction of travel, and they just keep going until they hit the coast and can’t go any further.
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“such difficult people … they become intolerable to everybody and eventually have to leave. Climate determines the general direction of travel”
This is making me rethink the journey of my mother’s side of the family from Indiana to Florida in the depression…
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It’s the same as referring to drug addicts living in tent cities as “homeless.” As if the absence of a home was their main problem and not the addiction.
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Exactly. If only we were dealing with people who happened, through no fault of their own, to have no place to live. That’d be a solvable problem.
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““homeless.” As if the absence of a home was their main problem”
Well I think the term you’re supposed to use now is ‘unhoused’… which presupposes that somebody else has failed to house them.
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The following is not about unmentionability but about solutions to pedestrian death problems :
Are panhandlers and brain-damaged addicts the same group? I wonder about this as I fear the ones who are likely to get themselves killed are too brain damaged to panhandle. The small number of homeless people I talked to that seemed likely to get themselves killed (though they managed not to) were too far gone to ask anyone for money.
would your preferred solution involve sending people to jail or involuntary mental health treatment or something else ?
-YZ
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I don’t have any studies to cite on it, but if the local population of panhandlers is anything to go by: yes, you can still panhandle well into brain-damage territory. Every major intersection in our town is staked out by multiple sign-holding “help the ugly,” “need beer money,” “anything helps,” “homeless and hungry” guys (and the occasional gal), and I’d estimate about one in ten of them is either currently high, or permanently brain-damaged, going by the twitching, shaking, muttering, and the wearing giant heavy coats in very hot weather.
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…and yeah, they are always wandering around in traffic on major roads, both on foot and on bicycles, they never use the crosswalks, and since the “safe” strategy for a lot of them is to sleep in public places such as parks and the library during the day, and then wander around all night… that means at least some of them tacking erratically across major roads in the dark.
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“they are always wandering around in traffic on major roads”
I remember in Gainesville a homeless guy showed up. He was sort of… adopted by a mix of the local punk scene and hippie holdouts (many there at the time) and general progressive types. He was obviously mentally ill and had substance problems but was generally inoffensive. If he wandered into an indoor/outdoor party then people would make sure he had something to eat and otherwise let him be. He had been a professional musician (and impromptu played piano a time or two at a local club). He became something of a local landmark…. and was hit by a car and died while crossing a busy road at night.
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Gainesville was always special in that regard. When I was there, we all had our favorite semi-celebrity homeless people: Cool Breeze, the Hatless Man (who ranted at traffic, loudly, from the sidewalks), and the pink sandal lady. For whatever reason, their public vagrants seemed to skew more toward garden-variety schizos, who were adopted by the public. I don’t recall any of them getting run over while I was there, though two people I knew were seriously injured that way.
Sadly, I think even G’ville’s legendary tolerance may be getting strained by the new meth zombies. They’re not nearly as personable as Cool Breeze was.
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I’ve got two reply’s to -YZ’s post.
First nearly a decade ago now one of my cousins was getting married. He married a girl from up on the outskirts of Detroit. Now at the time homelessness was an issue, but it wasn’t the massive issue it is currently. The part that is relevant is the bride’s grandfather. The bachelor’s party was a casino, and the Bride’s Grandfather decided to drive us all there. (This wasn’t a huge wedding.) On our way there, we passed by a number of homeless people holding signs on the side of the road.
What the grandfather told us has stuck with me ever since. He told us, that he used to own a restaurant, and for years every time someone homeless asked for money for food, he gave them an offer. He told them to come with him, he would feed them, and give them a job at his restaurant. To a man every one refused, not a single one was willing to take the offer.
Upon hearing that I started thinking back. For me if someone comes up and asks for money, unless its clear they are lying, I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt. With a few exceptions, most of them I saw either go grab beer, or go right back to panhandling.
The second thing I want to mention is my answer to your question. While I recognize the mental institutions were bad places, I also recognize they were needed. We quite frankly should bring them back. As for those who are wandering about and are not brain damaged, I suggest a 3 strike policy.
Give them 3 opportunities per town, but if they keep panhandling, arrest them and put them on a work program. They get fed, and community work is done. This either gives them a skill, or it keeps them off the streets.
The thing is, I have nothing against people simply wandering about, heck if you are broke and need help, asking for help is fine. What is not fine and what I have an issue with, is scammers who basically cry wolf so often, that when someone cries wolf because there is a wolf, no one believes them.
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The american dream is to live as far as possible from the consequences of the civil rights act.
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For all the talk above that would suggest The Community Mental Health Act is the law to blame, there’s still the question of white flight that’s tied up in it.
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It’s both, and they both come back to lack of law enforcement.
We have noise ordinances, drug laws, prostitution laws, panhandling laws, traffic laws, littering/dumping laws… and somebody in a corner office who lives in a safely expensive suburb decided it would be better not to enforce them. Turns neighborhoods to excrement.
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…and just FYI in case you aren’t up on the recent situation: the new meth, P2P, that’s been coming in from Mexico since sometime after 2009 (when Mexico banned ephedrine), *causes* brain damage that looks almost identical to schizophrenia. So, the drug problem and the mental illness problem are not separate problems. They’re very intimately related problems.
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Exactly! Concise and to the point.
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In what way?
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This kind of apartheid is a result of extreme devolution. Who needs public transport when everyone has a car? Rather spend the money on schools.
Part of the post-apartheid system was consolidation of cities and suburbs into single metropolitan units. This was expected to benefit slums, but in many cases politicians from slums simply used their position to move to suburbs, which was considered a win for diversity.
Investing in the inner city has happened, mostly in Cape Town, but this is considered elitist and promoting gentrification.
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