Think your city doesn’t like you? You’re right

May 6, 2016 3:52 AM

Hostile architecture, also known as defensive architecture, exists on a spectrum. At one end are the overt design features that are obvious to anyone walking by—like spikes and fences. At the other end, says Petty, are the design elements in which “the hostile function is often embedded under a socially palatable function.”
posted by veedubya (116 comments total)

Interesting article! Wish it was longer so I could read more. The photos of the benches were instructive. People who spend their time coming up with this stuff must be really mean.
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 4:08 AM on May 6, 2016 [14 favorites]

Anti pigeon spikes and netting fall into this category as well, I suppose.
posted by leotrotsky at 4:14 AM on May 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

I wonder if it's ever occurred to Mr Petty that his surname perfectly matches the attitude of those whose work he's engaged in studying here? What could be more petty than some rich developer denying a homeless person the meagre comfort of a sleepable park bench?
posted by Paul Slade at 4:19 AM on May 6, 2016 [6 favorites]

I remember the reaction to those anti-homeless spikes. The lesson seems to be to hide the hostility under decoration -- don't use spikes, use decorative concrete that just happens to be spiky, say.

European cities are calm and safe places now, but looking at the massive window bars and high walls on many older buildings, you can see that things weren't always that way.
posted by Dip Flash at 4:21 AM on May 6, 2016 [6 favorites]

I always found the furore over the anti-sleeping spikes rather misguided. The counter-argument being that if there are fewer places to sleep around town then the homeless are more likely to go to a shelter or somewhere capable of offering more help and resources.

If you are not opening your own home to rough sleepers, can you really complain when other property owners or tenants try and deter them utilising spaces designed for other uses?
posted by mary8nne at 4:41 AM on May 6, 2016 [10 favorites]

Rather than complaining about spikes, shouldn't the demonstrators be pushing for better shelters and more suitable dedicated amenities for rough sleepers?
posted by mary8nne at 4:42 AM on May 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

They have. The same corporate tenants that install this crap and slowly encroach upon all our public space are often the same corporate entities which fund the politicians who cut social services while giving tax breaks to the wealthy.
posted by harriet vane at 4:45 AM on May 6, 2016 [98 favorites]

Brutalism is literally cold and abrasive.
posted by adept256 at 4:46 AM on May 6, 2016 [5 favorites]

The counter-argument being that if there are fewer places to sleep around town then the homeless are more likely to go to a shelter or somewhere capable of offering more help and resources.

And more tuberculosis, theft, religion and petty rules. There are legitimate reasons why a lot of homeless people eschew shelters. If getting people to take your assistance requires stabbing them endlessly you probably need to examine the help you are offering a bit more closely.
posted by srboisvert at 4:49 AM on May 6, 2016 [69 favorites]

I'm curious what the opposite, compassionate architecture, might look like? Nooks and archways specifically designed to offer privacy and safety as temporary shelters? I remember seeing this example during the furore over the anti-homless spikes, are there any others?
posted by mrjohnmuller at 4:55 AM on May 6, 2016 [11 favorites]

Homeless people are sleeping on benches? Put spikes on them!

Mexicans are crossing the border by the thousands? Build a big wall!

It's the same kindergarten level of problem solving.
posted by adept256 at 4:59 AM on May 6, 2016 [21 favorites]

Money spent on symptoms only.
posted by Slackermagee at 5:10 AM on May 6, 2016 [18 favorites]

I'm hyper alert to these sorts of benches because the other place they're popular is American college campuses, to keep undergrads from having sex on them. (Ditto the midnight sprinklers whose strategic ability to reach benches and sheltering bushes is no accident.) Even in common rooms, you end up with airport lounge furniture so nobody can lie down while they watch TV, to discourage the sex.

One of the consequences of these anti-homeless benches is that they're difficult and uncomfortable for parents with small children as well, who may need to sit with a child right next to them.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:11 AM on May 6, 2016 [10 favorites]

A few months back, there was a minor uproar about something similar here: the government installed a bunch of railings to prevent kids from playing football in the empty area underneath their apartments.
posted by destrius at 5:12 AM on May 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

Even more important than the physical denial of a sleeping spot, I think, is the message that this kind of architecture sends both to homeless people and to everyone who lives in or even visits the places that employ this kind of architecture. The message is that the builders of the space don't care about the needy and vulnerable, that they are in fact actively unwelcome, that they should disappear. The builders have gone out of their way to deny even the bare comfort of a bench under the sky to those who are most in need of any comfort of any sort at all. Everyone who is awake to this design can see the message—and when these hostile features are hidden and made subliminal, they send a further message to those who can still see them, that the builders and users of the space would prefer not to even have to think about the fact that there are those in their community who are needy and suffering.

It's callous and petty and it makes me despair for the world.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:18 AM on May 6, 2016 [45 favorites]

I'm hyper alert to these sorts of benches because the other place they're popular is American college campuses, to keep undergrads from having sex on them. (

For some reason I can't read this sentence any other way than "I, Eyebrows McGee, am constantly trying to have sex on benches on college campuses and am often thwarted" and I can't stop laughing.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 5:21 AM on May 6, 2016 [78 favorites]

:D

More that I was on the college paper so we used to go to the excruciatingly dull campus purchasing committee meetings where they debated the merits of various anti-sex benches, but your one makes me sound cooler.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:26 AM on May 6, 2016 [46 favorites]

Calls to mind SF's urine deflecting walls.
posted by smirkette at 5:29 AM on May 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

Anti pigeon spikes and netting fall into this category as well, I suppose.

Fun fact: the original brand name for anti-pigeon spikes was nixalite, or "nix alight."
posted by HeroZero at 5:40 AM on May 6, 2016 [5 favorites]

Anybody who thinks that they're "helping" homeless people by making it hard to sleep somewhere is completely fooling themselves.

When I heard the term "hostile architecture" my mind jumped to so many of the public spaces in the city that I live in - massive, featureless concrete walls facing sidewalks; small plazas that feel like hotel rooms; massive parking lots.

Sleeping spikes are a bit more overt.
posted by entropone at 5:42 AM on May 6, 2016 [16 favorites]

I always assume that benches with protuberances are designed that way to prevent skateboarders from using them as grinding rails. I suppose they can do double duty, though. In the cities where I've worked supervising and managing park maintenance, skaters are a bigger concern than the homeless when it comes to bench design.
posted by Shohn at 5:46 AM on May 6, 2016 [10 favorites]

For some reason I thought this was going to be about "designed" buildings that were hostile even to their intended occupants.

What could be more petty than some rich developer denying a homeless person the meagre comfort of a sleepable park bench?

In several of the places I lived, these were measures installed by the city government.
posted by indubitable at 5:50 AM on May 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

I dunno... I'm pretty much fine with most of these examples of hostile architecture. The reason is, features that are inviting to homeless encampments, or pissing, etc end up being hostile to everyone else, when they become homeless encampments or public toilets, and yet still offer no real solutions for people who are homelessness or need to piss.
posted by 2N2222 at 5:53 AM on May 6, 2016 [12 favorites]

Seriously I see nothing wrong with building a bench that serves a particular purpose, sitting, and can be installed for the use in this one particular way. There are reasons why businesses do not want homeless people sleeping on their doorsteps and benches and that merely reflect the general publics attitudes towards homeless people.

Actual customers could be deterred from entering the shop using the facilities if they are being used regularly by the homeless. Unless you also want to reform capitalism and do away with competition entirely then this mode of criticism seems rather shallow.
posted by mary8nne at 6:13 AM on May 6, 2016

As a lifelong skater and someone who spent 3.5 months transient and homeless 2 years ago, I would like to personally say "this stuff really sucks"

I grinded your rail. It was fucking incredible and the photo we snapped was a work of art. I really do understand the notion of making something so hostile that it only serves a money making enterprise, but I would really love to live in world where people's first thought was not "how do we quash that horrible stuff" and instead it be "how do we make a space that's durable and useful for all purposes that maybe we didn't consider?".

Like, skateparks don't wear out easily, so maybe architects could specify the handrails be made of tougher materials. Maybe we could make public spaces that don't invite homeless people to piss on the wall. We're a nation of smart people, we could solve this problem elegantly and compassionately if we decided to step back enough and allow that notion to be incorporated into our models of possibility.

I just think the outright hostility towards everything that operates outside the prescribed economic utility of a public space is really a sad reflection of how mean and uncaring we allow ourselves to become.
posted by Annika Cicada at 6:14 AM on May 6, 2016 [49 favorites]

There's a bench on a hill near me that's set up like stairs - 4-5 connected, level seats arranged on an incline. When I first saw it I thought it was a really cool and clever way of fitting an everyday object into the contours of our hilly Pittsburgh terrain - until my wife pointed out that it was more likely just arranged that way to keep homeless people from sleeping on it. ESPECIALLY since they could just as easily have installed a normal bench on the flat ground maybe twenty feet away.

I felt duped - it's disturbing how effectively these goals can be hidden. "We don't want homeless people here, but we also don't want anybody to KNOW we don't want homeless people here" is such an insidious and harmful strategy.
posted by DingoMutt at 6:17 AM on May 6, 2016 [16 favorites]

Although the article's comment that some places use pink lights to deter teenage males who will think the color is uncool struck me as funny, and perhaps the best use of fragile masculinity I've heard all day.
posted by DingoMutt at 6:20 AM on May 6, 2016 [18 favorites]

Seriously I see nothing wrong with building a bench that serves a particular purpose, sitting, and can be installed for the use in this one particular way.

Except, as Eyebrows McGee pointed out, those benches are also really bad for sitting. Like, the ones in the Port Authority Bus Terminal in NYC which look like this. I have not so fond memories of being an exhausted teenager after a fun day in NYC, waiting for a bus to get back to my parent's place in NJ, trying to balance on those things, and failing. I can't imagine what it's like for an older person/somebody with a disability.
posted by damayanti at 6:20 AM on May 6, 2016 [13 favorites]

I have actually noticed the rise (and now partly the fall) of anti-homeless benches here in MPLS.

When I first moved here, there were lots of fairly good bus shelters - they had three walls and a roof, and usually a little bench that wasn't long enough to lie on. Some of the bus shelters in the downtowns were actually indoors, built into the buildings, and they were properly warm in winter.

So yes, you would encounter homeless people in them occasionally. I used to bus all over the metro back then because I was a student and had more free time, and I sometimes saw homeless people in the shelters.

Once I got to talking to a guy, and he was crying and drinking because the housed lady who had helped him out over the years, let him use the bathroom, given him food, etc, had just suddenly died. He couldn't mourn her properly and go the funeral and so on because he was just some homeless guy and didn't really know her family. I have never forgotten and it was awful.

(I have met several homeless people who have been prevented from mourning like this, or because their partners' bodies have been disposed of by the hospital, or because they weren't let into the hospital. It's so cruel you would not believe.)

So then they got rid of most of the bus shelters and took out the benches, so you'd freeze in the winter and get drenched in the rain, and little old ladies had nowhere to sit, and if you had grocery bags you must rest them on the snowy ground, will you or never so.

And the bus "shelters" we had in those years! If those are shelters, as Sam Gamgee said, then one wall and no roof make a house - a sort of roof supported by a couple of poles, that's what we'd get. No protection from anything but rain or snow falling straight down on a windless day.

Now they're building bus shelters and train stops with sorta-real roofs and walls and some actual benches. They still do this thing where they leave a sort of clerestory space at the top of the walls, or puzzle gaps in the roof, and how the wind blows in. I've stood in a bus shelter and it was snowing in the shelter due to a quirk of the way the roof caught the wind. And only about half the benches are sit-down benches; the other half are tilted lean-on benches that don't work if you're not about 5'4" - 6'.

Basically, I preferred things with the occasional homeless person in the bus shelter.

Also:

I object very strongly to a society which does not wish to address homelessness by anything more than a handful of inadequate, dangerous, night-only dry shelters but also does not want to let the homeless sleep on benches. One or the other, assholes, is how I feel.

And also: I've known a number of homeless people over the years, some well, some in passing, some street-homeless, some semi-housed, some middle class, some working class. Homeless people are people too. Most of the time, you don't encounter them because they're just doing their thing, except their lives are very hard and they have nowhere to go. Folks think of homeless people and immediately remember, like, those two alcoholics punching each other under a bridge because those are the ones who are in the most distress and thus the most visible.

I just can't get behind any of this, because most of it seems motivated by "ooooer, I don't want to see any suffering, push it away off the beaten path". Fix the suffering or look it in the face, is what I say.
posted by Frowner at 6:25 AM on May 6, 2016 [91 favorites]

They installed the homeless-detertent benches at one of the playgrounds I used to frequent, so the vagrants wouldn't bother the children (which they already didn't) with the result that now NOBODY goes to the playground. The benches are too shallow for pregnant women to sit, or for parents to sit with a child on their lap, and uncomfortable to sit for two hours ... they're only suitable for perching for 20 minutes (and only if you aren't pregnant or toting an infant). They have cleared out the homeless, it's true, but now NOBODY uses the park at all because hostile to the homeless turns out to also be pretty hostile to families. The census on the use of that playground dropped from "popular" to "ghost town" shortly after they put in the benches.

I hear drug users have migrated there because it's always empty now. We go to the park with the big 1930s benches from New Deal park investments and are unbothered by the homeless dudes shuffling off in the mornings to wherever they go. Everyone likes that park better because it has New Deal vintage bathrooms ... Places to pee for the homeless are also places to pee for toddlers.

Stuff that's body hostile doesn't just affect the homeless but the disabled, the pregnant, small children, the elderly, and anybody else who's not "30 and fit and can wait half an hour to sit or pee."
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:27 AM on May 6, 2016 [103 favorites]

Actual customers could be deterred from entering the shop using the facilities if they are being used regularly by the homeless. Unless you also want to reform capitalism and do away with competition entirely then this mode of criticism seems rather shallow.

Sure, that's all well and good. A business doesn't want to be a service provider to homeless people. That's not great business.
But part of the point of the article was that "a hostile function is embedded in a socially palatable function."
Let's keep things neat and clean for the customers.
Let's pretend like this is out of some strange, disembodied concern for homeless people - it will force them into shelters!
Let's ensure that everybody is viewed as not a citizen but as their potential to be a consumer, and let's wipe our hands after we roll the shit downhill.
posted by entropone at 6:27 AM on May 6, 2016 [13 favorites]

damayanti, that's the first time I've actually seen how those work. I never looked closely and had always assumed that someone had ripped off the cushions from one of those. So I would sit on the floor.
posted by Hactar at 6:34 AM on May 6, 2016

Some of these benches also deter elderly and/or disabled people who have difficulty standing up after being seated. It's probably unintentionally hostile, but this type, which forces one's knees above one's butt, is particularly tough to get out of.
posted by sixpack at 6:42 AM on May 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

> There are reasons why businesses do not want homeless people sleeping on their doorsteps and benches and that merely reflect the general publics attitudes towards homeless people. Actual customers could be deterred from entering the shop using the facilities if they are being used regularly by the homeless. Unless you also want to reform capitalism and do away with competition entirely then this mode of criticism seems rather shallow.

What are these reasons?

Homeless people do not generally block a doorway to a shop during business hours.
posted by desuetude at 6:43 AM on May 6, 2016 [6 favorites]

The benches installed at newer DC Metrobus shelters come to mind, because they are (a) effective at preventing homeless from sleeping on them and (b) completely ineffective as benches. They are shallow, convex, and divided into the three sitting areas, all of which lead to an unpleasant sleeping or sitting experience. Bravo.

In a counter example, the design of the escalator tunnels in Metro stations provides a nook (sort of visible on the left) between the escalator and the wall which can be and often is utilized by the homeless during cold/wet weather.
posted by enjoymoreradio at 6:46 AM on May 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

> I always found the furore over the anti-sleeping spikes rather misguided. The counter-argument being that if there are fewer places to sleep around town then the homeless are more likely to go to a shelter or somewhere capable of offering more help and resources.

That's not how it works. When a city doesn't offer enough shelter beds or services, or when those shelter beds are so awful (a mat on the floor in a huge warehouse!) that homeless people would rather sleep in a tent on the median strip under a fucking freeway then the city is doing something hideously wrong.
posted by rtha at 6:46 AM on May 6, 2016 [25 favorites]

Oh, and the way the mayor "encouraged" people to go to shelters? He ordered the encampments cleared, which meant DPW came and put peoples' stuff - all of it, tents and the contents they contained, like IDs and medication and you know, stuff you have where you live - into GARBAGE TRUCKS and took it away.
posted by rtha at 6:48 AM on May 6, 2016 [28 favorites]

Frowner: They still do this thing where they leave a sort of clerestory space at the top of the walls, or puzzle gaps in the roof, and how the wind blows in. I've stood in a bus shelter and it was snowing in the shelter due to a quirk of the way the roof caught the wind. And only about half the benches are sit-down benches; the other half are tilted lean-on benches that don't work if you're not about 5'4" - 6'.

Come to think of it, I think these architects and the US government's torture program could really learn a lot from each other. Stress positions, sleep deprivation, weird lighting, exposure to the elements, cold, convincing the victim that the pain they suffer is their own fault. Maybe they'll figure out a way to work sexual humiliation into our urban landscape.
posted by indubitable at 6:48 AM on May 6, 2016 [8 favorites]

Frowner: I just can't get behind any of this, because most of it seems motivated by "ooooer, I don't want to see any suffering, push it away off the beaten path".

Bang on as usual. Rather than actually solving the problem of human suffering, we just force people to suffer in places where we don't have to look at 'em. If we don't have to see suffering, we don't have to think and feel about it. If we don't have to think and feel about it, we don't have to do anything about it. Problem "solved".
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:48 AM on May 6, 2016 [7 favorites]

Also, if you prevent homeless people from sleeping on public property, then they have to sleep on private property. And since by definition, homeless people do not own private property. So that means either trespassing or breaking and entering. So... now that you've paid extra money out of public funds paying for a bench that is more uncomfortable for me to sit on and impossible for me to lay on and read on a sunny day, homeless people who can't sleep on said benches do things like jam the latch on my apartment building's security door so they can sleep in the downstairs laundry room. Thanks for making me 'safe' jackasses.
posted by Zalzidrax at 6:52 AM on May 6, 2016 [17 favorites]

There is one compassionate way (provide housing plus counseling) and several punitive ways (spikes on everything, making sleep/begging/standing illegal, etc.) to deal with homelessness. I have to think that Utah's experiment points toward which way is actually more effective/cheaper in the long run.
posted by emjaybee at 6:54 AM on May 6, 2016 [18 favorites]

rtha: Oh, and the way the mayor "encouraged" people to go to shelters? He ordered the encampments cleared, which meant DPW came and put peoples' stuff - all of it, tents and the contents they contained, like IDs and medication and you know, stuff you have where you live - into GARBAGE TRUCKS and took it away.

I really don't understand how confiscating and destroying homeless people's legal possessions isn't grossly illegal and how the cities who do it don't get sued and prosecuted into oblivion. I thought the sanctity of property was one of the core values of American society. This is straight-up theft, vandalism, and destruction of property. There's no due process, there's no avenue of recourse.

Don't have a permanent address? Living somewhere where the Powers that Be would rather you didn't? I guess you're just a non-person in the eyes of the law, and we can do whatever the fuck we want to you. Does anybody know if there has ever been a serious court challenge to this practice?
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:54 AM on May 6, 2016 [8 favorites]

> There are reasons why businesses do not want homeless people sleeping on their doorsteps and benches and that merely reflect the general publics attitudes towards homeless people.

> What are these reasons?

Like so many things in the world today, I would guess racism and classism (either explicitly by the businessowner or implicitly responding to the prejudices of their customer base).
posted by enjoymoreradio at 6:59 AM on May 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

What could be more petty than some rich developer denying a homeless person the meagre comfort of a sleepable park bench?

In several of the places I lived, these were measures installed by the city government.

LOL if you think these are two separate entities.
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:01 AM on May 6, 2016 [11 favorites]

Also, if you prevent homeless people from sleeping on public property, then they have to sleep on private property. And since by definition, homeless people do not own private property. So that means either trespassing or breaking and entering.

And legal trouble for them, and jamming up the courts with nonsense "crimes". You can't sleep on public property and you can't sleep on private property, and you can't not-sleep forever, so you commit a "crime" by being alive. Just like when there's no public bathrooms and you can't use the ones in stores or restaurants, you commit a "crime" by having a body that needs to piss and shit.

The underlying logic is murder logic - bodies that can't work and can't pay to hide away should die, and will not be allowed to carry on the ordinary processes of living.

Oh, there's dirty homeless people here! Well, I wonder why they're so dirty, could it be because they don't have access to showers, washing machines or a place to store clean clothes? Could it be because they sleep in the dirt? I wonder.

I mean, I too have had scary interactions with homeless people who were not well or who were high. Sometimes people are homeless because they're messed up, sometimes people become homeless and the stress/fear/shame/deprivation messes them up. I didn't like those interactions one bit, and I admit I try to avoid them. But messed up people are people and should not be chivvied to the ends of the earth.

I always think of Joe in Bleak House - like all Dickens it's ridiculously sentimental, but Dickens was no dummy and he was absolutely right that all society does with homeless people is move them on and move them on, hoping they'll conveniently disappear or die. “It surely is a strange fact [..] that in the heart of a civilised world this creature in human form should be more difficult to dispose of than an unowned dog," thinks the doctor character while he's trying to get Joe to a place to lie down.
posted by Frowner at 7:07 AM on May 6, 2016 [42 favorites]

indubitable: Maybe they'll figure out a way to work sexual humiliation into our urban landscape.

Based on my experience in construction, the people who install the hostile architecture would be happy to fill that role.
posted by idiopath at 7:12 AM on May 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

And legal trouble for them, and jamming up the courts with nonsense "crimes". You can't sleep on public property and you can't sleep on private property, and you can't not-sleep forever, so you commit a "crime" by being alive.

"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread."
posted by entropone at 7:30 AM on May 6, 2016 [15 favorites]

The problem with providing homeless shelters is that it goes against the neoliberal prohibition against taking money from YOU!, hardworking taxpayers, and giving it to the undeserving poor.

If this was the Victorian era, whose values the likes of Thatcher so admired, we would establish workhouses, to keep the homeless from starving in an unsightly fashion, while ensuring that they pay for what they receive. Only we would not call them workhouses but something like “community debt settlement centres”, and give the contract to the same companies that run prisons and workfare programmes.

One problem is that, unlike the Victorian era, ours is an increasingly less labour-intensive age. The working-class jobs created by the Industrial Revolution are all but gone, and the call-centre jobs that replaced them are going away as machine learning improves. There is no demand for such coerced labour, and if it was to be coerced for moralistic/disciplinary reasons, it would amount to a huge waste of resources: paying over the odds for an inferior simulation of machine labour. One might as well give the homeless* a basic income, or rent-free housing and a supply of food and clothing. Only no, because that would be allowing the unworthy to get something for nothing*, which is immoral.

* “homeless” here can also include people who would not have the means to pay rent/a mortgage once their job is automated out of existence, including those who are currently well-paid middle-class professionals.

** not to be confused with the worthy getting something for nothing, keeping it offshore where it's free of the burden of taxation, and donating generously to pliable politicians.
posted by acb at 7:31 AM on May 6, 2016 [14 favorites]

Wouldn't it be nice if there were a better solution for helping homeless people than making flat concrete benches for them to sleep on in public parks? At least in San Francisco, the anti-sleeping benches are a symptom of a deeper societal problem. They are not the cause.
posted by Nelson at 7:32 AM on May 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

"* “homeless” here can also include...those who are currently well-paid middle-class professionals."

/me raises hand
posted by Annika Cicada at 7:42 AM on May 6, 2016

I grinded your rail. It was fucking incredible and the photo we snapped was a work of art. ... skateparks don't wear out easily, so maybe architects could specify the handrails be made of tougher materials.

Oh get over yourself. Your hobby is not so special snowflake that the world should re-engineer itself to cater to you. I love supporting providing places like skate parks via my taxes - go skate there.

As sonoscope explained a while back in a similar fpp:

In my previous job with the American Visionary Art Museum, I investigated the possibility of reengineering our plaza areas to make them more broadly usable ... Retrofitting a space that was designed before the advent of the grinding fad with stainless steel edges and other protective measures isn't a trivial thing. It costs a fortune...

On a happier note, there are some designers exploring the idea of compassionate architecture like mrjohnmuller was asking about. Vancover did a tiny project with benches that fold out to be shelters. Another company designed benches that pull up into shelters. Another designer wants to facilitate tent use by the homeless with scaffolding designed to make tents better to live in.

There has also been some resurgence in pissoirs in some cities, which granted are more aimed at drunk revelers than the homeless, but do afford some benefit to homeless (mostly) males. It's not a solution to the problem of lack of public bathrooms but it's a step back from the urine repelling paint.
posted by Candleman at 7:48 AM on May 6, 2016 [15 favorites]

Slackermagee: Money spent on symptoms only.

Because the band-aid is cheaper than actually cleaning and suturing the wound. And it looks better, see, it's "skin color," you don't even notice it!
posted by filthy light thief at 7:52 AM on May 6, 2016

> I really don't understand how confiscating and destroying homeless people's legal possessions isn't grossly illegal

Oh, it is! The city gets sued periodically and they promise to never do it again, and then...
posted by rtha at 7:58 AM on May 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

I love supporting providing places like skate parks via my taxes - go skate there

Thank you for your support. I skate the shit out of skate parks here in Austin and elsewhere almost every day and you have no idea how it saves my mental state after dealing with the inherent crap that comes from being online every day.
posted by Annika Cicada at 8:01 AM on May 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

Maybe they'll figure out a way to work sexual humiliation into our urban landscape.

Based on the statistics available around sexual assault and homelessness, pretty sure that's already taken care of.

I keep coming back to something Jessamyn said when she was interviewed for the Vermont Rumble Strip podcast -- that these people are your community too. I carry that with me a lot, especially living in a city with a huge homelessness problem. That these people, who you don't want to look at, are also your community.
posted by kalimac at 8:05 AM on May 6, 2016 [11 favorites]

I keep coming back to something Jessamyn said when she was interviewed for the Vermont Rumble Strip podcast -- that these people are your community too.

People who advocate for these sorts of things don't really believe that, though. They have this image of train-hopping hobos who pick up and leave if things get too uncomfortable, or worse, gravitate to the places that are comfortable. So by not having these measures, they think they're encouraging people to come in from other places that do have them.
posted by Etrigan at 8:15 AM on May 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

businesses do not want homeless people sleeping on their doorsteps

jfc, the entire focus of the world's energy doesn't need to concentrated on making-it-easy-for-businesses. maybe one zillionth of one percent could go towards a fucking break for the less fortunate.
posted by j_curiouser at 8:20 AM on May 6, 2016 [32 favorites]

mary8nne >

The biggest single problem with the points you raise lies in the conception of this question as solely one of private property rights. That fails completely to address the fact that public spaces are also being designed in such a way as to make them distinctively inhospitable. You know, public -- existing for the use and benefit of everyone. Beyond this arbitrarily skewed understanding, though, the commentary provided also evinces a callow, uncritical sort of moral tautologism, in which whatever is so, must be right and defensible.

Seriously I see nothing wrong with building a bench that serves a particular purpose, sitting, and can be installed for the use in this one particular way.

Many things are designed in such a way that channels their use along predictable lines. We make prescription bottles child-tamper-resistant, for example, to protect children from accidentally ingesting medication.

These benches are not designed this way for the safety of homeless people, however. Design choices like these are intended to affect people's experiences, they're not oriented to abstract ends. They don't design these benches because they're thinking "Let's build a bench that serves a particular purpose, which is sitting!" They're thinking "How can we make it extremely uncomfortable for someone to sleep here?" So let's not pretend otherwise.

There are reasons why businesses do not want homeless people sleeping on their doorsteps and benches and that merely reflect the general publics attitudes towards homeless people.

Neither of these is a moral justification for treating people like they're nuisances, akin to nesting birds, rather than human beings with very basic unmet needs. The general public's disdain for certain marginalized classes of people is pretty terrible index of how that group should be treated, historically.

Actual customers could be deterred from entering the shop using the facilities if they are being used regularly by the homeless.

So what? That's the business' problem, not the homeless people's.

Unless you also want to reform capitalism and do away with competition entirely then this mode of criticism seems rather shallow.

By either deliberately or inadvertently misunderstanding the scope and character of the issue, mary8nne's comments fail to address any of the more complex questions here: about the changing nature of the state's role in the provision of social welfare, the consequences of a contested relationship between the domains of the private and the public in the contemporary era, or the negotiated nature of empathy in the public sphere. Instead, this argument is illustrative of what it accuses -- tendentious, shallow critique.
posted by clockzero at 8:25 AM on May 6, 2016 [17 favorites]

beyond architecture, my city passed an anti-sitting law. ffs.

"I just don't see that it's anti-homeless to say you can't lie or sit on sidewalks." - Mayor 'Douchebag Capitalist' Suthers
posted by j_curiouser at 8:26 AM on May 6, 2016 [6 favorites]

The counter-argument being that if there are fewer places to sleep around town then the homeless are more likely to go to a shelter or somewhere capable of offering more help and resources.

That counter argument only works in places where there are shelters capable of offering more help and resources. Take a city like Chicago, massive homeless population and not near enough shelters devoted to that population.

If you are not opening your own home to rough sleepers, can you really complain when other property owners or tenants try and deter them utilising spaces designed for other uses?

This statement is ridiculous on its face. Because people aren't opening their homes doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of people who would support social policies (and pay for them gladly) geared toward solving the homeless issue in major American, and world, cities. What's the other use of the park bench at 3 o'clock in the morning? Does it really hurt us to allow someone with nowhere else to go to lie there? Instead we see draconian cuts in social services and statements like the above that kowtow to the social control being exerted in an effort to . . . I don't know . . . keep the undesirables away from the clean folks?
posted by amcevil at 8:32 AM on May 6, 2016 [10 favorites]

One irony I've noticed with anti-homeless bus shelters is the ones around here have giant advertising screens in them, bigger than my own TV. They must be worth a fortune. Anyhow I saw one advertising extremely expensive luxury watches. Like people are going to be compelled to buy a $10000 watch so they know how late the bus to the cannery is.
posted by adept256 at 8:36 AM on May 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

Unless you also want to reform capitalism and do away with competition entirely then this mode of criticism seems rather shallow.

You...you do know you are on Metafilter, right? I mean, I think most of us do in fact want to reform capitalism so thoroughly as to make it unrecognizable.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:36 AM on May 6, 2016 [13 favorites]

Actually, I have opened my home to homeless people, both formally (inviting people to stay) and informally (not calling the cops when someone sleeps on my porch). I have also been a core volunteer at spaces that welcomed homeless people both formally (you can come in here and have coffee and use the internet, etc) and informally (de facto, we know you're sleeping out back where the trees keep the ground dry).

So my critique wins, right? That's great - capitalism is going down starting at 12am tomorrow morning.
posted by Frowner at 8:36 AM on May 6, 2016 [29 favorites]

I grinded your rail. It was fucking incredible and the photo we snapped was a work of art.

Sigh. I know it wasn't you but over the past ten years skaters have basically wrecked the rail fence outside my house. I've painted it several times but it's rusted now, and looks like crap. One of the rails has collapsed. I've tried asking skaters nicely not to grind. Some of them listen (thanks!). Some of them give me the finger. Some of them try to come back when they think I'm not at home. So yeah, this year I'm seriously considering installing a half a dozen metal clamps on the rail. I'm the hostile one now. What else can I do?
posted by storybored at 8:39 AM on May 6, 2016 [27 favorites]

@storybored: There's a lot of really shitty behavior that's normalized in the skater scene that I find repelling. I'm a bit of a snarky punk I know and my comments here on this have caused friction, but I'm also the type that if you asked me (or hell even yelled at me) to stop I'd apologize and move on.

For the most part I skate 99% of the time at skate parks now. But I would love if the idea of skateable surfaces were incorporated into corporate public spaces.
posted by Annika Cicada at 8:47 AM on May 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

over the past ten years skaters have basically wrecked the rail fence outside my house. I've painted it several times but it's rusted now, and looks like crap. One of the rails has collapsed. I've tried asking skaters nicely not to grind. Some of them listen (thanks!). Some of them give me the finger. Some of them try to come back when they think I'm not at home.

Another case of why we can't have nice things.
posted by acb at 8:49 AM on May 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

That's good of you to say that Annika. I'm totally in favor of skating parks.

I never yell at the skaters but it's peeving to have to ask them to stop in the first place. I mean, I don't have to ask passersby from throwing rocks at my window....
posted by storybored at 8:52 AM on May 6, 2016 [8 favorites]

The more noticeably hostile architecture to me (maybe because I live in Seattle) is the lack of rain protection on the sidewalks next to any newish buildings. Starting in the 90's awnings and covered sidewalks gave way to something that gestures toward the concept of shelter, like a 4-foot-wide piece of glass ten feet above the sidewalk. Or there's the more explicit version, where there's a nice covering that runs the length of the block - but it's set a couple of feet out from the wall, so if you try to lie down next to the building you'll get soaked.
posted by five toed sloth at 9:06 AM on May 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

If you are not opening your own home to rough sleepers, can you really complain when other property owners or tenants try and deter them utilising spaces designed for other uses?

This "if you are not opening your own home" always seems to be offered up as some smug indictment of the other's supposed hypocrisy (in the refugee context, as well). I can't tell if it's built on deliberate refusal to recognize that the reason we have a state is so that it can perform functions, like arranging services for the homeless and refugees, that individuals are ill-equipped to handle, or if the people are just so far gone in the late capitalism mindset that it literally does not occur to them that there are options between "drive them away, hoping they will lie down and die somewhere convenient" and "place random strangers in need of significant services in private homes."
posted by praemunire at 9:14 AM on May 6, 2016 [32 favorites]

Do skaters still wax down concrete ledges? That's my only real beef with them. Grind all you want but waxing concrete in public places is gross and it's next to impossible to remove. It's basically vandalism. No big surprise that buildings and parks install anti-grind flanges (or whatever they are).
posted by GuyZero at 9:18 AM on May 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

I always thought that skaters were being whiny about anti-grind components. Having the edges of planters, curbs, benches, platforms and rails chipped and scraped because skaters demand their freedom has always been annoying to me.

I see almost no difference between grinding on public infrastructure and vandalizing rocks and trees in parks.

Anti-skate brackets are ugly, too. Just a reminder of why we can't have nice things.
posted by Chuffy at 9:31 AM on May 6, 2016 [7 favorites]

I really don't understand how confiscating and destroying homeless people's legal possessions isn't grossly illegal and how the cities who do it don't get sued and prosecuted into oblivion. I thought the sanctity of property was one of the core values of American society. This is straight-up theft, vandalism, and destruction of property. There's no due process, there's no avenue of recourse.

How's a homeless person who just got all their possessions placed into a garbage truck going to sue the city? They have bigger and more immediate problems to deal with!

But seriously, harassment by cops and city governments is a pretty common thing for homeless people, according to those who have been there.
posted by theorique at 9:45 AM on May 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

Anti pigeon spikes and nettings are sort of different in that pigeons are dirty, useless disease-carrying airborne rats.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 9:51 AM on May 6, 2016

"I just don't see that it's anti-homeless to say you can't lie or sit on sidewalks." - Mayor 'Douchebag Capitalist' Suthers

The law in its majestic equality …
posted by TedW at 10:06 AM on May 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

This is the worst bus stop I've seen in Milwaukee, dressed up as "art" but barely functional and deeply hostile. It's on a busy and highly visible intersection of three streets and I feel terrible for the people who have to use it in the snow and rain.

This Milwaukee suburb doesn't want bus shelters at all, ostensibly because of the visual noise of advertising, but anyone who lives here knows it's to discourage The Poors (read: black people) from coming out to the mostly-white, upper-middle-class neighborhood.
posted by AFABulous at 10:09 AM on May 6, 2016 [5 favorites]

The historic Driskill Hotel in downtown Austin has big planter boxes in all of its alcoves facing the street. They hire people to keep them looking nice, and they add a nice element to the street. But I have no doubt that their primary purpose is to keep people from sleeping there (though asked the guy who was working on them one day if they get a lot of drunks peeing in them on the weekends. He said they did)
posted by tippiedog at 10:45 AM on May 6, 2016

This is the hostile to humans benches the advertising partner provides in my city. It's my belief that they are designed to prevent people from blocking the ads while still getting access to public space to install their platform. Insufficient sitting surface that none the less collects water; upright dead flat backs; and "armrests" that prevent laying.

On the other hand pretty much all the rest of the benches installed in city controlled public spaces are these quite comfy (for sitting anyways) resin benches. They have skateboard clips but otherwise on impediments for laying on them. However we've got extensive undeveloped riparian zones in the city where homeless people tend to sleep/camp so you rarely see anyone sleeping on a bench.
posted by Mitheral at 10:48 AM on May 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

Wow, AFABulous, that bus stop is truly a monument to hostility! It's both useless and expensive at the same time.

The article and this discussion has got me thinking about a lot of everyday annoyances that I've previously attributed to incompetent city designers, but that are probably intentional efforts to keep people moving and impede congregation. The worst one in my town is probably the three million dollar public bathroom the city built in one of our main shopping/festival streets. It has glass walls, so only fetishists with a penchant for indecent exposure can use it.
posted by Kevin Street at 11:04 AM on May 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

Eyebrows McGee pointed out that divided benches also make things harder for parents of young children. They also make public spaces less accessible to fat people like me, who may not fit comfortably in the narrow space defined by the dividers or bumps. These kinds of design decisions work to keep lots of less-preferred, less-aesthetically pleasing people out of public spaces.
posted by not that girl at 11:05 AM on May 6, 2016 [12 favorites]

me, earlier: Maybe they'll figure out a way to work sexual humiliation into our urban landscape.

Kevin Street: The worst one in my town is probably the three million dollar public bathroom the city built in one of our main shopping/festival streets. It has glass walls, so only fetishists with a penchant for indecent exposure can use it.

Ah ha! I knew it!
posted by indubitable at 11:16 AM on May 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

Something similar was written last year. Not sure if anyone linked to it yet
posted by ChipT at 11:27 AM on May 6, 2016

Rather than complaining about spikes, shouldn't the demonstrators be pushing for better shelters and more suitable dedicated amenities for rough sleepers?

It doesn't have to be one or the other. More shelters plus more humane urban design are not mutually exclusive.
posted by Beholder at 11:42 AM on May 6, 2016 [4 favorites]

theorique: I get what you're saying obviously, but you'd think that a homeless rights advocacy organization or the ACLU or somebody would sue the pants off the city on behalf of the homeless population. Per rtha I guess that's happened more than once and it hasn't stopped the behavior from recurring; perhaps next time they need to go after the person who gave the order directly? It just seems like if city officials are ordering blatant theft and destruction of property against their citizens, they should be stomped on hard.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 11:50 AM on May 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

Just try to find a place to sit down and rest outdoors in NYC. Often there'll be nothing for blocks, no benches, no parks, nothing. These bullshit anti-homeless measures aren't just hostile to the homeless, they're hostile to every single person in the city.
posted by showbiz_liz at 11:50 AM on May 6, 2016 [5 favorites]

And hey, if peeing in a public place is something that's gonna happen (and let's face it, most of us have been there at one time or another) doing it into a planter seems better than just doing straight on the sidewalk. At least it doesn't leave a puddle.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 11:51 AM on May 6, 2016

Kevin, if you have a picture of that public restroom you mentioned, I'd love to see it. What I'm envisioning in my head matches your description, but I keep thinking "that can't possibly be right, they wouldn't do that." I have got to see this multi-million-dollar celebration of public micturation you describe.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 11:53 AM on May 6, 2016 [4 favorites]

Ah, darn it, it seems I exaggerated the cost. It was only half a million dollars, but that's still a lot of money for a bathroom that no one ever uses.

Here's an article with a video tour of the facilities. The architect seems to think the glass walls are a feature, not a bug. It doesn't mention that the hours have since been scaled back, and the temperature is deliberately kept uncomfortable to discourage people from staying. (No air conditioning in summer, heated just above the freezing point of water in winter.)
posted by Kevin Street at 12:03 PM on May 6, 2016 [5 favorites]

The problem with tacitly permitting skaters to use public or private architecture as an affordance is many skaters are not mature adults like the ones we presumably have here on MeFi. And you can't discourage the teenage wannabe crust punks from damaging your property without also making it ungrindable for the 34yo rad mom, unless you make a case-by-case value judgment about the particular skaters in question which can be seen as discriminatory.
posted by a halcyon day at 12:30 PM on May 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

Also, if you're a designer or architect who's working on a project, in many cases you don't have the freedom to choose to make the bench sleepable or the alcove sittable— the City or the client specifically says "we need to provide 64 seats in this park but they must not permit someone to sleep there" or "our current building has a urine problem and we need that fixed".

The effort to subsume 'hostility' into the salient primary function of a bench or building facade is often a significant effort of problem solving on the part of the designer, ie it is literally their job.
posted by a halcyon day at 12:36 PM on May 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

Neither of these is a moral justification for treating people like they're nuisances, akin to nesting birds, rather than human beings with very basic unmet needs.

When I was living in Ottawa, millionaire mayor Larry O'Brien made this comparison explicit by telling the press that homeless were like pigeons, and that if you stop feeding them they will go away.

One-term millionaire mayor Larry O'Brien, I should say.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 12:47 PM on May 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

What are these reasons?

They are tired of cleaning up feces in the morning?
They're tired of having to rouse a drunk in order to enter their business?
They're tired of being used for storage of food containers/mangy blankets/dog accessories/stolen library books?
They're tired of their plants being used as ashtrays?

Homeless people do not generally block a doorway to a shop during business hours.

I can only think you do not live in a place with a major transient problem.
posted by madajb at 1:21 PM on May 6, 2016 [6 favorites]

Port Authority Bus Terminal in NYC which look like this.

Do those open notches/gaps in the front serve a purpose?
Stopping skateboards or something, because otherwise it just looks like a great place for people to stash litter or gum.
posted by madajb at 1:26 PM on May 6, 2016

> There are reasons why businesses do not want homeless people sleeping on their doorsteps and benches and that merely reflect the general publics attitudes towards homeless people.

> What are these reasons?

Like so many things in the world today, I would guess racism and classism (either explicitly by the businessowner or implicitly responding to the prejudices of their customer base).

I feel like we can find a middle ground between saying 'it's fucked up that we've come to dealing with homelessness by making our public spaces so inhospitable that they just go somewhere else and we call that success' and 'being unhappy with a large homeless population in the spaces you inhabit is purely down to your racism and classism'.

I live across from a park right now with a large homeless population, and I have lived in cities with large homeless populations while being dependent on public transportation. I recognize that there aren't a lot of options for homeless individuals and that homelessness is not a personal failing but a social problem that has gone unaddressed and I will say as much when the topic comes up.

That said, no, it doesn't fill me with joy that the nearest public green space to me smells like urine and is full of empty mini bottles of liquor, and I don't enjoy stepping over a prone person's body to buy a bottle of shampoo or board a bus. Like, sure, it's a part of life and it's indicative of our society's failings but I don't think saying that discomfort at a personal level is something shameful or that saying that it's solely the responsibility of people who live in the places that homeless inhabit are responsible for solving homelessness. It's a problem and how we handle it now is not good for homeless people or homed people.
posted by geegollygosh at 1:29 PM on May 6, 2016 [7 favorites]

What are these reasons?

They are tired of cleaning up feces in the morning?
They're tired of having to rouse a drunk in order to enter their business?
They're tired of being used for storage of food containers/mangy blankets/dog accessories/stolen library books?
They're tired of their plants being used as ashtrays?

Homeless people do not generally block a doorway to a shop during business hours.

I can only think you do not live in a place with a major transient problem.

When I was in downtown LA recently, I was really, really shocked by the number of visible homeless people, and the number of people who were in pretty bad shape begging on the street. I could absolutely see how having a large number of people who don't have access to bathrooms, who don't have access to anywhere to store their possessions, who don't have access to ashtrays and who are often sick/stressed/self-medicating...yeah, that wouldn't be so great. I do not think that the morally okay solution is for everyone to move homeless people on to the ends of the earth, though.

Another thing that I have learned from knowing homeless people: being homeless is really stressful. You rarely sleep really deeply, for instance, and this messes with your consciousness and your hormones. I have literally seen profound changes in people's ability to regulate their emotions and behaviors when they started having a safe, predictable, private place to sleep. People being weird and disregulated in public is in part a problem of exhaustion.
posted by Frowner at 1:33 PM on May 6, 2016 [27 favorites]

for the "why can't they just go to a shelter" people: LGBT folks are way more likely to be homeless and may not feel safe in shelters (especially the T: trans people may not be allowed in the correct gender shelter, and are subject to assault in the opposite one).
posted by AFABulous at 1:40 PM on May 6, 2016 [13 favorites]

> What are these reasons?
They are tired of cleaning up feces in the morning? They're tired of having to rouse a drunk in order to enter their business? They're tired of being used for storage of food containers/mangy blankets/dog accessories/stolen library books? They're tired of their plants being used as ashtrays?

>Homeless people do not generally block a doorway to a shop during business hours.
I can only think you do not live in a place with a major transient problem.

Hahahhaha. No, I live in Philadelphia; we have a significant population of chronically homeless people.

It's very easy to sneer at anonymous homeless people for being the ONLY filthiest filthers in filthville instead of recognizing that people in nice stable living situations are also responsible for what the shopkeeper has to clean up in the morning. Non-homeless people let their dogs shit all over your stoop, piss in your doorway overnight after too many beers, and litter in gross and egregious ways (dumping leftover food, cigarette butts everywhere, discarded used condoms.)
posted by desuetude at 2:07 PM on May 6, 2016 [6 favorites]

Also, if you're a designer or architect who's working on a project, in many cases you don't have the freedom to choose to make the bench sleepable or the alcove sittable— the City or the client specifically says "we need to provide 64 seats in this park but they must not permit someone to sleep there" or "our current building has a urine problem and we need that fixed".

You're also free not to work for that client.
posted by indubitable at 2:27 PM on May 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

"You're also free not to work for that client."

In this economy?
posted by XtinaS at 2:31 PM on May 6, 2016

Acting out of conscience isn't always easy. If you have dependents, as a practical matter you might have to go along because you have other lives depending on your income. But if you have the means to survive a period of unemployment, you should strongly consider it.
posted by indubitable at 2:49 PM on May 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

That's terrible Kevin, though not quite as bad as I thought. I was envisioning a restroom where the actual stalls and urinals also had glass walls surrounding them. I would probably use that bathroom if I had to go, but then I generally DGAF about that kind of thing. If you were somebody who had even a tiny bit of public-bathroom anxiety (and I used to be one of those people, so I know how that feels) this bathroom would be totally useless to you.

Also, I bet all that glass looks super gross now unless they have people come squeegee it clean on the regular. There's a reason why most public bathrooms in high-traffic areas have white tile walls.

Anyway it's definitely hostile design! If I saw that, I would immediately think "the designers want people to be uncomfortable in there so that they won't linger." I'm not sure I have as big a problem with this as a human rights issue as I do with some of the other examples though (park benches, bus rest stops) because people lingering in public bathrooms and using them for things for which they were not intended makes them less useful for people who just need to pee, and everybody needs a safe and private place to pee.

What I have a problem with is that the glass walls make the bathroom much less useful for everyone. Unless you have no anxiety issues and are in a position where you're privileged enough not to have to give a fuck about the whole world watching while you do your business, this bathroom is useless to you. That probably accounts for about 75% of the population, which means it's effectively pointless.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 3:31 PM on May 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

Actually, that restroom looks perfectly reasonable to me. It's basically the "we get bad weather" version of the restrooms we have at the south end of Lake Merritt — the stalls have doors; the sinks are open to view.

Nobody's predating on anybody. The worst problems these bathrooms have are graffiti (hello, Oakland) and occasionally they get foul if somebody's missed the seat. (But we watch out for each other and wave people off when we can: "You do NOT want to go in that one, better wait for another...")
posted by Lexica at 3:52 PM on May 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

Actually, I didn't watch the whole video the first time (I was annoyed by the tiny size and inability to fullscreen it) and missed something critical; the urinals actually are in full view! You're standing with your back to a floor-to-ceiling plate of glass! That would give me the heebie jeebies.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 4:44 PM on May 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

"You're also free not to work for that client."

...which is tantamount to saying "I'd rather potentially be homeless myself than fulfill the requirements of my profession."

There are two primary scenarios an architect would find oneself in: either the partner or principal of a firm, or an employee of one.

In the first, the people who work for you depend on your firm. Sure, you can fire a client or turn down the work, but the margins on architecture are slim everywhere, and the mandate in a civic project likely comes from the planning department or other legislative body, not the body who is bidding the work. Your refusal just moves that project to someone else and denies your firm some revenue. In many cases, turning down a large civic or commercial project means you have to lay off staff.

In the second, your recourse is to quit the project or your job, directly putting your own financial stability at risk, as well as anyone who depends on your income. Which puts you yourself at risk of becoming homeless.

This isn't a choice a reasonable or logical person would make. There is no Hippocratic oath in architecture. The closest is where the AIA Code of Ethics states "Members should uphold human rights in all their professional endeavors" and "In performing professional services, Members should advocate the design, construction, and operation of sustainable buildings and communities."

It's arguable that a sustainable community includes caring for the homeless, but it's not in the scope of the park or the renovation to provide that care. It's also arguable that designing an unsleepable bench at a client request is hostile to a human attempting to engage in an undesired activity, but it does not expressly violate their human rights.
posted by a halcyon day at 4:47 PM on May 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yeah, the whole peeing in public thing...maybe we should just get over it.
posted by Chuffy at 4:53 PM on May 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

I will however concede that architects, urban planners, and other design professionals have a professional responsibility to leverage their specialty to the benefit of the community at large. That includes supporting legislation to provide care for the homeless, as well as other agendas that make a community a more pleasant place to live for everyone.

It is also in one's best interest as a design professional to foster a more prosperous and pleasant community, both from a cultural and a financial perspective.

To wit: I think it's preferable to design a bench that can be easily cleaned rather than one you can't sleep on, but if it's your livelihood at stake it's OK to design a bench you can't sleep on. You should also attend the meetings to support funding mental health services instead of more homeless shakedowns by police. You should also install a durable coping along the edge of your planter so the kids don't chip it up when they grind it.
posted by a halcyon day at 5:14 PM on May 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

Anti-skate brackets are ugly, too. Just a reminder of why we can't have nice things.

These aren't totally ugly. Kind of cute, actually. (As one would expect, in Japan)
posted by ctmf at 8:06 PM on May 6, 2016

"You're standing with your back to a floor-to-ceiling plate of glass! That would give me the heebie jeebies."

Yep, about a dozen feet from the sidewalk. And there's no paper towels or air blower to dry your hands with.

And I hear (though I don't know for sure) that the stall doors on the women's side are just a little bit too high, so they expose a couple more inches of leg than a lady might be used to in such a situation. A lot of work went into making the place as passively aggressive as possible!
posted by Kevin Street at 8:17 PM on May 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

When I was in downtown LA recently, I was really, really shocked by the number of visible homeless people, and the number of people who were in pretty bad shape begging on the street. I could absolutely see how having a large number of people who don't have access to bathrooms, who don't have access to anywhere to store their possessions, who don't have access to ashtrays and who are often sick/stressed/self-medicating...yeah, that wouldn't be so great. I do not think that the morally okay solution is for everyone to move homeless people on to the ends of the earth, though.

Some of the Starbucks locations in downtown LA and Hollywood have recently closed their bathrooms to both customers and non-customers. It's a really hard problem for the neighborhood, compounded by the regional failure to build a widely-distributed infrastructure to address homelessness.
posted by jimw at 11:24 PM on May 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

Wow, I would have figured that customer bathrooms would be required by the health code.
posted by Mitheral at 12:19 AM on May 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

It's not clear (to me) if they are making dubious claims of the bathrooms being out-of-service because of "plumbing problems" or they have found a loophole in the health code related to the age of the buildings that these locations are in.
posted by jimw at 2:30 AM on May 7, 2016

I've slept rough more nights than I like to remember, but I guess never by the dire necessity that some people face - I've always technically had a home to go to if I was willing to face what that entailed. I first noticed the "hostile architecture" thing in around 1993 - gratuitously replacing wooden benches with aluminum ones (if you don't know why that's hostile, try lying on an aluminum bench on a cold night), conveniently placed spotlights, and so forth. You learn to work around it - move away from the areas they don't want you, find unsecured places, or if necessary break the 'features', sleep for a couple of hours, and be gone before anyone notices; get way from the central city (and here it helps if you don't need to panhandle, so lucky me), find a tree and some surrounding hedge.... It'd be easy to make it sound cool, 'stainless steel rat' kinda thing, but it's not - it's hard and sad and cold, it's walking barefoot in a place where everyone else has shoes, and even if they don't notice, you do: it sucks.
posted by memetoclast at 9:10 AM on May 7, 2016 [5 favorites]

Re: the glass bathroom - if people are going to be peeing in public anyway, you may as well give them a urinal to do it in instead of having piss on walls and sidewalks. Seeing someone's back at a urinal is no different than walking behind someone. Unless you are standing next to someone and consciously looking, you are not going to see the person's genitals.
posted by AFABulous at 9:56 AM on May 7, 2016

Public urinal across from Dolores Park, in San Francisco.
I wonder about the decision process behind the design and placement of this thing.
posted by the Real Dan at 2:44 PM on May 7, 2016

Public urinal across from Dolores Park, in San Francisco.
I wonder about the decision process behind the design and placement of this thing.

It's at the top of a park that is hugely popular among both the homeless and the rest of the city's sun-worshipping population (and is right at the top of the "gay beach"); the transit stop is kind of incidental; there are other restrooms in the park but this location is quicker for men who just want to go & go; and of course there's some mystery group that's so offended by its existence that they've opened a civil complaint.
posted by psoas at 2:30 PM on May 9, 2016

My superficial understanding of homeless people is that their physical configuration is still basically the same as a normal human's - head, torso, usually at least one limb, a couple of teeth, beard etc. - and that they also follow more or less the same patterns and possess many of the same predilections as the acceptable human model - shuffling or limping or wheeling around through geographic space, sitting down if they aren't already, eating food from the garbage, sleeping, wanting more money - and so it is my informed belief that saying something "discourages the homeless from using it" is exactly the same as saying "discourages all humans from using it" and so a) why the hell am I paying for it? and b) what the fuck does it even exist for anyway? and c) I hope you get locked out of your house one night and so have to sleep on one of the benches that you approved and I hope you fall off it and break your hideous neck and then continue to roll down the grassy hill and onto the wall of spikes and I hope the spikes all go into your eyes and your stomach and that really tender part under your arm where the ulnar nerve is and I hope you have to lay there with a broken neck and full of spikes in the cold for seven days and seven nights until you are dead.
posted by turbid dahlia at 7:36 PM on May 12, 2016 [1 favorite]

If you are not opening your own home to rough sleepers, can you really complain when other property owners or tenants try and deter them utilising spaces designed for other uses

Venice Residents Upset Neighbor Allows Homeless To Camp In His Yard

More to the point, I've been trying to pare down a thesis-length comment about the fiasco that is the Santa Monica Blue Bus bus stop redesign but it's just too frustrating.
posted by Room 641-A at 4:54 PM on May 13, 2016