Angle grinder would be so much more romantic.
Angle grindr
Why do so many people WANT city parks to become homeless shanty towns?
they are literally wasting money and resources and labor to make something worse just to make the lives of homeless people harder. Homeless people got it hard enough as is if they want to sleep on a fucking bench rather than the floor im not gonna fucking bother them and if there is nowhere to seat its the fault of the fucking corporations buying up all the housing and jacking up prices just because they can and the racists politicians who implement racists zoning laws that are at best designed jack up real estate prices and more realistically design to enable segregation, NOT the fault of the people who are forced to live on the streets.
What so many people probably want is homeless having somewhere safe to go and resources to go out of homelessness. They get hostile architechture instead.
Towns and "communities" (don't laugh!) which expend resources on stuff like this to actively marginalize, punish, degrade, and criminalize homeless and impoverished people further, in a country which already has way more vacant houses than homeless people, but require homelessness and require it being kept dangerous and wretched in order to keep the "housing market" 'competitive' and stable for landlords (similar to the "job market" under capitalism fundamentally requiring unemployment as the "Reserve Army of Labour") deserve all of the used needles and wall-feces they get.
It is a deeply sick country which does this, for a sick economic system, which produces sick mindsets in its petty-bourgeois "have-mine's", represented in the fact that the first reaction at someone pointing out the absurdity and anti-social hypocrisy of painting hostile architecture 'PrOgReSsIvE,' is "but if we don't occlude public space and dehumanize and force further into pits-out-of-sight the homeless, I might have to step over them on my way to get Fro-Yo!" Even those homeless who try to stay out of the way and consign themselves to busted tents in loud, toxic, dangerous places like under highways still regularly get smashed up and chased out and their stuff stolen by the pigs at the behest of some of the most reprehensible cowards in the country. I've lived and worked in places where I daily spent hours around or commuted on foot through multiple homeless encampments at all kinds of hours. I can't imagine the lack of conscience and callous shallowness-of-soul that would drive people to rally systemic violence against them. I've had more problems caused to my life by small business tyrants and tourists and pigs in single cities in a year than from every homeless person I've interacted with in my life put together. I've also been meaningfully helped and advised by more homeless people than by any gentrifier or cop.
If you don't want so many homeless people, take it to the landlords. Demand the end of (or at least mitigation regarding) the parasitic extortion of the need for shelter, where workers have to fork 1/2 of their paychecks over to some moneyed jagoff who didn't even build the house (and half the time don't even maintain it, and when they do they pay real workers to do it, with the money they parasitized through rent in the first place), and who evicts those who lose their job for 'existing in a house while poor', or who hikes their rent and evicts "low-value" tenants the second they smell better profits. Better yet or in addition, take it to the banks and real-estate tycoons foreign and domestic sitting on huge lots of vacant housing which are illegal to live in, all while new plots of land (including some of the last remaining nature) are ripped up and destroyed for more hideous condos and soulless developments that nobody can afford. Also demand the abolishing of criminal-record hiring discrimination for those who served their time which keeps them in the system and cycle.
Take it to your town doing this sick depraved stuff so they put these resources toward actual community efforts to address the causes of the problem, rather than toward additional fascist policing and morally and spiritually bankrupt dystopic projects like this, whose advocates and executors are infinitely more sociopathic and violent and disgusting than any of even the filthiest sketchiest and most aggressive homeless people I've spent time with, been threatened or hassled or scammed by, shared bottles or cigarettes with, given money or food to if I had some, whatever.
How much did this bench cost to design, manufacture, transport and install?
And this is what we're spending that money on?
