Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Downtown St. Louis, just a few years ago, had a thriving shopping mall, and multiple department stores, including a major flagship. This was decades after Detroit lost its last department store. So something changed in recent years.
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I think in general we don't put enough weight on the effect of the internet in enabling remote work, online shopping, and ride-sharing apps like Uber. There are fewer day time office workers spending money downtown and using transit. The current decline started around 2010 which was when smart phones and high speed internet really reached 100% saturation.That was the moment when you could go to Walmart and spend $39 to buy a prepaid android phone.
They aren't around to dilute the presence of homeless people which leads to a sense of unease.
When I've ridden public transit in other cities while traveling (always drive when I am at home) my completely honest feeling is that I don't care if there is some gross homeless person on the train doing gross things if they are minding their own business. Only wimps get scared of things like that. But, if I get on a train and I am the only person who doesn't have a tattoo, I feel uncomfortable in a more psychological way, and it's not merely a matter of security but also a feeling like I am in the wrong place in general, like this train is for these other gross poor people and people will think I am also poor and judge me. I know this is classist and bigoted and whatever and from behind a screen on social media people will judge the hell out of this opinion. But be real, you know you've felt this way too.
Also what this means is that all this time, the vagrancy issue in cities isn't solely a policing or security issue. The homeless aren't so much a cause but a symptom. Someone who is homeless who manages to pay the fare to ride a bus and minds their business the entire time has every right to be there, they are not a criminal, they are doing nothing wrong, and a police officer who is riding the bus will not make the bus more "safe" because it was "safe" already. Despite the popular narrative we cannot simply blame "safety" as the reason for problems with urban centers.
Rather it's partially an image and psychology issue, and that's going to be a lot harder to fix.
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