Different take on the bench. The dividers allows for the pregnant and the disabled to sit. Which I believe is more important than letting some homeless sleep on that particular bench.
You can have those arm handles at the ends of benches without being dividers, accommodating both, people with movement problems and homeless people who need a spot to sleep.
You are absolutley right. Wouldn't it be a great idea then to build more benches or fight causes for homelessness in general instead of shooing some away from some benches?
Ask the person making the argument, not me. I'm just explaining their argument.
As for my opinion, homelessness(on the streets, not car sleeping or couch crashing) in the US has one primary cause, the drug crisis. This leads to a lot of people simply having a fear of homeless people, because you know, someone meth'd out can be(not always is) pretty scary and dangerous. It sort of makes the other problems worse, how do you make people want to walk in walkable cities if they're scared of being stabbed by a dirty needle? I have a separate ideological belief against drug prohibition, but sadly that has been shown(or at least seemed to) to not actually reduce drug related homelessness. So honestly, I don't know the answer, homeless people are people, people addicted to drugs are people but it is difficult for shelters to help people who have a risk of being violent to staff and other residents.
Because as we all know, without dividers every bench in the city would have a homeless person sleeping on it 24 hours a day non-stop, never allowing anyone to sit down ever again.
No they won't. They will only sleep there the exact moment someone with a disability isn't nearby. They can sense people in need. So they wake up and leave the premises. Right?
In your first comment, you say the extra armrests are there to keep "some homeless" (not even a homeless PERSON) off the bench for disabled individuals. You're saying that benches should have these installed because seating disabled people is more important than letting "some homeless" use it for a night's rest.
When others point out that a bench with armrests at the ends and no dividers could be used by both groups, you say "bUt YoU hAvE tO SiT oN tHe hOmELeSs" as if 2 people can't use a bench at the same time. It's a bench, not a chair, that's the whole point. What are you even arguing here, that if homeless people are allowed to use benches that they'll all be occupied, and they all will refuse to move, and we'll have to sit on the unhoused? Absolutely preposterous.
And then, when all this is pointed out to you, you say the rest of us have "degenerative" genes and can't hold 2 thoughts at the same time. Really? That's straight up far right rhetoric, bringing up the inferior genes shit.
Yes, unhoused people should absolutely have a place to go, but we don't need to build our cities to be hostile towards them.
TLDR: Go the fuck outside, get some help, go for a walk, call your mom, hell, even go talk to a homeless person, touch grass. I'm done with Lemmy for today, you should be too.