I would have shit in that alley, too

Years ago in Sydney, I passed a homeless guy begging outside McDonalds. I too was always of the opinion that it's better not to give money to homeless people (who might just spend it on alcohol or drugs [1]), but instead get them the thing they need. As he was outside McDonalds, I asked if he wanted me to get him something. He gladly accepted, as he'd apparently been banned from going inside after they picked up on his routine of buying one coffee in the morning and staying there all day having the free refills. (To be fair, I get both sides of that argument). I came back out and handed over his meal expecting that to be it, but as he was thanking me, he said I was the first person who'd stopped to speak to him for months (presumably apart from people telling him he had to leave) and to me it seemed such a shame that while people were willing to throw a few dollars in his hat, not a single person had stopped to ask how he was. It certainly made me realise how lonely and isolating that life could be, which I'd never previously considered.

[1] FWIW, I now think that's a gross over-simplification - getting drunk might be the best way to keep warm / not feel cold etc., and they might actually need money for things other than food, but the younger me hadn't thought about any of those things either.

I think in some cases, people are making the wrong presumption here.

"Scruffy looking" person can be a homeless person, or a drug addict. And people in these businesses are employees typically, not owners.

While many (most?) homeless people may be very tidy, and cause no issues, there is also a subset of homeless people which are mentally unstable.

So how do you tell "good homeless" from "worrisome homeless" and lastly from "drug addict"?

And if you are forced to make this choice many times per day, and get it wrong, you have customers coming to you and saying "My kid was in your bathroom and it had human shit on the wall and vomit all over the toilet!", how do you deal with that review on Yelp?

Trying to claim that without any reason, just randomly, businesses started to become wary is not fair.

From personal experience decades ago, I was on welfare. As I appeared somewhat respectable, I was given a discount on the largest room, as long as I kept the landlord notified of issues, vacuumed once a week, and mopped the shared bathrooms daily.

The bathrooms were simple, clean, and each tenant used their own toilet paper.

One day I entered a bathroom to find shit speared all over the walls. Literally, at least 60 or 70 smears of shit. Apparently one of the tenants had a friend over, he ran out of tp, and so his friend used the wall.

I basically had to mop the walls, took hours to get it all off.

I assure you that any such incident will make most people extremely wary of allowing anyone that appears questionable, in to use a bathroom.

It's not "keep the homeless out" but "keep the scruffy looking person out" along with fear of having to clean that up again, dear god no please!, and oh no I'm going to get a bad yelp review.

> Who’s going around giving pro bono Brazilian waxes to the homeless?

Apparently this is most likely to be a local clinic; when handling lower-income clients, it's often a routine part of any sexual health treatment.

(A friend who is a medic is slowly enlightening me on all the necessary parts of life and healthcare that we're too polite to talk about in school.)

(US here) I've been making and giving out care packages to the homeless in my area for years. I've learned a ton of things along the lines of what the article talks about.

When I'm looking for a person to give a package to, I try to spot the ones that look like they're in the roughest shape. If they want to, I'll spend time just shooting the breeze with them.

While they're certainly appreciative of the gift, I have very frequently heard two things from them: the main thing is that they really appreciate someone treating them like a human being rather than ignoring them or treating them like garbage. And they also really appreciate someone just having a chat with them.

I think lots of people tend to objectify the homeless, to think of them as somehow less than, or fundamentally different from, "decent society". The truth is that they're not. Any of us is just a disaster or two away from joining their ranks.

EDIT: I just wanted to add one anecdote (of several) to highlight my point. One day when I was making my rounds, I spotted a man who didn't look particularly homeless in appearance. He had clean clothes in good repair, reasonably well-groomed, etc. But over the years I seem to have developed a kind of "sixth sense" and asked him if he was homeless.

He told me that he'd been on the street for about a week. A few months earlier, he had an excellent professional job, plenty of money in the bank, owned a house, and generally had everything that people strive for. Then he suffered through a bitter divorce that ended up with him stripped of everything, leaving him broke and homeless. There was nothing obviously wrong with him -- he didn't seem to have a serious drug problem or crippling mental/emotional issues. He could have been any of us.

(I gave him a care package and some advice: to make it his priority to get off the street as quickly as possible. If he stays homeless for more than a couple of weeks, he's likely to remain there for years, maybe forever. My care packages include a list of where to get help and resources of various sorts, so I pointed out one that is particularly suited to his situation and strongly encouraged him to go to them. I hope that he did. I never saw him again, so I think he may have.)

I suggest another consideration: where the homeless live? In all countries we have poor and rich areas, but curiously homeless are mostly concentrated in large cities, while many are anyway poor outside they tent to have at least something resembling a home, maybe an ancient barrack or a camping van but still something. They still being able to find some occasional or regular low wage jobs still better then nothing.

Welcome to modern America, the greatest nation on earth!

Not that things were all that much better, at the bottom, in previous decades. Or centuries.

The barista doesn’t want homeless people in the toilet because inevitably crack paraphernalia goes in there too.

Better to have shit on the street than crack paraphernalia in your business toilet.

As a data point, yesterday I was walking watching two guys smoking crack outside Costa in Covent Garden, London.

Alas it works to the lowest common denominator. A better solution would be government investment in mental health and housing but most of the world works on “fuck you I’ve got mine”

It is ban of plastic shopping bags. Try to find something else to contain and scoop poop. Even dogs have their little plastic bags for free.

I've lived in cities with decent homeless populations (Austin, New York) for almost my entire life. I read about this phenomenon of homeless people defecating on the streets all the time. I've literally never seen this in real life. Neither the act itself, nor human waste on the ground. Am I just very lucky? What gives?