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stabby_cicada OP ,

I hope that's just bad phrasing. You are not the victim. The problem is not that you have to see the improvised shelters. The unhoused people in that photo are the victims - of economic injustice, of discrimination, of the myriad social failures of our society and government. Their problem is lack of shelter. They solve it with improvised shelters in public spaces.

I want to emphasize this because it's a way of thinking that's very hard to maintain in a society so prejudiced against homeless people. Tent cities and improvised shelters and unhoused people sleeping on the streets are not problems. They are solutions, used by the unhoused, to the problem of lack of shelter.

Those solutions are suboptimal, obviously, and cause other problems, including your own negative emotional reaction to seeing them.

But if government and society see tent cities and improvised shelters as problems to be eliminated, instead of bad solutions to the deeper problem of housing inequity, government and society will implement "solutions" that merely relocate or eliminate the shelters to remove them from sight, and leave the unhoused even worse off than before.

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