I really liked the link you posted along with your blog post. To be honest, I never thought about sleeping in public placing being different for different classes of people until the reading this week, and your blog post really hit on that. When I see upper class people sleeping in public, it never really bothered me. I just thought think to myself “Wow, they must feel really safe… They aren’t afraid of being robbed?” So the rules against sleeping in public places didn’t fully make sense to me. But from this article, I realized how ignorant my way of thinking was.

Homeless people who don’t have places to sleep, have to sleep in public places. However, upper class people think of the sleeping homeless as being “scary”. Perhaps it’s a combination of fearing that the homeless are violent and the realization that people live that way making people uncomfortable. People associate homelessness and poverty with nothing but crime, and that has led to laws and architecture meant to deter “bums”. It’s stereotyping and extraordinarily unhelpful in solving the issues of poverty and homelessness.

Last year I was in a dance video that was being filmed in Washington Square Park. It was late at night and there was a homeless man that kept jumping into the shot and trying to talk to my friend’s niece. My friend got scared and started to yell and chase after the homeless man and threaten him. That night, a man came over with boxes of pizza and he told us that he came every night to feed the homeless in the park, and that the one near us was a regular and wasn’t going to hurt anyone. He then proceeded to offer us pizza as well. This just goes to show how quick people are to make assumptions.

When people in power make these same accusations, we end up with institutions that are aimed towards attracting only the wealthy and businesses. The High Line is a great example of this, and it does its “job” well. It’s strictly regulated and often feels more like a museum than a park. One time, I believe last year, my parents took me to the High Line since we were in the area. And I actually remember being very bored! It was hot that day, and I felt like I had nothing to do besides slowly follow my parents while they took ten thousand pictures. It’s meant for the artsy, leisurely type.

The one place I somewhat disagree with you is when you ask if a fresh coat of paint even makes a difference. In my opinion, it does. Just repainting and replacing old playground areas with new ones can make the park look cleaner and more welcoming and safer. Parents would be more likely to want to bring their children there. It cleans up the park and turns it into a welcoming community space without changing it into a wealthy tourist magnet or alienating too many of its original visitors. I believe that too drastic of a renovation could change the use and make up of the parks and defeat the purpose of the renovation as a way of supporting an underprivileged community.

 

~ Samantha