Park visitors required to sit up straight on benches in Orlando

Here's my second post today about parks in Florida: a sign in an Orlando park erected to refresh visitors' memory of the City Code forbidding them to "lie or otherwise be in a horizontal position on a park bench."

Tacky Fabulous points out, "Somebody must have tried the 'I wasn't laying down - I was just positioned horizontally' excuse."

I know - you're saying to yourself, "But wait a second! Didn't Orlando hover near record high rates for murders in the year 2007? Shouldn't there be a sign, instead, that reads: "Please do not impale with bullets or otherwise inflict death blows on other beings?" The answer is yes, but people who commit homicides tend to start as people who recline on park benches. It's textbook.

I also like the part prohibiting people from "remaining" in "bushes, shrubs, or foliage." Link

• [SaintCynr]

  It’s easy to be irritated by, or frightened of, the homeless. It’s harder to see the whole picture- that our money-obsessed society makes them what they are- broke, unwanted, hopeless, and reviled.

  The reason the homeless congregate in parks and on benches is that they have nowhere to go. Most of us haven’t yet experienced the terror of having nothing, of being a “burden” to everyone else. But if the bankers and politicians get their unwitting way, more of us will. Many, many more of us.

  I’ll probably be flamed for this, but so what. I know, no one wants to be made to feel bad for being successful and comfortable. But that’s not my message. My message is this: When everyone is simply trying to do as well for themselves as possible, someone else has to pay to make that a reality. Foreign slave laborers, the unlucky, the mentally ill, the “different”. It’s always the most vulnerable who do so first. But once the edges have crumbled, and there’s no way to ignore the “good people like us” who begin to fall prey to the incessant grasping for More, the rest of the plate is the next to go.

  I’ve been homeless. I sincerely hope none of you need experience it. It is a soul-destroying thing.

• [Cpt. Tim]

  even barring a homeless problem, don’t be a jerk and lie down on a bench. you’re taking up sitting space for 4 with one. Its like the jerks on the subway who take up two seats either with their legs or with their shopping.

  now if it said do not lay down in the park at all that would piss me off. For being so verbose the sign has a lot of wiggle room. apparently sleeping in the park is okay as long as its not on a bench, bushes, shrubs, or foliage.

• [ragingred]

  GABRIELM, you said you saw the sign posted on a gate on the Pacific Crest Trail. So, the sign is saying that the gate is state property and it’s illegal to remove or damage it.

• [gabrielm]

  RAGINGRED – it was not actually on the trail, but on a side road we crossed which hitching to a town.

  I get that “MOLESTING” refers to vandalizing. sign specification still lists it.

• [ragingred]

  “Same” refers to “state property.” Same = Being the one previously mentioned or indicated; aforesaid.

• [Nicholas Weaver]

  Daemon etc…

  Not to get involved in an off-topic flame war, but SF has one of the BIGGEST homeless problems, and at the same time tries to help the most.

• [Anonymous]

  Typical – in my city ALL the public benches have been removed completely… great fun for a non-homeless man with arthritis like me.

• [SaintCynr]

  Crash:

  There’s a lot of stuff to address there, I’m not sure I can do it justice in this post, but I’ll give it a whirl. :)

  1. Lending money at interest

  The US economy is based on debt. A massive, crushing load of debt, both personal and governmental. Borrowing money costs money. And we, and our gov’t, keep on borrowing. It’s a debt spiral. The thing is, when you extrapolate this out to its logical end, you begin to see that wealth must naturally accumulate into the hands of fewer and fewer people, because borrowing costs, and those with the money to lend must be paid their due. Add to simple or compound interest the taxes, fees, surcharges, and all the other hidden costs of things, especially those associated with credit cards, and it makes the situation all the worse. Eventually, unless we cease our endless borrowing to maintain an unhealthy standard of living (which is primarily based on luxuries, not the creation of a sustainable, balanced way of life), the vast majority of wealth will end up in the pockets of a very privileged few.

  2. Baseline costs, and keeping up with the Joneses

  The basic tools of life (food, shelter, etc) cost a baseline amount, though depending on one’s frugality, it can be a lot or a little. A person who makes 30k a year will have less wiggle room in their budget once these items are paid for than a more wealthy one will. One blown engine or a medical emergency will be far more deadly to the financial health of a less wealthy person. And hey, if you overdraw your account paying for that emergency, you get banged with overdraft fees and a host of other “shaft the poor” costs. A wealthy person will almost never get to that point, except through mismanagement. It costs more to be poor, plain and simple. You’re more likely to have good credit if you’re rich, because you almost always have the cash to pay your bills on time, and you don’t have to let the cable or utilities slide to cover other expenditures or the emergencies. And if your credit is better, you can borrow money more cheaply. Again, it costs more to be poor, because there are many more dangers. Add to all this our incessant exposure to advertising, social pressure, and a desire for comfort that make us want to buy more, more, more. “Retail Therapy”. Our way of life is not sustainable.

  Let me use an example that occurred with my brother-in-law the other day. The holidays just ended. He has 3 kids. He spent a load of money he didn’t really have to give his kids a nice Christmas. His apartment complex had his car towed a couple days ago. Ostensibly this was because he was double parked. He wasn’t, but he needs his car, and the impound fees go up, up, and up if you don’t get it out right away. The towing company is supposed to provide a photo of the infraction, but of course, it wasn’t “ready yet” when he went to contest/pay the charges. It’s a shakedown. The towing company pays the complex a kickback for the right to shaft the people who live there. Now, a rich person wouldn’t have tis occur. They can afford to pay the fees, or a lawyer to contest the shakedown. A poor person can’t. It’s that simple.

  Alrighty…I gotta go. I’ll try and come back and add more later. The minutae of real life intrudes!

• [vsync]

  Orlando also tried to ban giving hungry people food.

• [simplehuman]

  The outer limits pops to mind “We control the horizontal and the vertical!”

  That aside, in my neighborhood we had a homeless woman who would piles dozens of stinking, rotting blankets on a bus stop bench and create this mound of bedding. It looked like a nest and was caked in filth. She’s set it up in the early evening and spend the night. The woman was clearly mentally ill, spending the night wailing and jibbering to herself. I could hear her some night from my house two doors away.

  Numerous people, myself included, tried to help her and find her somewhere better to sleep, but she would either ignore us or start screaming. The cops eventually came one night when she got into it with the transit police after voiding on the bus-stop bench.

  It’s heart-breaking to see someone suffering like that, and people of good conscience are often frustrated trying to find a way to help.

  Putting up nonsense signs like that only further cuts the homeless off from the human community. Shoving the “undesireable” out of sight does nothing to address their issues and ultimately devalues our humanity.

• [Moon]

  I’m pretty sure it’s NOT true that the homeless will go to shelters if they are provided.

  For a lot of homeless, their goal is being independent.

  (at least in Chicago)

• [Crash]

  #19: And many more were evicted from homeless shelters for their behavior (often due to mental illness).

• [Takuan]

  Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London echoes your points. Being poor is vastly complicated and ultimately more expensive. You might also like the Vime’s Boots Theory of Economics as propounded by Pratchett.

• [simplehuman]

  It’s more palatable for many to simply imprison the mentally ill along for petty crimes, and regularly roust them on the streets with asinine signage and ordinances.

  These are the same people who think Rush Limbaugh is witty.

• [Takuan]

  sleeping on the grass is OK then? Read it carefully.

• [Crash]

  #10 (SaintCynr): How did you come to be homeless? And how did you end it?

• [SaintCynr]

  (23)Crash:

  In 1992, I got out of the Air Force after serving in the Gulf War. I intended to backpack around Europe. My “friend” and traveling companion was deported from the UK (where I’d meet him in the weeks to come)for being a smartass to the customs folks, and so I never got there- I went to hang out with my friend instead. Foolish loyalty. I had about 5 grand in cash and bonds with me, and we spent the summer pointlessly hanging out in Western Pennsylvania. The only trouble was, I was the only one with money out of a group of 5. I bankrolled baseball games, nights out, cigarettes for the smokers, endless fast food and diner meals, thinking, “Well, we’re friends, we’ll find a way, they have my back.” Incorrect. Once my money ran out, no one wanted to hang out any longer. I knew no one else there, had nowhere to go. It was a recession, and no one wanted to give me a job. I looked for a month, and then I couldn’t sell anything else to make even food money. I grew up in the mountains, and after shamedly being city homeless for 1 month or so, I went and stayed in the woods, living off the land. Thank all that’s sacred I knew how to, or I’d have probably not made it. After 3 more months, I did some work for a friend’s family, made $50, and used that cash to hitchhike home to Colorado.

• [Crash]

  Saintcynr: Thank you for those details; they are very illuminating and do a lot to humanize the faceless homeless. We all see panhandlers, but hardly ever know or ask how they got there. We probably should.

  If I may ask you one more question — when you wrote earlier you mentioned that much of the strain on the destitute comes from “everyone simply trying to do as well for themselves as possible; someone else has to pay to make that a reality.” Did you mean that in relation to your own story? Are you talking about the absence of meaningful social support for basic living after you ran out of cash, your difficulty in finding a job, your fair-weather friends? Or are you talking about something else entirely, such as the more chronically impoverished?

• [Warren Camishen]

  Mrk, y mst lv n gd prt f twn. Whr m, w hv lds f (wht n mght cll) “smlly ndsrbls” lngng vry whch wy n r mn cty sqr – frghtnng wy dcnt, prght ctzns (nd schl kds)

  Hv y vr trd t g t yr lcl lbrry nd bn tntd by drg pshrs, drnks nd cmmn crmnls sttng n prk bnchs? hv nd t’s n pcnc!

  Ths sgn f yrs my b fnny, bt t lst t’s wrttn n clr mnnr.

  n th ld dys sgn lk ths wld’v rd “BMS ND TRNSNTS KP FF TH BNCHS R Y’LL B RRSTD”

  Wrnngs lwys tnd t b fnny r rnc, bt t lst ths n’s sm-cvl.

• [Nicholas Weaver]

  You’ve never walked through the bad parts of Golden Gate Park, have you?

  Such ordinances are necessary and need to be enforced if you don’t want your parks to become homeless camps.

  Here in the bay area, a lot of people have just resorted to designing benches with internal armrests, so you CAN’T lay down on them.

• [Mark Frauenfelder]

  Whether or not the signs are useful and necessary, I found the *wording* funny. What’s wrong with that?

• [Axx]

  A bit wordy, isn’t it?

  I always got a kick out of a sign in the library from my undergrad days. The sign was simply the word SUPINE with a big, red cross through it.

• [catdogpigduck]

  I live in orlando in the area where these signs are.

  They are for hobos but it is silly because hobos don’t read.

  In this same area around Lake Eola there is another sign that says “WARNING: BIRD DROPPING ZONE” There are these birds that apparently poop there, but like a whole lot.

• [scarabic]

  Bah. This is hardly posture critique.

• [Anaxaforminges]

  I live in San Francisco and we have a HUGE homeless problem. I know several homeless people and they don’t go to shelters because they have strict rules. Show up by a certain time, no ins-and-outs, lights out, no drinking/drugs…

  They are starting to provide rooms to the homeless with no drinking/drug use prohibitions. As long as they don’t fight and don’t crap in the corner, they can stay and drink or do drugs. I forgot what they called this…. But it seems to work. The homeless people chill and drink some beers and retire to their rooms for the hard stuff. At least they’re off the street. The several homeless people I’ve known all died. It’s a very hard life. They were older guys and they aged rapidly in just a few years. “Picture of Dorian Grey” rapidly.

  Being homeless is basically a slow death sentence.

• [sonny p fontaine]

  never a more pius group than the “defenders” of the homeless. although those that would judge someone to be a “drunk” “drugpusher” or a “HOBO”(really!!! what freaking century do you live in?) aren’t far behind. come on peeps there is really no reason to be “heartbroken” for someone that doesn’t live up to your hygiene standards. amazing to me that you freaks can spin the most lighthearted posts(and usually Marks from what i see) into some cry to take better care of those somehow “less” than you. get a freakin’ sense of humor would ya? ya bunch of sourpusses
  and #8 you are on state property while reading a sign addressing rules about state property. and yes homer, molest is a funny word right up there with “#2″ tee hee

• [EdT.]

  I hope there’s an exception for if your murdered body has been dumped in a bush.

  I mean, talk about adding insult to injury to have your next of kin also be responsible for a loitering ticket while making funeral arrangements…

• [gabrielm]

  OK all of you sign experts. Can you tell me what this road sign means? It reads:

  ANY PERSON REMOVING OR MOLESTING SAME WILL BE PROSECUTED

  Thanks in advance!

• [Daemon]

  Yet another example of treating poor people as the problem, instead of treating poverty as a problem.

  If you don’t want homeless people sleeping on your benches, provide them with a superior alternative. Better yet, actually make a real effort to deal with the reasons why there are homeless people in the first place.

  There aren’t exactly a lot of people who choose that lifestyle freely.