probablyasocialecologist:

In some cities, the homelessness crisis on transit systems is truly life and death. On May 2, a New York subway rider choked a man who had been seen panhandling and acting erratically, killing him. Between January and March, 22 people died on LA Metro, most from overdoses and in areas commonly known as homeless hangouts, according to the Los Angeles Times. Last year, a man who had been drifting in and out of hospitals, mental health facilities, and living on the streets for decades pushed Michelle Go in front of an oncoming train, killing her. Later that year, New York City mayor Eric Adams authorized the involuntary hospitalization of some people during homeless encampment sweeps and mulled a policy of increasing ticketing and summonses for homeless people—an obvious precursor to jailing them since they do not have the money to pay any fines. Many centrist and right-leaning commentators, such as Josh Barro, paint this issue as one that “exposes a key contradiction that leftists need to resolve. Do they care about the provision of high-quality public services? Or is their primary objective to ensure that the coercive force of the state is never used to enforce rules?” The creation and enforcement of stricter rules are increasingly popular policies nationwide, and fail to address the causes of homelessness.

Nevertheless, conservative activists and think-tankers have launched coordinated campaigns to make being homeless a felony, ensuring the homelessness-to-prison pipeline becomes even more streamlined. In April of last year, Tennessee state senator Frank Niceley, in discussing one such bill, made the argument that homeless people should find inspiration in a young man who, for a brief period early in life, “lived on the streets and practiced his oratory and his body language and how to connect with the masses and then went on to lead a life that’s got him into the history books”—evidence that life on the streets is not “a dead end.” He was referring, of course, to Adolf Hitler. Tennessee passed the bill, implicitly recognizing that, generally speaking, the U.S.’s answer to homelessness, inasmuch as it has one, is prison beds or shipping them out of town for someone else to deal with.

Amongst this mess, transit agencies are caught in the middle, tasked with doing something about a problem they had no role in creating and have no way of solving, which is often used as an excuse to dedicate little to no staff or budget to the problem.