The Disappearance of the Public Bench

I also like clean safe unobstructed sidewalks and parks but along with benches, we've made a decision. We've decided that putting the mentally ill in a facility and arresting people for public drug use is not something we're comfortable with at the expense of those other things. I don't personally ageee with this decision but it is apparently the consensus.

I'd add that we also chose policies that made housing expensive. It used to be much cheaper to live in NYC for example, but housing options included what was essentially a dorm room with shared facilities. Those were outlawedes for various reasons. There are also a lot of other policy factors that push up housing prices.

Cheap housing isn't a panacea, but if there was sub $500 dollar rent in NYC you'd see a lot less homelessness.

Urban spaces can be kind or unkind, and benches are a good way to judge.

A week ago I decided to explore a new part of town. I mean, I've only lived in this town for a few years, but I'm not into big cities, and I live in a country where even the capital can feel inordinately leafy and forested if you come from a town in India. I don't come from India, and my dad saw to it that I got acquainted with the ticks and the brambles from a young age, so short of true jungle or a dense mangrove swamp, I consider most places fair game for a leisurely stroll or a rowing. So I was talking with my mom on the phone, relating to her the greens of a small prairie and the reeds demarcating the swampy shore, and counting the many rabbits that were scattering at my passing, when, at a turn of the dirt trail, I found a stark reminder that I was still in town territory: a perfectly normal bench.

America is not known for caring about public infrastructure if they can avoid it once upon a time most cities actually had a public work department that actually tried to keep you know the public places clean they don’t anymore if you want clean public places you have to go someplace else in the world. Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea.

Most of that stuff has been farmed out to subcontractors in America and that includes what your kids eat in most public schools, the school cafeteria is just one big vending machine these days.

Can’t say it’s a problem in Chicago, we still have benches just about everywhere I can think of

Yup. Public trash cans too.

It's becoming harder to find a place to sit down in London (UK), too, especially one without hostile features like bench partitions or spikes.

Having no public restrooms within a 15 minute walk is worse than having no public benches. Cities shouldn't be allowed to exist without either of them. Also, ground-level restaurants and supermarkets should not be allowed to reject non-customers from using them.

Bulk urine is a good source of urea/ammonia which has commercial value, especially considering the global fertilizer shortage.

This is one of the cases in point of Hostile Architecture.

Or, you get benches that are horribly uncomfortable. Or with awkward bars (prevents sleeping). Or spikes.

In this case, there is nowhere to sit. That's 100% intentional.

Was in a bigger city in the weekend, and they don't have many benches. But it was nice in a way because people just sat anywhere every stair case step, every curb, grass patches, next to a tree, train station floor,...

Where there was a bench 5 people would sit, where there wasn't 15 did

Of course it was a pleasant weather otherwise...

I believe expensive housing is at the root of many societal problems, it's not even funny. We don't have park benches because we've adopted hostile architecture to keep out "undesirables". This mostly means "homeless people". But why are there so many homeless people? The primary reason is housing unaffordability [1].

One of the funny things about China is that there are a lot of "experts" who insist on reading the tea leaves and assign secret, nefarious motives. The truth is that China is pretty open about what they're doing. If you take everything China says at face value you're going to be ahead of 95% of the China talking heads on TV. That's not hyperbole.

Property speculation was a common way for Chinese people to accumulate wealth. This has made property expensive in the Tier 1 cities in particular. The CCP had tried to cool this with various reforms but it turned property into a Ponzi scheme. Basically, developers would have to sell new units and then use those funds to finish a previous project. This is a big factor in the Evergrande default [2].

Xi Jinping took power in 2019 and had some policy priorities that include cracking down on corruption, reforming the housing market and ecological living. In 2019, he famously said "houses are for living, not for speculation" [3]. So the real estate market has been in decline for years. Some might view that as a failure but it was an intentional popping of a real estate bubble for the greater good. China makes it difficult and expensive to own more than one home. Likewise, foreign capital can't be parked in real estate like it can in the West.

One of the good things about the Internet is that people can see for themselves how modern, clean and people-centric Chinese cities are, particularly Tier 1/2 cities.

Instead of investing in society, we militarize and overfund the police, start pointless wars, create homeless people through unaffordability and build our cities around various profit opportunities for mega-corporations (even having to have a card is to the benefit of corporations). And of course we can't forget what role racism played in how our cities evolved and were planned.

[1]: https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/

[2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/default-delisting-evergr...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...

This has little to do with the homeless and everything to do with a society that's shifted from seeking to facilitate positive things (e.g. the comfort of some random person on some random occasion) to one that wouldn't invent fire or sliced bread if it thought that doing so would be good for the wrong kind of people.

This is intensified in spaces administrated by government due to the incentives of government and the type of people who are best retained and fill out the org chart of such organizations and it is obvious because these spaces are most public but it's a thing everywhere, for example your hospital has security that could kick out "bad people" (whatever that means) but it still has a crappy waiting area not because they don't want to make it inviting for people who care about you to stick around lest they be there to raise a stink in the event you are mistreated.

There are comparable examples of this sort of "make things worse for people who are doing fine things" in all sorts of public and private contexts beyond just seating. I wish it was just the benches.

My best friend built two public benches for his eagle scout project in the late 90s.

Here's one of them, can't remember where the other is (in the same park): https://maps.app.goo.gl/kSFyikeerp7i77oZ8

I think the reason most people do not sympathize with this argument is that most HN readers are programmers, and many of them are still in a relatively secure class position.

Traditionally, programming has had a high barrier to entry, but it has also been a profession where compensation has remained relatively strong. As societies become harsher under pressure from high housing costs and economic displacement, they tend to become more aggressive and violent. But many people do not sympathize with this issue because they are not personally in that situation. They mostly experience the visible disorder: aesthetic damage, drug use, and the social harms produced by deeper structural failures.

But if we compare this to HN debates about LLMs, an irony appears. In labor-market terms, LLMs are similar to hostile design.

LLMs are not installing benches for programmers. They are closer to removing the benches.

In the past, there were lower-level tasks where junior developers, non-traditional developers, non-native English speakers, and small open-source contributors could remain inside the profession. CRUD work, documentation fixes, test writing, small bug fixes, simple UI, repetitive glue code — these were not glamorous tasks, and they were often inefficient. But they functioned like public benches inside the profession. They gave people a place to sit long enough to learn.

LLMs attack exactly that layer.

From a company’s point of view, this is rational. Code that might take a junior developer several days can now be drafted by a model in minutes. Documentation, tests, boilerplate, simple screens, and repetitive API wiring no longer seem worth preserving as training grounds for humans.

As a result, the market may look more efficient. But that efficiency resembles the history of removing benches. It is not only the “problematic” people who disappear. Elderly people, children, travelers, disabled people, and ordinary people who simply needed a place to sit are pushed out as well.

Software has a similar problem. If we remove low-level work, low-quality work may appear to decrease. But at the same time, we also remove the space where beginners can fail, receive correction, observe others, and slowly acquire the instincts of the profession.

So LLMs are not merely productivity tools. They can also function as a force that removes public seating inside the software profession.

That is why I find it difficult to reconcile the logic of people who argue that public benches should be removed, while also arguing that LLMs should not be accepted.

They are already sitting inside the profession. They already have experience, English, networks, code review experience, and existing project history. For them, LLMs look like a faster tool. But for people trying to enter from the edge of the profession, LLMs are not just a tool. They are a change in the structure of entry itself.

The lower seats where people could once sit and learn are disappearing. Newcomers are expected to start from a higher level of abstraction and with stronger verification skills from the beginning.

In cities, the logic for removing benches is usually expressed in the language of order, safety, aesthetics, and maintenance cost. In software, the logic for adopting LLMs is expressed in the language of productivity, efficiency, cost reduction, and quality control.

But behind that language, what disappears is the buffer zone through which a community receives people.

A city without benches may look cleaner, but it does not become more public. Likewise, a software market without entry-level work may look more productive, but it is hard to say that it has become a healthier ecosystem.

When I read HN, I often see this kind of irony. And perhaps we all live inside such ironies. That may also be part of what makes communities interesting.

People do not seem to have a consistent attitude toward publicness itself.

Instead, they show completely different moral intuitions depending on where they are positioned within that public space.

I always find that interesting to watch.

“Why can’t we have nice things?”

Any article like this that I read that dismisses anti-social behavior as some kind of normative cultural trait I think misses the point.

In most places street furniture serves a function, and a function that cost a significant amount of resources. The anti-social use of these features harms the social services those features are meant to serve.

Anti-social behavior can be trivially defined by a kind of categorical imperative. That is: does this behavior, if universalized, render the public service non-functional. It is increasingly naive to consider these concerns simply in a cultural context or some power dynamic.

Gosh, if only there was some way we could solve homelessness!

Don't worry about it, as at least we can drop tens of billions of dollars to show the Iranians how big and powerful we are.

Our society is sick and it's not getting better anytime soon. We're past the golden era of civilization and barreling towards dystopia now.