Paying people not to relieve themselves on the pavement
This article caught my eye. From the LA Times:
In L.A., the [automated public toilets] are supported by advertisers that buy space on nearby street furnishings. All of the APTs in the city, except two on skid row, charge a quarter for each use. Los Angeles is actually guaranteed $150 million in revenue from the 20-year contract for the APTs.
Why the skid-row exception? Two reasons seem pretty clear. First, homeless people don’t spend quarters lightly, if they have them at all. Second, if the city doesn’t give them a free indoor place to relieve themselves, they’ll use a free outdoor place: the street.
You can’t exactly sell a lot of advertising around a john for homeless people. That means no company can make money off such a toilet. The toilet’s existence, therefore, implies that the city is willing to pay a significant subsidy to dissuade those people from soiling public space.
Why don’t you get subsidized the same way? Because you’re no threat. You don’t foul sidewalks.
So if you do pollute, the city will pay you not to. And if you don’t, the city will take advantage of the services you can provide to it in terms of looking at adverts.
There is an analogy between the skid-row bathrooms and some criticisms of the economic incentives provided by some carbon offsetting projects. If we pay project developers to reduce their emissions (by destroying potent greenhouse gases, for example), when the incentive gets big enough new sources of emissions may emerge just so they can be cleaned up and receive offsets. If the APTs in LA were expensive enough, perhaps wealthy people would look at their compatriots’ situation in skid-row and start relieving themselves on the pavement in the hope that the city would open free bathrooms.
Hat tip – Tim Harford.
Stumble It!
Another funny analogy along the lines of the jokers at cheat neutral! Reversing the analogy suggests another interesting point – heavy polluters, like LA’s homeless, need a cultural shift to change their ways.
Education and incremental lifestyle changes appear to be the best long term remedies for homelessness (beyond the immediate patch job of food, shelter and health care). The same seems to be the case for heavy polluters, with education and gradual reductions in carbon emissions providing the most effective path forward.
Ignoring both problems certainly does not work. But, perhaps, neither do extreme solutions. The LAPD have been known to bulldoze unwanted homeless tents from skid row’s streets. Yet homelessness remains. Similarly, harsh emissions curbs could force businesses out of business, or oversees, where looser restrictions await.
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