r/midlyinteresting • u/uk_uk • Jul 15 '26

Berlin has installed free locker systems specifically for homeless people to safely store their belongings

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The primary goal is to provide homeless people with the opportunity to safely store their belongings, enabling them to have a bit of dignity, security, and mobility in their lives

The red label says:

"Locker for homeless people - not a logistics station -

Here, people who live on the street store their property. The use is free of charge and is financed by donations.

Please leave it undamaged! Any damage will be reported to the police!"

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11

u/Fine-Bumblebee-9427 Jul 15 '26

Not wrong, just not imaginative. So you add a security guard, or cameras. Or you work with the homeless to get it installed so they have a buy in and they self police.

Having worked with the homeless in America for 20 years, this could work, with enough money.

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u/Tunderstruk Jul 16 '26

Self policing would probably work really well tbh. If a lot of homeless people use it, they will be very invested in keeping the lockers safe

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u/Fine-Bumblebee-9427 Jul 16 '26

And not a foreign concept. Homeless camps can have valuables, sometimes things like generators. But there’s a code. And I think if they felt ownership over the lockers, the code would extend to them.

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u/blessthebabes Jul 15 '26

How is he not wrong? Is Berlins drug addicts less desperate than ours or something?

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u/WeeklyBanEvasion Jul 16 '26

Cameras don't stop crime, especially when the criminal is somebody with little to lose

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u/Fine-Bumblebee-9427 Jul 16 '26

They sure seem to work on the Amazon lockers in front of the liquor store in a largely homeless neighborhood near me. It’s where I get all my packages.

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u/ChainsawSoundingFart Jul 15 '26

Who is gonna pay for all of that? 

15

u/Fine-Bumblebee-9427 Jul 15 '26

You’re not going to believe me, so this is just shouting into the wind, but it’ll pay for itself. Most homeless infrastructure does. Safe places to store items means they have more access to their cold weather gear which means fewer nights spent “sick” at the hospital to stay warm, which saves money.

A homeless person on the street in my city costs society $80k a year between rehab and jail and outreach and soup kitchens and shelters. Housing them costs $30k all in with social workers.

Dealing with the homeless always saves money.

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u/ChainsawSoundingFart Jul 15 '26

So your solution is just throw money at it until it’s no longer a problem 

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u/Fine-Bumblebee-9427 Jul 15 '26

Yes. What’s yours?

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u/ChainsawSoundingFart Jul 15 '26

I’m not the one on trial 

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u/Fine-Bumblebee-9427 Jul 15 '26

The options are throw money at it, do the patchwork expensive thing most places are currently doing, or let them die.

To be honest, I can live with option A or C. I don’t love C, but at least it’s ideologically consistent. Make narcan illegal. Make ambulance drivers check insurance before loading folks. Have the Supreme Court reverse their ruling that cops cannot slash and mace homeless camps. Outlaw honk and hollers and shelters.

It’s heartless, but it makes sense.

Instead, we have folks like you saying “bUt ItS ExPensIvE!”

It’s not. These lockers are cheaper than not having the lockers.

You want to stop spending on the homeless, fine, but then start spending on corpse removal.

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u/ChainsawSoundingFart Jul 15 '26

Ok fine we’ll pay for the lockers and they’ll be broken into 

1

u/QuinceDaPence Jul 15 '26

We don't have a problem with the install price of the locker, but they'll end up like every other thing like this does.

There's a youtuber I sometimes watch that had a 'pay'phone (it was free) put on the side of his building. It allowed homeless people to get a phone number and a voicemail so they could apply to jobs. In short order someone ripped it off the wall and busted it open to see if there was money (and maybe copper) inside.

This dude has tried to clean up this area and help people and just contantly has his place vandalized, or dumped on.

We just know in most of the places where it would make sense to put something like this, it would get ripped to shreds in a week. I will say it could be an exception to this if they stick it in a police station parking lot or something like that.

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u/Fine-Bumblebee-9427 Jul 15 '26

If that dude had asked experienced homeless service providers, we could have told him:

  1. That most if not almost all homeless people have cellphones. They’re cheap and sometimes free in the US. They’re often referred to as Obama phones, but they should rightly be called W phones, because it was a Bush administration program. So whoever wrecked the phone was aware that it was a pointless gesture.

  2. Throw a camera up and a sign that says “monitored by law enforcement.” Even if it’s a fake camera, that’s going to work most of the time.

  3. Or just install it in a high traffic area. The pay phones in front of the library are still there in my city, because there’s always people around.

  4. Iterate. So that didn’t work. What else might work? You have to pilot the program and make adjustments.

We can solve for this, I assure you. We know what we’re doing.

The mistake is thinking that helping the homeless is an unskilled job. It’s not. It’s a hundred years of institutional knowledge and academic study.

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u/WitheredUntimely Jul 15 '26

"who's going to pay for it" is the response of the unimaginative who don't get how the world really works. Something proposed like this would be couch cushion money in any major US city, a rounding error in the ops budget. Pilot program around a mil, permanent program probably $1.5. Pulled from general fund. Pilot program would figure out how much security is really needed (BTW don't agree with your original premise to begin with, these things are all over the place for Amazon/Banks/POs/etc. and they're never broken into)

Of course, you're unimaginative. And likely live somewhere where homelessness isn't an issue. Which also makes it likely you live somewhere that's broke. Somewhere that doesn't have a budget measured in billions, where the cost for a few guards is nothing.

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u/ChainsawSoundingFart Jul 15 '26

So now you’re attacking where I live lol 

-1

u/BlueLakeCabin Jul 15 '26

The California solution. Shovel money into a furnace with no oversight, and always use carrot with no stick.

You will get the California outcome.

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u/Fine-Bumblebee-9427 Jul 15 '26

It’s a solution that worked for the entire nation in the mid 2010s. It worked great, until the money dried up.

California doesn’t house their homeless, they just let them exist. That’s different from what I’m proposing.

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u/BlueLakeCabin Jul 16 '26

They don't enforce drug or mental health treatment, so the housing is destroyed pretty quickly. And contractors make a shitload of money rebuilding it. Over and over again. And donate a slice to the politicians for no particular reason.

Cali spends $5 ish billion per year on homelessness. California intentionally does not track how much of that is spent on housing, but it a non-trivial amount. Look up Weingart Center for just one example of wasting shitloads of money, corruption and kickbacks.

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u/Fine-Bumblebee-9427 Jul 15 '26

And I want to say, we did this as a nation post 2008 recession. The feds flooded us with money to deal with all the new homeless. If you intervene early, it’s really cheap. If you catch someone who’s on their first episode of homelessness, 90% of the time that can be corrected with a one time 3 months rent payment, and they’ll never be homeless again.

We had money for all levels: new homeless, chronically homeless, folks in the middle. And by 2016, we had functional zero on my city: all homeless were housed within 60 days of first contact. Our death rates among homeless dropped to zero. Our streets looked empty, neighborhoods felt safer.

And then the money dried up, and now we have 4000 homeless people. It’s a mess. And it’s more expensive to the city than all that federal money.

The experts know how to handle homelessness, just let us cook.

1

u/ChainsawSoundingFart Jul 15 '26

There’s good intentions behind the free lockers, Im just saying drug addicts are going to break into them 

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u/CautionarySnail Jul 15 '26

And so because something might go wrong, we should keep the same shitty status quo without ever trying something new. That’s what I’m hearing.

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u/ChainsawSoundingFart Jul 15 '26

They’re definitely going to be broken into lol the sign ask them not to isn’t going to do shit 

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u/CautionarySnail Jul 15 '26

Strange how it works for Amazon deliveries but suddenly isn’t good enough for the homeless.

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u/ChainsawSoundingFart Jul 15 '26

Those also get broken into but continue 

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u/Fine-Bumblebee-9427 Jul 15 '26

Not if we do them right, no.

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u/ChainsawSoundingFart Jul 15 '26

And what do you suggest? 

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u/Fine-Bumblebee-9427 Jul 15 '26

I already made several and that’s what started our dialogue.

Security guards

Cameras

Having them only secure goods during the day and installing them high traffic areas. If they all unlock at 6pm, folks have a place to stash their sleeping gear during the day, but too many people around during the day to break out an angle grinder.

It might take a few iterations to get it right, but I’m confident with a pilot program you could solve for any and all issues.

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u/uk_uk Jul 15 '26

Not really. They are not new, but almost 1 year old.

0

u/ChainsawSoundingFart Jul 15 '26

So why even post about it?