There are some public springs near me located on a public street, well I’ve been told they are springs and have been there producing water since forever.
There are a lot of homeless men and men with no water hookup bathing there, they wear shorts. Never seen any women using it but all you have to do is put a bucket there and haul it home.
Anyway this brings me back to my point which is I don’t understand why in the USA bathing is seen as something you need to rent or own to do. If you are homeless or destitute hah fuck you! Go stink!
Seriously this was the hardest thing about being homeless, there is no place to get a quick shower. Hotel rooms are $$$$ and homeless shelters are long term obligations, they don’t want to just let people use and go.
Bathing for cleanliness is typically something we view as a private activity in the United States. Given that the vast majority of people have access to bathing facilities there really isn’t a big need for public bathing facilities.
You can pay to take a shower at a truck stop. Maybe not at all truck stops, but I’ve seen some before. There are also public showers at some beaches, and I don’t think they ALL charge an admission fee.
I guess it would be nice if we had showermats (bathmats? hah!) attached to laundromats, though. You could take a shower while your clothes get clean and kill 2 birds with one stone.
A new Goodwill store in my area just opened and it has a career center offering work appropriate clothes and personal hygine products. Shower facilities seem like a good idea, too.
That really depends on where you’re living. There is a dearth of toilet access in places like New York City. A lot of businesses in the United States have public toilets because they’re required to by law but many of those places can deny you access if you are not a customer. Anyway, I don’t think the comparison to toilet facilities is particularly useful. Most of us don’t feel the urge to bathe several times a day.
I lived in Bogotá, Colombia in the mid 70’s. At the time there were somewhere around 5000 homeless people living within the city limits. They were called “gamines” which is actually a French word. Anyway, I remember walking downtown to my dad’s office and passing a number of fountains. There, I would often see young kids bathing, both nude or in their undies. I was around 10 years old. On hot Summer days I always wanted to jump in there with them :).
In the USA at least, most people bathe/shower either right after waking up in the morning (before getting dressed), or right before going to bed at night (after getting undressed). They bathe where they sleep.
This is pretty common for people who are temporarily homeless. Chronically homeless people who live on the street long term often have issues other than lack of access to showers that keeps them smelly.
Many of them do. However, as the OP mentioned, they “are long term obligations, they don’t want to just let people use and go.” Generally, I think you have to sign in/out every day to be allowed the privelege of using them, as a way to encourage some stability.
Anyone know the average cost of a truck stop shower these days?
Unfortuntely, owning a bath tub or shower becomes somewhat inconvenient when you don’t have a regular home with plumbing to attach it to.
Seriously OP? Generally the goal in this country is “try not to be homeless”. And assuming you become homeless for some reason, what sort of stuff do homeless shelters “obligations” keep you from? Riding the rails with a bindle on your shoulder?
In different eras and cultures, public baths had a certain logic in that plumbing was still expensive, so it made sense to have public baths where natural water sources were available, or to pay to have water piped to a handful of locations for the purpose of having public baths.
But nowadays, running water in the home is taken as practically a given, so practically every residence has a bath or shower. And since most people bathe only once or twice a day, generally after waking or before retiring, there’s really no need for most of us to bathe anywhere else. So there’s little demand for baths or showers in public places, other than at the gym, pool, or beach.
Toilets are obviously a different matter, since most of us need to use the toilet every few hours, and it’s pretty normal to be out and about for a longer period of time than you can ‘hold it.’ So one can generally find toilets in public places because there is considerable demand for such facilities, though those public places are usually businesses that expect you to be a customer in order to use the facilities.
I’ve never been homeless, but it seems to me that if you’re going to be putting the same filthy clothing back on anyway, then what’s the point of bathing?
