Carl Zehr Square renovations

[SF22]

They were fucking brand new! Would you tolerate it if it was something on your property that you spent a lot of money on? We spend municipal tax money to install beautiful infrastructure only to have it ruined by ignorant assholes. Why should we tolerate that? These people should be locked in stocks in a public square!

Quite an extreme desire of public violence you wish to see but okay.

It's simply a colossal waste of money. Why spend thousands - likely well over $10'000 in new benches and labour - replacing something you know is going to get tagged once again? It's like how we waste thousands of dollars a year on grey paint and labour costs to buff city/regional walls only for them to get tagged within a week, just to crack open a new can of grey paint and send a crew out so soon. Half the time that stuff doesn't match and the walls end up looking like some shitty Rothko painting although, at the same time, buffing of graffiti becomes a subconscious form of abstract art in and of itself). Just gives the artists free canvas as well.

A lot of graffiti sucks, sure, but it's a futile battle. And I think it gives cities charm. Set foot in any European city or town and it's everywhere. World class cities like London, Berlin, Paris, Budapest, Milan and so on are covered in the stuff, both good and bad. Every single surface gets hit with it and unless it's something important (a subway car, the front of some government building, public art) it's left alone. They don't try to fight it most of the time because they have better, more important things to spend tax dollars on. It's like trying to stop a bleeding artery with a bandage from a dollar store.

If you hate it and want to see it gone that's fine, but I don't think it's worth a single cent to fight unless it's in a place (or has offensive content) where it warrants removal. A bench still works whether there is paint on it or not.

There is a tagger that hits the Lexington bridge over the highway about once a month, and then someone comes in and paints over it, and three days later the same tag is back again. If you look at the bridge, there are tons of grey rectangles in different shades where it's been painted again and again. I know we don't want graffiti everywhere, but how much have we paid to have one stupid word covered up again and again for 2 years straight? They could've left it, and I bet the person never would have tagged it again. Instead, it's now an ongoing battle that costs us money.

(That said, I appreciate if the taggers have at least an ounce of artistic ability with a spray can).