In a post on cohost, since crossposted here, I said this off-hand:
even the fuckin' malls started ripping out all the benches so the kiddoes won't hang around
I was reading it back a bit as I cross-posted, and for a moment I was tempted to edit the remark to use the term "loitering".
In my defense, I was at least going to keep the stink marks on it.
But I realized if I did that, I'd have to explain why I was putting the stink marks on the word "loitering", and that would've derailed the original piece, and I didn't want to do that.
The extremely blunt answer however is that "loitering" is a fake idea. A nonsense term, one of many that capitalism has invented to try to stigmatize and in some cases even criminalize, the normal behavior of healthy and functional societies.
In the early days of the automobile, there were a lot of accidents, and one of those kinds of accidents was just rich people in cars running down pedestrians.
These pedestrians were just using the streets the way they'd always used the streets, but now suddenly you had rich people with cars, and capitalists running trucks, and automotive executives who wanted to sell more cars.
So rather than slow the hell down, or redesign the streets with mutual use in mind, or even take any responsibility for running people over and killing them, they seized upon a local slang term in Kansas City: "jaywalking."
Automobile manufacturers leaned hard into the idea that all the people they were killing? Totally their own fault. They should've been using the street in the way we decide is most convenient for the car, and even eventually put it into law in some places (though not as universally as some folks believe; laws very wildly, and in some countries like Finland, the pedestrian has prime right of way).
They essentially criminalized "using the goddamn street like I have for centuries" because it was inconvenient to capitalism.
"Loitering" is just another one of these, really. It means "hanging around somewhere and not feeding money to capital while doing it", which you might recognize as something people in other societies present and historic just do all the fucking time, and indeed, is considered the whole purpose of the public square or forum.
As a millennial, I can barely remember such places existing in America. Even in the days of shopping malls, there was always this pervasive sense that I had to at least look like I might maybe buy something, even if the truth was I had 12 cents to my name and at least one of those was usually Canadian somehow.
But even so, it felt like I could at least find somewhere to fucking sit. Public spaces have become so hostile to the simple act of presence that I've seen modern reviewers complain that Friends is unrealistic, because in this post-Starbucks era, what coffee shop would allow so much valuable real estate to be taken up by a bunch of slackers who rarely buy more than one drink between the 8 of them?
Public parks feel frankly ominous now, thanks to the war on the homeless, and the replacement of benches and tables with security cameras and police patrols.
This isn't normal. It isn't. Capitalism has sequestered the commons once again, and then criminalized the act of not spending. They stole the public from us.
It isn't just that we don't have third spaces, it's that we don't have a public square at all anymore. Most downtowns are dying or deteriorating, unless they've been thoroughly commercialized Times Square style.
I don't have a conclusion to this; it just sucks.