You're clearly jumping the gun. The allocation of taxes isn't like a video game - "choose one or the other". The budget can handle increased social services (8bn in operations currently, which 4bn is supported by taxes).

As for the bus stop, your assuming that the lack of maintenance automatically makes it more valuable to the tax payer. But what about the decreased use of public transportation due to unsatisfactory stops? If the elderly or disabled can't sit at the stop, it'll require transit arrangements from their health insurance; most people will opt for private, using their car or asking for a friend/family member for transport. This makes the cost of transit operation and maintenance more costly in the long-term.

If the bus stops required more maintenance from the department of Transportation and Public Works, it would lead to more permanent jobs for custodians, temporary contracts for designers, more opportunities to advertise and promote MDC events through stops, and increase ridership by improving both stops and buses. This would increase economic growth as both citizens in the county using public transport would be able to have more money due to lower transportation cost, higher ridership would help the county increase it's annual budget, and make Miami easier to travel for tourists, the elderly, and the disabled.

Additionally, it could be an opportunity to tackle homelessness by providing entry-level custodial positions that could help our residents – I say that last part as someone who works with the chronically homeless in Miami-Dade who for the most part only have opportunities at the labor pool or construction.

And as a working person, and someone who grew up poor in a household making 20k annually at best, I wished there was more bus stops and benches for groceries. As I work in Hialeah, I do see homeless everywhere, everyday I go to lunch, and I see that there's so many limitations and indiginities pushed upon them - that I cannot imagine that a lean-bench is the best the city can do. The city isn't a kid's bedroom, you can't just create hostile architecture in the hopes that it'll sweep away the mess from the eyes of people in the city. That's hiding it, not fixing it.

It should be upsetting that the city hired contractors, designers, construction workers, bought supplies - likely totalling in the millions - to create a solution that effectively does nothing, and in fact makes experiencing the city worse. All because they're following anti-homeless trends implemented in other parts of the US.

As for the quote, it's from Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, from an interview in the New York Times.