Florida City Is Blasting “Baby Shark” Song to Try to Drive Homeless People out of Park

Whether or not you’re the parent of a young child, you probably can’t go long without hearing the absurdly catchy children’s song “Baby Shark”. For one town in Florida, that earworm is being weaponized. According to a new report from the Palm Beach Post, the town of West Palm Beach has begun to play “Baby Shark” on a loop, in an attempt to prevent homeless people from resting in one of their parks.

The music is being played at the patio of West Palm Beach’s Lake Pavillion, a glass-walled events venue that holds over 100 weddings, business meetings, and other gatherings each year. According to the report, West Palm Beach expects to earn $240,000 from those events in this fiscal year, and they want to ensure that customers don’t have to “trip over bodies” while using the facility.

“People are paying a lot of money to use the facility,” Leah Rockwell, Parks and Recreation director for West Palm Beach, explained. “Thousands of dollars. We want to make sure people paying this money had a facility that was clean and open and continue to use it in the future.”

Rockwell claims that an ever-growing number of homeless people have been using the pavilion patio to sleep, which prompted them to queue up a loop of “Baby Shark”. According to the report, the 2012 Parry Gripp earworm “Raining Tacos” is also being played.

It’s easy to interpret this whole ordeal is a rather outrageous example of hostile architecture, which refers to some sort of urban planning that deliberately goes out of its way to exclude certain uses of it. While it might not be exactly the same as placing spikes on flat surfaces and separating the seats on park benches, it’s hard to deny that being subject to hours of obnoxious children’s songs is a controversial way to draw away the homeless.

City officials have tried to point out West Palm Beach’s more humane attempts at stopping homelessness, including building subsidized housing and connecting those affected to mental health services and job training.

“Our staff and our partners know all the homeless by name and engage with them on a regular basis,” Jennifer Ferriol, director of Housing and Community Development, explained.

West Palm Beach reportedly plans to put more official restrictions in place for Lake Pavillion, including creating more formal opening and closing hours for the park and better enforcing trespassing laws. In the meantime, Rockwell argues that putting “Baby Shark” on repeat is doing the trick.

“It has been effective and is a temporary measure to make the area accessible for those who have rented the facility and for future events.” Rockwell added. “We are not forcing individuals to stay on the patio of the pavilion to listen to the music. The music is heard only if you are on the patio, a very small area relative to the rest of the waterfront.”

Illaya Champion, a homeless man, told the Palm Beach Post that this tactic of weaponizing children’s music is “wrong”, but that he continues to seek shelter near the patio.

“It don’t bother me,” Champion revealed. “I still lay down in there. But it’s on and on, the same songs.”

What do you think of this use of “Baby Shark”? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!