Boise is why L.A. can’t legally clear its streets of homeless encampments
latimes.com
latimes.com
Later in the article it does mention that LA (correction from Boise) is also voiding millions of citations on the homeless, and that those citations were keeping the homeless from accessing services, like housing. That brings even more questions about the usefulness of ticketing for homelessness.
Edit: correction it is LA not Boise voiding citations.
Then at least you don't have residents complaining about homeless tent camps. And the cops feel like they have a tool to "fight homelessness." And the added (perceived) incentive of disincentivizing people from coming to your area to be homeless and set up semi-permanent tent camps.
20% of all homeless are under 18
Source: https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/2018-AHAR-P... Page 11.
How did you determine that?
There are a few good books on all of this. It's not a resource problem in the Western world. It's a mental illness and drug problem.
EDIT: I should say rather, the major problem has never been lack of beds. Sometimes I've had to wait a few days, etc., or choose a different place. Nobody has infinite money. But it has never been a major or insurmountable problem.
Also, bed availability aside - I've heard many who are scared of the available shelters, due to threats, drug dealing or harassment from other ill-fortuned inhabitants.
Maybe we just define 'elective' differently.
I urge anybody who is worried about homelessness in their area, to try and dig deeper into possible root-causes for wide-spread homelessness. Maybe each and every individual homeless person have made bad or even catastrophic decisions that led them to their calamity, but if that really is the case (just for arguments sake - my experience says otherwise for most cases), why are so many making these bad decisions? Let's treat systemic problems as such, and make sure that we don't only focus on relieving symptoms, and maybe we find homelessness to be a solvable problem.
And so they move to a tent encampment? This makes no sense.
The problem isn't even the bad and catastrophic decisions that homeless people made to get them into the situation -- would that it were -- for the permanent homeless, it is the bad and catastrophic decisions they make on a daily basis to keep themselves in it.
How to treat this? Involuntary mental health incarceration. Police ticketing and other harsh actions to break up the cycle and keep people from being comfortable with their homeless situation. Destroy the social anti-patterns that are keeping people trapped.
Do you know anyway with a child in this situation? Ask them how their offers of money and help went, and what happened when that help was delivered. You may have an interesting conversation.
Not saying it's a good law. But the article is wrong.
Edit: Here is the relevant section of the actual code.
> Enforcement: Law enforcement officers shall not enforce this camping section when the individual is on public property and there is no available overnight shelter
Boise Mayor David Bieter is attempting to challenge a landmark federal court ruling that prohibits cities from ticketing or arresting homeless people for sleeping or camping on public property if there are no shelter beds available as an alternative.
Driving people elsewhere is one major mechanism.
That can mean to other cities - it's a zero-sum game, but so is buying homeless people bus tickets to leave, and cities do that too.[1] It can also mean pushing them outside city limits into the metro area, or into less-desirable areas with fewer officers and/or informal instructions not to ticket the homeless. (Similarly, arresting homeless people isn't meant to house them in jail, but to get them out of heavily-policed areas.)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/us/homeless-busing-seattl...
This is exactly how Boise has kept it's homeless population low for many years. First they ticket people, then jail them and finally offer to let them go if they get on a bus headed out of the state.
So yes, help them. But also just do something, anything at all.
They will also need to remove a few inches of topsoil to clean it up. This is the sort of procedure that is used to clean up toxic chemical spills, high levels of pollution, and nuclear waste.
Where are the the piles of needles people keep claiming they need to walk over on their way out of their apartments in Seattle?
As I went walking I saw a sign there, And on the sign it said "No Trespassing." But on the other side it didn't say nothing. That side was made for you and me.
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people, By the relief office I seen my people; As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking Is this land made for you and me?
Nobody living can ever stop me, As I go walking that freedom highway; Nobody living can ever make me turn back This land was made for you and me.
Boise: 2,000 homeless in population of 227,000 = 1:113
LA: 36,000 homeless in population of 4,000,000 = 1:111
Given the difference in annual weather, it's not clear that Boise policy is effective in reducing homelessness.
They might winter in Portland or even LA.
Spokane is another city in that area with a huge homeless problem, and perhaps even harsher weather (Boise is at least high desert). Though housing can be super cheap, my granddad used to run what we thought became basically a flop house that we nicked named the Empty Arms.
SLC seems to have focused more on housing the homeless, but even then I think in recent years they’ve found that their success has mainly just led to a larger problem.
Oh, except Boise has a population of 228000 to LAs 4 million.
So LA is 17 times larger. So basic scaling would be equivalent to 28-35k homeless.
I think the reason Boise is having less difficulty with homelessness is solely because it’s a small city.
Everyone who wants one should have a home.
See https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-07/homeless...
Many homeless don't have mental health and substance abuse issues, but are just forced out of their homes on debt, etc. And of course some develop mental health (and sometimes substance abuse issues) after living homeless.
Assuming that is an affordable solution (it's not), we will then simply end up with destroyed houses.
(Archive link for those who prefer non-broken web experiences or want to avoid supporting publishers that actively want to break the web.)
You can make people receive help. We just don't do that anymore because we've adopted a principle of radical autonomy, which apparently includes the "freedom" for the mentally ill and addicted to literally rot on the streets.
Many homeless advocates seem to have similar fears as gun rights advocate. Whereas some people vociferously oppose gun restrictions because of an irrational fear of helplessness in the face of crime if they couldn't carry a gun anywhere and everywhere, some homeless advocates vociferously oppose forced psychiatric and drug abuse treatment because of an irrational fear--obscured by a simplistic, self-serving sense of empathy--that they'll somehow be forced into such treatment or otherwise lose their own autonomy.
The boogey man of big government out to get you isn't just a motivating fear of the right, it's also a motivating fear of the left.
What about people who want to be homeless?
Why have we built a society in which anybody who doesn't accept the lifestyle of sleeping in a static, hardened structure, and working to pay rent or a mortgage so as to have the right to do so, is diagnosed with some kind of illness?
Isn't it quite clear that there are some humans that simply aren't built to live with this strange definition of normalcy?
I have lived on a school bus for the past five years (if you are curious about this aspect, I gave a talk at PyCon last year that might interest you[0]) and I have met literally thousands of people like those I'm describing. I'm convinced that there are hundreds of thousands - perhaps millions - in the USA.
Of people that I have met who live on streets, in forests, in mobile vehicles like me, and in all sorts of other configurations that are not "homes" as we typically understand that word, I think that something like 1% are a nuisance to the extent that some kind of intervention is warranted for the public good. And, for what it's worth, that's probably true of about 1% of people who aren't homeless as well.
Now, in the age of smartphones, small-scale solar charging, and remote work, it's easier than ever to be happily homeless.
Let's stop acting like it's such a problem.
Help the people who are homeless and want to stop being homeless. Don't judge the people who are homeless and loving life.
I think you overestimate the number of homeless by choice vs homeless by circumstance. You also are sort of marginalizing the homeless who need help by painting them as happily homeless. Very naive take on the situation.
Well, we can't really know the numbers here. But the discussion seems to never include this phenomenon, so I think it's fair to say that this particular constituency is under-represented in the discussion even if there were only a small number of people.
And again, I think there are many, many such people - I have personally met thousands without really trying. There are Rainbow Gatherings in every state, each with thousands or tens of thousands of such people, and this is just one gathering of one subset of this population.
> You also are sort of marginalizing the homeless who need help by painting them as happily homeless.
I don't mean to do that. I think that people who actually need help are being marginalized by casting such a wide net as to lose them. If people want help, why aren't we directing resources there? Instead of sending the police to arrest people who don't want help?
> Very naive take on the situation.
In a literally sense, I think it's not naive. I have been houseless for most of my adult life. How much of this phenomenon have you personally experienced?
I think those latter two points are rare, but I might be mistaken. How many homeless have a job and pay taxes, but choose to be homeless?
I think at the end of the day it's about having the ability to afford yourself and care for yourself. And we tend to believe that if an adult doesn't have this ability (as opposed to the opportunity), then it is a handicapped individual, either physically or mentally handicapped in some way. That's why I think most people believe homeless which aren't suffering from the lack of this ability most likely just lack the opportunity.
I don’t think many would have a problem with someone who lacked a permanent home but setup camp or their vehicle on a formal campground with reasonable hygiene facilities so they weren’t pooping in the street and we weren’t walking over their tents.
I don't think there is a connection to property ownership and the presence of a nuisance caused by people.
So what if people are living on land that they don't own and rent? Who has decreed that land ownership must be the absolute fundamental social norm? What if people are instinctually disinclined to believe or participate in land ownership?
Why do we insist on being the only animal for which a subset charts the entire landmass of the earth into a grid, assigning ownership to every square inch? It's absurd.
People tenting under bridges, on bike trails, in forests, don't bother me. Rich people have stolen far more from my family than poor people have.
Equally amusing is that we attempt to make this a requirement, but do not make this a fundamental right in association with said requirement.
If you're going to MAKE people have something, it should be provided for them IMO.
If one cannot force the homeless to leave, how does one positively incentivize people to stop living in the street?
Really solving this will take work at the national level. There's more than enough wealth around to fund it, given how much goes into the pockets of opioid manufacturers alone.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/think-utah-solved-homeles_b_9...
OFF the street?
Of course all urban centers are so starved of entry level housing that anything good enough to minimally get a homeless person off the street (bathroom, place to sleep, maybe kitchenette) would also be swamped by everyone from the poor and working, college students, immigrants, etc.
Suppressing this housing is all done in the name of maintaining and increasing housing values for the affluent. If you increase the supply of housing, the value of housing drops, and white people don't want that.
I doubt it; one of the reasons that homelessness is a difficult problem is that some homeless people are very unpleasant to live with, which means other homeless people prefer to remain on the street rather than share housing with them.
Oh and the there’s the giant homeless encampments every 1-3 miles as you drive around LA.