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Comment by dv_dt | Hacker News Reader

In the article, Boise is challenging a court ruling that cities cannot ticket or arrest the homeless if there are no shelter beds available. This begs the question how ticketing/arresting clears the streets? By shoving them elsewhere for another city to ticket? Or housing them in jail (at a much higher expense)?

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.

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I think that is an error in the article. I live in Boise. The law allows ticketing if there IS room in shelters. People would not be ticketed if the shelters are full.

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

https://citycode.cityofboise.org/home/standard/7-3A-2

The article says that.

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.

Hi Boise person, been thinking of visiting your city for the first time because I hear so many great things about it (except for this mayor), when is the best time to visit?

Mid to late spring is my favorite time of the year. Perfect temperature and lots too explore. Plus the waterfalls outside of town are at their peak.

Usually putting them in jail.

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.

And women and children being able to walk the streets without being harassed is another -- as you might write "(perceived)" -- incentive.

Unless, of course, those women and children are homeless.

Nearly all homeless are adult men.

Not true. In San Francisco, 35% of homeless residents in the last point-in-time count identified as female, and another six percent identified as another non-male gender.

Some would say 75% is the majority.

65%, unable to edit my comment for some reason.

Few would say 65% is "Nearly all"

39% of homeless are female

20% of all homeless are under 18

Source: https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/2018-AHAR-P... Page 11.

That isn’t true. First, you have to distinguish between the visible and invisible homeless. Homeless women who aren’t mentally ill or heavily into drugs are very likely to get access to a shelter at least, so you wouldn’t notice them (the same is true for men as well, just less so). And then you have mentally ill or heavily drug addicted women, you notice these in LA also. It isn’t clear to me why there are more men in this category than women, but perhaps they get more family or social support as well.

The invisible homeless aren't the ones who would get harassed by the police.

No. If there are children in any of these encampments, I would say that they need to especially be broken up. Homelessness in modern America is to a great degree elective. People need to be harassed off the streets and into shelters for their own welfare -- especially children -- or involuntarily committed.

> Homelessness in modern America is to a great degree elective

How did you determine that?

I've worked on getting some individual people into assisted living situations, etc. The problem has never been lack of beds. It has been the individual involved.

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.

Assuming your limited interface is representative, and there in fact always are more usable beds available than homeless people (I doubt this, but only have anecdotal evidence to the contrary from working with homeless people) - how does that translate into 'homelessness is elective'? I've seen a multitude of reasons that destroy peoples lives, and makes them unable to be a productive, rent-paying, law-abiding citizen.

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.

> I've heard many who are scared of the available shelters, due to threats, drug dealing or harassment from other ill-fortuned inhabitants.

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.

I struggle to understand what points you are making. Are you saying that since these people are making life difficult for themselves, there can be no external causes behind that behavior? It sounds a lot like "their own fault, not my problem" to be honest.

No, I'm not saying that. Can you point to the exact sentence that confused you?

On one hand, I do understand these are tools to "do something" that may occasionally help, on the other hand, sometimes tools when available become overused and I think are fundamentally inadequate for addressing the root (very difficult) problem. I think LA has actually in recent years brought online a lot of added housing for the homeless, but unfortunately the numbers of homeless seems to also be surging upwards; and in almost all US cities it seems.

> This begs the question how ticketing/arresting clears the streets [if there are no shelter beds available]? By shoving them elsewhere for another city to ticket?

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...

> Driving people elsewhere is one major mechanism.

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.

LA is the city that's voiding the citations.

Ah you're right thanks, and edited. There was a semi-ambiguous "they" I tripped over not reading quite closely enough in the article.

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