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Comment by bwship | Hacker News Reader

These tent camps are quite new in the US. About 5 years ago, there started to be a tent camp in Seattle, but when I moved to LA there was not tents anywhere (except maybe a few on Skid Row), flash forward to about 2 years ago, and there are now literally miles and miles of tent camps all over Los Angeles. It is one of those things that once it is allowed at all, it quickly becomes overwhelming.

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What part of LA are you in? I’ve lived on the west side for the last 13 years and tent camps have been an issue for at least the last 10. They started getting noticeably worse about 5 years ago in line with a rapid rise in the unsheltered population [1].

[1] http://www.laalmanac.com/social/so14.php

I was on the west side. Yea, there were a few tents on 3rd street in Venice, but I used to play golf at Penmar for like the least 8 years, and there were never tents there, and in the past couple years it became about 1.5 miles of tents along holes 1 and 3. It has just grown leaps and bounds.

> It is one of those things that once it is allowed at all, it quickly becomes overwhelming.

I believe this is mostly due to the effect of the ruling in the landmark "Martin v City of Boise" [1] case.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_v._Boise

IIRC the tents started right after the occupy Wall Street movement. Often they’d camp next to homeless or homeless would join their camps and it morphed. There have also been drives to deliver tents to homeless…

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