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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

It's not really that shocking. In Austin Texas a little over two years ago the city council removed the ban on lying and camping in public places. The result was an explosion of tent encampments all over the city, so much so that just a couple months ago city voters reversed the decision in a referendum.

There are certainly valid points on all sides of the debate, and "lying in public" laws can definitely be abused to harass individuals, but there are also some valid rationale for why they exist in the first place.

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Encampment is quite different from falling asleep... And even then it should be enough to tell the person to move on, not to arrest them.

Move on to where?

To a different jurisdiction where it's someone else's problem.

Home, friends, family, shelter.

I mean if someone gets drunk and falls asleep they are not necessarily homeless.

Where can people who have no home, friends, family or income shelter?

under a bridge downtown.

in all seriousness there is no backup beyond a few hundred beds in even the largest cities, with waiting lists, and not exactly the first thing you think of when things turn strange in your life and you end up on the street suddenly. You don't think that you are "one of them" and you just are "holding on for this or that" to happen. At some point, if you exit early enough, you can still transition to other societal levels. Left long enough, it changes you or at least you are considered differently and looked at funnily, to say nothing about the difficult in maintaining work and income to get OUT of said situation, etc.

There's probably some better and worse areas in a city for pitching a lot of tents for a long time. For example some unused parking lots could work better than streets. It would make sense for the city to provide some basic services there too, like water, toilets and a trash skiff... probably some person actually doing it would know a lot better what's important, and what would be alleviate the need to camp somewhere that causes problems for others.

It seems that there's this discussion between false alternatives like "let people do anything" and "let's punish people harshly for minor things". How about offering better alternatives, giving people instructions first before any worse consequences etc.

The park services have a similar problem, but the solution is simple:

* No permanent structures.

* You need to move every X days.

* You cannot stay in the park/forest/etc for more than Y days/month.

Cities could forbid tents and count hours rather than days. Criminalizing the act of napping in a park seems like a huge overreaction to peoples' fear of tent cities. If you've never taken an afternoon siesta along a local greenway, you should try it sometime. Bring a blanket and a book, but don't forget to check for sharps before you lie down.

I don't think there are valid points on all sides of the debate. A disturbing number of people think that homeless people should basically be exterminated.

That's not a welcome idea at all, and it deserves no validity.

So I think the problem there is that the root causes of homelessness need addressing.

Moving all these people to a different city/town/location is not "solving" the issue.

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