Public Camping will be a Felony in Tennessee starting June first
apnews.com
apnews.com
Something worth noting about the US Justice system, is it's become a dance with tough-on-crime legislators pushing insane penalties that and prosecutors who force defendants to plea crimes down, at the threat of imposing those penalties.
That is, it just makes it easier for prosecutors to punish campers since instead of charging them with a petty crime they say, "hey, plead guilty to a reasonable sentence or we'll take you to trial and if we win you'll no longer be a free citizen." It's a clever workaround to the 5th amendment, which gives defendants lots rights and imposes really expensive standards like "beyond a reasonable doubt" on prosecutors.
Rents are often over $1400 for a one bedroom apartment, and mortgages are higher still. Even where mortgages are lower than rents, there is a barrier to entry in houses of needing a down payment.
Until politicians gain the will to allow for a real correction and a real price on money, this will not stop.
Then they make more money by renting an ADU on AirBnB for 3x the rental cost to another person in the middle class who wants a vacation paid for by their increasing assets.
I have met more and more new homeless who are now struggling with mental health issues since they became homeless as well. The stress will do that to a person. I try to be the person that pushes them towards the spiritual rather than the medicinal to ease the stress.
We really need a recession/crash to reset the housing market, otherwise we're going to end up with a bunch of oligarchs owning all the properties while the millennial populace will be on the streets
It is not as simple as supply and demand. There is a huge profit motive as all that controls supply and the type of supply. It is one thing to build studio apartments but do we need "luxury" studio apartments for a 50% premium?
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=luxury+...
Since housing is a need people will pay what they have to. So the supply and demand chart is skewed. Also, that demand also includes people who demand two houses. And an artificially low supply, well who does that benefit?
If there was enough supply built housing prices would crash. How do you think people who view their houses as an investment feel about that?
people do not need to be evicted when the economy crashes. That as a choice in 2008 that Bush and Obama made. They bailed out the banks instead of the people. But the solution is deeper than that as well. There is no way out, and people with more money then you will have it all and you will have nothing, that is how this all works.
If this happens, then the people who currently can't afford housing will be turbofucked, while the people with the expensive housing will be, at worse, just fine, or at best, will profit greatly from it.
The GFC was not that long ago. And it minted so many millionaires that everyone is keeping an eye out for prices to drop because they want to replicate that same success. Lightning will not strike like that again because everyone is standing around that spot with metal rods held high in the air. There's no end of people waiting for "the next housing crash" to buy.
If you want cheaper housing, then you want more housing to be built. And you want the housing to be high density. Which means you're going to stepping on a lot of innocent people, and enriching a lot bad people to get them built. We're probably talking about using eminent domain to seize single family homes, and handing the land over to some developers (at a discount) to raze them and build large condos in their place. Because, fact is, nobody wants to give up their single family home that's been appreciating at double digit rates for the past 20 years with no end in sight. You're going to have to pry it from them.
You might need some plumbing for a second kitchen, installing a new front door, or perhaps putting up a wall or two.
> Because, fact is, nobody wants to give up their single family home that's been appreciating
Critically this solution would be a win-win for a lot of existing homeowners.
There's a lot of people at retirement age whose kids have left the nest who'd happily go for turning their house into a duplex, but the bureaucracy isn't giving them that option.
They might not want to "move", but would happily give up half their living space for extra retirement money.
There's a lot of ways to dramatically increase the housing supply practically overnight.
lol my landlord is actually planning to do that with the house I'm living in after we move out, whenever we decide to do that.
Of course you can also destroy existing houses and re-build, or build new houses, but then you're back to the GP's point that that will often take time. Repurposing existing buildings can often be done very quickly.
You'll also get "new housing" that you'd never get without it, even if you had sufficient money. E.g. my example of an older couple that might keep their house for life, and would never consider moving, but they might consider accepting a tenant in their (mostly unused) basement or large garage.
Interestingly e.g. California seems to have made this legal in 2021[2], but I'm not sure about the specifics there. In jurisdictions I know about it's often de-facto illegal, because other building code often mandates such extensive modifications as to make it impossible. E.g. insisting that each address has its own dedicated entrance into the building.
E.g. where I'm from (Iceland) some older houses are set up as duplexes where there's a single entrance, and a small area shared by both houses, usually to hang your coats, store your shoes and other outwear, and very usefully a shared laundry room (a single family's laundry facilities are rarely used all the time). Such setups have since been made illegal for new housing by zoning regulations.
There's been similar moves towards "one size fits all" zoning in most or all other western countries. E.g. in New York it used to be common for younger people or new immigrant families to live in housing where several families might share kitchen facilities or other common areas. I.e. essentially being set up as collage dorms. That's since been made illegal for any "real" housing, which has resulted in driving up the price of housing, and pricing some people out of the market entirely.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-family_zoning 2. https://www.californiacitynews.org/2021/09/california-says-g...
Alot of these people are homeless because they're mentally ill. So this is essentially criminalizing being mentally ill.
This third world country setup already happening in L.A. and in the Bay. Massive homeless encampments a few blocks from 7 figure houses.
Also, America has made it next to impossible to escape homelessness once one has become homeless.
A shower, some medicine, some job interview clothes could go a long way to help some of these people, but that's next to impossible for someone under a bridge. Mental health could go a long way as well. Instead we just push them out sight.
Meanwhile we just gave how many billions to Ukraine?
It really baffles me why there's so little political will to help our own people in this country.
Homeless people, College students, older people, the sick, the poor, etc.
"""This is essentially a problem to be pushed onto accomodating states since there is no political will (no one wants the optics of being the bad guy putting people in mental institutions) to solve this at the national level. This is how it ends: The US becomes more like Brazil/India and more gated palaces next to miles of slums."""
Institutionalizing the kinds of severely mentally ill people who would benefit most from this kind of care is practically impossible, thanks to efforts from civil rights activists decades ago. Resources to help homeless with mental illness exist, but sadly these programs are all voluntary and have no real way to make someone follow through with treatment.
I was literally tortured in a privately run psychiatric hospital three years ago that I was forced to stay in for 10 days because of a misunderstanding. 10 days is the maximum Disability will pay for inpatient. Suddenly after 10 days I was better even thought I was fine on the first. I spoke to a doctor twice for a total of 10 minutes they whole stay.
We are not stupid, the system and society treats us like garbage. And when we just want to be left alone and be simple and free they pass laws and raise prices on everything.
At no point in history have we ever had a mental illness treatment doctrine that we can look back on and say "that was a good thing we did, go us". I happen to believe that the present day will be viewed upon no more favorably, what with our pills by the pocket-full and unregulated medical advertisements on social media. (Instagram sponsored content would seem to have the whole world believing they are in desperate need of antidepressants and Adderall, paid for by... the shillers of antidepressants and Adderall, how interesting.)
The fact that I could not get my doctors to look at my mental illness as an immune disorder (even after I was diagnosed with Lupus) as being the cause of my mood disorder tells you everything about how ignorant practical care is for the mentally ill. I just had a psychotic break after catching COVID as well.
Mental Illnesses are immune disorders.
These things aren't even available to people if they want them.
The small town I live no longer is accepting Medicare for Mental Health treatment. They can not pay people enough to afford to live here, Too bad, so sad.
I know at times I need to be in an institution. I remember when my mother used to go in the 70s. It was a nice place. This is not true anymore. But yes, people want me to be upset about some Ukrainian child and then they wonder why people vote for people like Trump.
I am not asking for much, just a small, safe studio apartment when I can have some stability and work part time. But the MBAs all want to build "luxury" studios because ROI.
I know I can do it, I know what is wrong with me and how to treat myself. The delusion is that people think the homeless are lazy/do not want to work. Having a job is easy. Being homeless is work.
Then they make laws like this? We need national laws regarding the rights of the homeless.
You seem to have a gift of gab, have you ever tried copywriting on upwork/fiver? Might be a promising direction to get you some stability and a small safe studio.
Work from library's until you can afford a cheap room on craigslist.
I just cannot explain the difficulty. First with working. My mood disorder throws me into instability that is catastrophic. I was an accomplished photographer (published) and was selling photographs locally making some extra money. I had an episode where I destroyed thousands of my black and white negatives. Years of work, gone.
I could move to the middle of nowhere and afford an apartment for say $700/month (if they rent it to me), but then I will not have healthcare. The places I can have healthcare, I cannot even afford a small studio never mind the first, last and despot needed to get the apartment. And many of these apartments have minimum income requirements that I am nowhere close to. And then it means I have to move away from the already meager social support I do have.
Then when I am paying 60% of my income in rent, how doing I afford my car, meds, doctors, heat, etc?
There are just so many roadblocks that people do not appreciate. As I said I had four homeless agencies trying to help me find housing and they could not help me, so it was not a lack of trying.
And renting a room is impossible. How many of you would share a house with someone you did not know who was on disability with a mental illness? I would not want to even put someone through living with my suffering if they did not know what they were getting into.
I have just turned 55 so I am lucky that more option are opening, but there is so much competition for low income housing.
I had to sell my camera years ago but I promised myself I would start again if I got stable. But thanks again for the tips.
As far as accepting help goes, there may be others who need it more, but there are a lot of people willing to give. A lot of young professionals right now feel alienated from their work and are looking for ways to support their community. A common theme you'll hear from these groups is "solidarity not charity", there's nothing wrong with accepting help from the community (if you feel comfortable with it of course). I really hope you're able to get back to a place of stability :)
house, showers, some food, health care, and education/job help.
I have no idea how to provide housing at scale but everything else is already in existence and just needs govt funding.
and the govt funding exists it's just going to other priorities some of which aren't even in America.
they lost billions in the Iraq war is another example.
the services just simply need to be connected with the funding.
really frustrating.
I don’t buy it and I sympathize with the people that are saying “enough”. Enough human shit on the sidewalks, enough destruction of our shared public spaces, enough not being able to go into certain areas after dark, enough open hard drug use, enough car break ins and armed robbery.
The people in these makeshift homeless camps are not homogenous in their background, needs, etc. But I think one thing we can all agree on is that these sites DO attract an outsized group of extremely antisocial people that decrease the quality of life for everyone. Many of them not mentally ill, just opportunistic criminals.
If some other states (or you) want to support and foster this, I say fine. Let these people go there. The differences in our states and free movement is part of what makes the US great. But don’t tell others what they have to tolerate where they live.
We are treated as less than human. Why would we not be anti-social? American society is anti-social. Imagine if someone told you you could not use the bathroom in your house, where would you shit?
We have nothing and have to steal to survive, we have crippling stress so we take drugs to escape because we cannot get the psychedelics that are cool drugs?
You think we just appear out of the ether, that there is no greater social issue happening. I would love to be able to compartmentalize as you do, it might help me sleep at night. I invite you all to watch some of our stories son this YouTube channel Invisible People.
Well, if I am picking on you specifically (apologies) it seems that you have: abundant time, access to the internet, a solid command of the english language, and if you're in the US access to a myriad of social and mental health services that would easily raise your standard of living to Lower Middle class if you took advantage. Not to mention the endless non-profit groups that offer safe shelter options, free food, etc.
Speaking on behalf of society: We don't like seeing you struggle or in pain, but what else do you want from us?
I am one of the lucky homeless. I was a network engineer making bank at Cisco before I became ill so my disability payments are higher than average.
Do you know the cure for Neuropsychiatric Lupus? You think I am just not trying hard enough? You think people right now I can write a sentence and use a laptop that later I am not crippled with anxiety or pain and my white blood cells vanish?
You know how many employers fired me because I called in sick just one day even though they knew I was disabled? You know how many apartments I could not rent, not because I did not have the money but because I was on disability? (I sued a landlord over this and won actually.)
And services? They have been cutting services ever since I was first disabled. Endless non-profit groups that do nothing? In my home town there were five non-profits to house the homeless. I went to all five, still homeless. "Safe shelter"? Spend a night in a shelter anywhere and tell me how safe you feel.
You think you know my story like you know every other homeless persons story. It is all so simple for you, isn't it, when you make up a fantasy in your head? I hope you do not get long covid or some other known disorder they have no idea how to treat.
Unlike you, when I speak, I speak for the people who need more than I do. I am grateful for the help I do have, but it is a purgatory of torture and suffering. I was getting better until COVID turned my housing struggle into homelessness and all that happened was this with houses got more houses.
But I did ask the question above in good faith: What more could be done?
For example, Exactly what is standing in the way between you and having a Section 8 apartment (or whatever)? Is there something specific that needs to change?
Stop people from using housing as an investment. Stop voting for either corporate party. Fight to pass laws banning the ownership of multiple houses. Fight for social housing like they have in Europe. Represent us in your town halls to fight agains the anti-homeless/poverty laws and fight for more funding for section 8 and low income housing. Do not vote for people who magically find $40 billion for Ukraine but cannot find money for homeless/healthcare. Make politicians earn your vote instead of just voting for the least bad person. End all the deductions for owning a house. End AirBnB in any community that cannot afford to house their poorest.
Frankly, the FED might help me more than anyone else once they raise rates and housing prices collapse.
And people think Section 8 is some magic thing, but section 8 is only half of it. If a landlord will not accept it a voucher is useless: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...
I have been on a section 8 waiting list for ten years, I am still well past 200 on the waiting list. Women and families always just ahead of me and section 8 housing is as rare as any other cheap housing.
Money does not fix everything. As long as we are going to throw $40 billion far far away, the federal government should match it 1:1 for housing administered by State programs.
Spend our money at home on our people. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/21/biden-signs-40-billion-aid-p...
The anti-social people decreasing everyone's quality of life are the people creating and supporting policies like this one that criminalize mere access to shared public resources.
Barring extreme mental illness that is nowhere near as prevalent as people seem to think, no one wants to be shitting on the ground in public. No one is willingly destroying their own property, personal or shared. If they're vandalizing parks it's because you've successfully made it no longer theirs. Why would they value it when you respect the property more than their lives?
> But don’t tell others what they have to tolerate where they live.
No. Wherever you live you have to tolerate people. You have to tolerate the consequences of our own policies. We have chosen to make a world where people can have nothing and be treated as less than human because of it. You must tolerate that or change it. Punishing people for experiencing the consequences you have imposed on them is monstrous. You can't dodge that moral burden by appealing to this limited concept of freedom.
Thank you for saying this. The wealthy love to externalize the human costs of their lifestyle.
There was an article in the LAT last week on this point.
It turns out, most of the homeless prefer to have access to drugs over shelter. It's so bad that a rehab diversion program had fewer than 1% of eligible users take advantage of it last year.
It's why so many of them are homeless in the first place: by choice. Because being housed means giving up drugs, or alcohol, or having to take medications. And most of them don't want to do that.
A minority of homeless are involuntarily and temporarily unhoused and would benefit from a bed, shower, and clothes. Unfortunately, we waste most of our money trying to house the voluntary homeless/drug addicts instead of the ones who actually need it.
Watch these videos.
https://www.youtube.com/c/InvisiblePeople/videos
As someone who has known many homeless people, the majority neither want to use drugs nor be homeless. I do not know many people who choose to be addicts. And to lay all this addiction on the addicts and not the pharmaceutical companies is brave of you. I also meet so many women whose decent into homelessness was caused by sexual abuse.
And go to a shelter for a night and tell me if you would choose that over a bottle of vodka...
Maggots, sexual abuse, filthy bathrooms: Orange County homeless shelters’ grim conditions detailed in ACLU report https://www.ocregister.com/2019/03/14/aclu-report-alleges-ab...
I can say from personal experience that the majority of the homeless I meet are (a) on drugs and (b) choose to stay homeless over utilizing shelter space (because almost all shelters in LA are sober). LAT literally just had an article about this confirming this. The vast majority of the visible homeless in LA are homeless by choice. And we have thousands of empty shelter beds every night because of this.
And to lay all this addiction on the addicts and not the pharmaceutical companies is brave of you.
Opiods were not the root cause of drug addition for most of the LA's homeless drug addicts, so blaming the pharmaceutical companies is silly of you. Opiods only recently overtook other drugs on LA's drug scene.
Try giving a homeless person food in LA when they ask for money for food. 99% of the time they'll just throw it back at you, because they really want the money to buy alcohol or drugs. And I say that from experience.
And as a public defender I wouldn’t doubt that most of the people you interacted with had a substance use disorder. Why would you meet the homeless who didn’t have any issues with addiction and didn’t need to steal to get their drug of choice?
As a public defender I think your sample is biased.
Unless you also volunteer to help the homeless on weekends.
Unfortunately, the reality is that most drug addicts prefer to be high, and the more they use, the stronger that preference. Worse, an aspect of many mental illnesses (especially the schizoid series) is paranoia regarding medication, so while ill most of the mentally ill will refuse their medications, though they may otherwise want to take their meds when not ill. (This is why stable housing is so important for the mentally ill: missing even a single dose can cause the illness to relapse, leading the individual to actively avoid medication.)
It was another five or six years before I seriously tried to quit drinking for real, but from that point I was on my way out in a way I never had been before.
It's technically correct to describe me at that time as "prefer having access to drugs over shelter" but it doesn't tell the full story of my situation or motivations. This society and these laws had taken everything else from me, and now expected me to also give up the drink? With no support and nothing else, nothing at all to replace it? Nah I'll take my chances.
I needed a lot of other help that we have decided people are not entitled to, that we aren't obligated to give. But it's us that decided that, not them. If people aren't able to accept the very limited help we're willing to give on the extremely harsh terms we're willing to give it, that's our fault not theirs.
just like there's theft from department stores.
department stores just bake that into the cost of doing business.
which is what government support systems should also do.
In my experience, the cruelty is the point. Its not a lack of political will. Its a direct punishment for not being a member of the 1%. It’s your motivation to become one of the 1%.
Its the logical result of pushing individualism over any form of collectivism. Selfishness rules and cruel punishments are the norm.
This is how it ends: The US becomes more like Brazil/India and more gated palaces next to miles of slums.
https://www.findlaw.com/state/tennessee-law/tennessee-crimin...
Yep, about a decade ago I was technically homeless but the VA found me a veteran’s shelter so I could get back on my feet. You only have to ask and they will help you.
Though… three or four years ago the woman who my landlord hired got tired of my late rent shenanigans and forced me out (I say forced because the owner honestly didn’t care and had no idea what she was doing). The VA has programs to keep you from becoming homeless but it is impossible to access them. Homeless? They will help. Going to be homeless? Come back when you haven’t had a roof over your head for at least one night.
In neoliberalism; "Hurry up and die."
I've never visited the US but I thought a felony meant breaking federal laws.
Meaning, the people pushing these laws are evil.
For murder, rape etc I think such measures would be justified.
Shouldn't the restriction of federal rights be limited to federal law? i.e. the right to bear arms, the right to vote.
Felony just refers to the severity of crime: murder, robbery, theft (over a certain level), sexual assault, repeat DWIs, etc are all felonies.