Hacker News Reader

Comment by kemayo | Hacker News Reader

The court's previous ruling on this was that you couldn't make "being homeless" illegal, and so laws against things like sleeping in the park were only valid if there was a reasonable alternative available. Generally this meant that the municipality needed to provide homeless shelters.

I can't say that I like this outcome, since now cities are motivated to just run the homeless out of town rather than helping them in any way.

View on HN

> Generally this meant that the municipality needed to provide homeless shelters.

The previous ruling was always kind of a kabuki theater. Homeless people often don't want to live in shelters - the exposure to crime and drugs and rules and lack of space is often worse than just living outside. So the previous ruling was still a blank check to harass homeless people so long as you dumped a bunch of money into a terrible homeless program.

Living outside also exposes you to crime, drugs, and danger too. Sometimes homeless people end up "captured" by gangs using threat of violence or cutting off a vice, and are forced to do things like sell drugs, sell scrap, or sell themselves to keep up with the taxation imposed by these gangs. Is everyone captured on the street like this? Of course not, but a few are, and there's really no recourse or protection. Are things maybe not so pretty in all shelters? Of course, but I'd take a facility where at least there is some recourse for bad action where it happens over the street where there is no recourse at all and you might end up as a modern slave to a gang member.

Well, the way that it was explained to me is that tent-living is kind of the "middle class" lifestyle among people who identify as homeless. The main problem with the shelters is that you don't have a fixed address, you don't have privacy, and you don't a way to collect and store possessions. Living in a tent or camp gives you self-sufficiency and the ability to make more choices.

Yeah. Reading the opinion, the logical argument of criminalizing a status (homeless) versus an action (camping in public) makes sense. The action applies to everyone.

We as a society need to continue trying to solve the problem of homelessness. However, leveraging the 8th Amendment, in part, to do it doesn’t make sense.

So if you are homeless, how do you avoid running afoul of the law?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com