US Supreme Court allows cities to ban homeless camps
bbc.com
bbc.com
If you told me this quote was from an Onion article, I'd say "well obviously."
Most homeless are elderly and mentally Ill. The solutions are institutionalization and retirement housing/pensions but no state did this after Reagan and instead made homelessness an issue to ignore.
Faced with the ability to legally incarcerate nearly 600,000 people, states likely won't hesitate to do just that without a second thought.
For a country that prides itself on freedom and liberty, having the largest prison population in the world is surely a damning indictment of the conviction.
Mentally ill, yes. Elderly, no.
Especially those that have for-profit prison system - which in some cases have state legislators as investors/stakeholders.
Private prisons represent 8% of all prisoners...
Prisoners cost ~ $40k a year annually in taxes. It's actually cheaper to house them - so I don't think states are going to be gung-ho about doing either.
Sending the poor to use expensive military kit on vulnerable foreign populations and arresting the non compliant is much more profitable than just providing every one of them with shelter and job opportunities. Society doesn't optimize globally for good will, it optimizes locally for profit.
The racket is that many prisions are private for-profit companies. So this is a way to funnel taxpayer money into those corporations. Who in turn are friends and campaign contributors of the politicians who push for more people into prisions. So it all feeds itself and the cost doesn't matter. The more cost, the better (to them).
San Jose CA has a homeless budget of approximately $120M per year. It has 500 beds. That's $240k/bed-year.
Of course, a lot of that $120M does NOT go to those beds, and there are some other facilities, but that $120M isn't all of the spending either.
Most homeless people are working age and homeless under a year. Costs of living are the strongest correlates of homelessness rates.
I suspect this is strongly skewed by half of all homeless living in California where they seem to be mostly from out of state and coming here for the weather, lenient drug laws, and many social benefits. You can just ask them and they will tell you--most of them are from red states where they'd be locked up for what they do here. As such, they came to California because they can get away with it and it's the easiest place to survive on the bottom as a drug user since you have temperate weather and lots of social programs giving you money, clothes, tends, and food. Why be homeless in California rather than move somewhere you can actually afford? It's the drug laws like Prop 47 that decriminalized hard drugs and theft up to $950 per incident (not even per day).
Seems fairly obvious that outlawing sleeping on the streets will make homelessness itself a defacto crime, which will ultimately benefit the prison industrial complex by providing a whole new stream of nearly free labor, thanks to the 13th Amendment. Tack on the housing swiftly becoming unaffordable almost anywhere in the country (major metropolitan areas especially) and you’ve got a recipe for dystopian profits.
We really need to get homeless people distributed to small towns. Centralizing them in big cities is so backwards. There are indeed 2+ strata of homeless as another has mentioned, I'd call them addicts and life happened-ers. I'm the latter, life happened and pandemic and more life happenings made it into a complex/non-linear situation.
Literally been working 6 years to get like $20k to fix my life with. Used to be a software engineer, got into a legal dispute and that messed me up bad, gotta get into housing before I try to fix that and then try to get back into tech. Not interested in free jobs that I don't go through the normal pipeline for, happy enough working as a dish washer / grocery clerk for the past several years. I'm not available by email or phone, too difficult to communicate logistics. Can't wait to get back to meaningful tech work tho.
I'm one case, the life happened-ers are all different. But I think getting them to small towns to rebuild is definitely the way. Really easy for me to save money and nobody knows I'm homeless, just very very slow. But it's fair and sustainable.
You can't really blame people for their hot takes either, when you're on month 32+ of powerwashing your alley and front sidewalk every day to try and get a few hours of the place not smelling like poorly maintained urinals/horse stables your overton window starts to shift to making more extreme solutions acceptable just because you are so supremely fed up with how things are and your sympathy was all used up years ago.
This sounds eerily similar to the origin story of the early American colonies
It's the other factors you mention, and "Cascadia/The PNW" has more in common with each other than it does with the rest of its countries (This is bioregionalism and it's strong out here). The only reason you'd know you went to Canada when you arrived at Vancouver BC from WA state is that you'll see a lot of tim hortons around. SF bay area and Vancouver BC have the same exact problems despite wildly different weather. It's culture and laws.
Honestly, our culture and laws which allow this to happen are super based and awesome, and having a large homeless population as externalities of booming economies, and lax drug laws is worth it. The rest of the world wishes it was the PNW, and being the "Prussia of the USA" is the position that California will naturally find itself in as a result of its northern half having the same factors which drive it to have so many unhoused.
They weren't even right about California. Most people in CA are homeless near where they were last housed.
Never do this. No one cares what you "suspect" but never bothered to investigate. And you're completely incorrect. People study these things. You could just read what they wrote.
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/06/425646/california-statewid...
There's lots of reasons why it's not a good solution, but having encampments in public parks isn't a good solution either.
But I think this ruling allows governments to disrupt encampments without providing shelter or incarceration. Forcing people to disperse from an encampment with nowhere in particular to disperse to, is probably a worse result for the people in the camps, and is likely not to be effective for the communities impacted by the camps; the camps may move around more often, but they'll likely start up again with the same few places in rotation.
Isn't there a lot of rose-colored glasses around institutionalization of the mentally ill? The reason we got rid of it is because it is essentially imprisonment, with all sorts of abuses and not some sort of all-inclusive luxury resort.
As a resident of California, I wholeheartedly disagree. The status quo could not continue. We need law and order. We can't have people just sleeping and camping wherever they want like California has been allowing. Many many public parks and open spaces are now taken over by open drug scenes (homeless camps) where crime thrives.
If the homeless just kept to themselves and weren't actively causing public disturbances in places like SF, this wouldn't be an issue
And it's an issue that affects some municipalities more than others. If a horde of homeless just show up in SF one day and strain infrastructure, I don't think it's unreasonable for SF to be able to do something about that
they already do. troopers,and "social serviceworkers act on reports of homeless camps in the woods search for them and make a census of the occupants.
shortly after the camp is broken up and warrants served.
Local municipalities couldn't get away with it because there's a very vocal and litigious activist crowd
Considering how obsessed people are with property values out here, this is probably going to trigger a bunch of changes
If you envision a hypothetical city which has too many unhoused persons relative to the city's financial ability to support those people - then what? The unhoused just die in the street unable to be moved somewhere that has sufficient resources to support them?
I get that there's a lot more nuance to this problem and that the ruling can be abused/used to enforce NIMBYism/jail the unhoused, but, fundamentally, cities have to have the ability to move citizens because the city is aware of its own financial ability to provide support, but the citizens within are allowed to be uninformed.
Still, it doesn't have to be ungrounded in numbers. Take GDP per capita for a city, normalize it by cost of living, and pass a federal law saying cities are only required to support an unhoused population that represents a percentage of the normalized cost burden.
Cities already bus unhoused people to other cities to try and shift the burden of responsibility. We could at least orchestrate the process in a way that fairly divides the economic cost. As it stands, it's just whoever acts faster and with fewer morals benefits and relatively poor areas with desirable outdoor weather shoulder the burden.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10511....
This suggests similarly?
"Indeed, 48% of the unsheltered homeless population is found in California and Florida alone, while just 15% of the United States population lives in these two states. Conventional wisdom among local officials and experts in cities with warm climates is that warm temperatures are major draws for homeless individuals.1
Similarly, research has generally affirmed that homelessness, and particularly the unsheltered type, is more common in warmer areas."
First: the west-coast homeless population is overwhelmingly indigenous, consisting of people who had (and mostly will again) stable housing in the region before experiencing homelessness.
Secondly: the much more salient reason the midwest sees less homelessness is that housing is much, much more affordable here. The homeless in the midwest leave homelessness, for apartments; they don't leave the region to be homeless elsewhere.
Third: there are huge numbers of homeless people in Chicago. Chicago is drastically bigger than Portland or San Francisco, where the homeless problem is more visible. Drive down Chicago Ave through Humboldt Park. People don't erect tent cities in the middle of San Francisco as a political statement; there just isn't anywhere else to put them. Chicago doesn't have that problem.
Humboldt has less than 10 homeless people. Its a tiny problem relative to the west coast.
Homelessness that people care about are the drug addicts who can not take care of themselves, these people would be homeless if housing cost $100 a month. Their status has nothing to do with housing costs. These types of homeless in SF are not overwhelmingly indigenous.
Regarding the origin of California homeless people, this is an empirically studied question; you don't have to derive your answer from first principles.
Are we better at getting people off the street than California? Indubitably. But the scale of our problem is, if not per-capita identical, then at least comparable, by the numbers.
The cities do have the resources to support them - they would just rather prioritize everything else
City dwellers need safe and clean streets and public transportation. Kids should be able to walk to school by themselves.
These two things don’t need to be in conflict.
Agree. But is it cruel and unusual? The court says no.
It rules that the Eighth Amendment doesn’t substantially restrict what constitutes a crime, just the punishment. (It restricts criminalising status. So the court mostly focussed on whether the law criminalises homelessness, versus specific actions, which it found it does not.)
> Homeless need shelter and help. It is inhumane that we let them rot on the streets.
The issue being argued was not that homeless should be able to camp where ever and whenever they want. This issue was that if you don't provide shelter then you cannot kick them out of public spaces.
If that was the law, then it would mean you need to build shelters if you don't want homeless in the streets.
What this new verdict means is:
- You can forcibly remove homeless people who have nowhere else to go
- Thus homelessness can be effectively illegal
- The only realistic solutions now are:
- Put the homeless in prisons
- Move them to cities and towns that don't have the resources to remove them.[1] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/sf-supre...
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That's expensive, of course, so cities will have the incentive to do what the city of Chico did when it provided an outdoor shelter facility for the homeless. A district court refused to allow Chico to enforce it's ban on camping even though it had that facility, because it was an outdoor facility not an indoor one. This ruling gives cities the ability to say "you can camp here, not there".
To address the homelessness crisis.” San Francisco Brief 7. The city “uses enforcement of its laws prohibiting camping” not to criminalize homelessness, but “as one important tool among others to encourage individuals experiencing homelessness to accept services and to help ensure safe and accessible sidewalks and public spaces.”
A good overview of why this is the best solution to homelessness: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-...
No one is sleeping outside because they don't want to sleep on a friend's couch. It's a government ultimatum to force people to attend religious services, plain and simple.
They are "members of the public". That doesn't mean they can unilaterally dictate the laws of society. If they were "the public", then they could just change the law. I wonder why they can't? Because most people don't want anyone setting up their household in a public park.
Enjoy your park.
And I will enjoy my park. Maybe the rate at which I have been hearing stories about children getting pricked with dirty needles will lessen with this ruling.
> They could also crash on a friend's couch
Ahhh, AirBnB for the homeless, of course. Because when you're profoundly troubled by mental illness, or addiction issues, everyone opens their doors and homes to you.
That "charity" is a religious organization which requires all residents to abide by strict "Christian values" including immediate abstinence from all drugs (even nicotine) and sex, attendance to multiple daily sermons, etc. while also working for the organization.
The group filed a brief with the court arguing for the ruling we got, stating that people were choosing to camp on the streets instead of go to the shelter as if that weren't an indictment of their offering that they believe a significant portion of their residents were only there because they would otherwise be arrested and not because it was actually a better choice than being on the street.
If all municipalities did this instantly and provided transportation to the homeless - either unincorporated parts of a state, or jail, most would choose jail. Nobody wants to try to survive in the wilderness.
For a real world example, you don’t go to the woods outside of Seattle because there are unhoused people living there and it's dangerous to go there.
> but getting a cabin out in the woods and trying to live off the land is totally a thing people do.
And not a realistic option for the homeless unless you can afford land to live on. What kind of bizzaro country do you live in where this is remotely realistic or legal? The real world isn't Minecraft.
I'm not Swedish but I spent some time there. you can just go camping anywhere, just don't leave trash or mess it up. But the US has untold acres of unpatrolled national parks and private land that nobody is watching. Sure, legally, you can't just live there, but without anybody to enforce it, yeah you can.
It's genuinely insulting to log onto this website and listen to people repeat travel magazine advice as their solution to homelessness.
Edit: and looking over some episode summaries, it's not like they reliably came out in great health, despite going in in more or less peak condition. Unless your point was that even short periods of homelessness has severe health risks and consequences?
Now the city doesn't even have to offer bed space.
No it doesn't
And on top of that, there's almost always a drastic shortage in shelter beds, so even people who jump through all the hoops only have a small chance of getting a spot. For example, Portland here, which is considered pretty homeless-friendly by a lot of people, only has enough shelter beds for about 1/5th of the homeless population.
For a lot of people, even perfectly functional, non-mentally-ill people, this makes it a perfectly logical move to look at shelters as only a measure of last resort and otherwise sleep in a car or find somewhere out of the way that will let them put their energy into trying to improve their situation rather than into trying to satisfy a new shelter's rules every day.
But fundamentally it seems to me that shelters are just that. Really bad psych wards that no sane homeless person would set their foot in.
Horseshit.
It's less than $50B, most of which goes to subsidized housing. The actual amount spent directly on homelessness is likely less than $20B.
> In most cities something like half the homeless refuse free shelter.
I guarantee you there aren't free shelter beds for half the US's homeless population.
These are just talking points.
In the meantime, yeah this is terrible for anyone who is homeless. It could very well do a disservice describing eh ruling as making being poor illegal though. The ruling only covers homeless camps, there are still a ton of poor people who do still have a roof over their heads that aren't breaking the law by being poor.
If cops have to stop enforcing it the laws will eventually be overturned. If cops do enforce it courts and jails will back up, eventually the law would either be dropped or more support would be built out to help those in need.
That's not to say I like the law. I would much prefer it didn't pass, and in general I disagree with a legal system that is focused on punishing citizens rather than helping them.
And note that cops don't have to actually arrest people in order to enforce those laws. They can simply prevent them from sleeping, endlessly.
I get that you are saying functionally its illegal to be poor, but that isn't actually what the ruling covered.
At least in my opinion, that extrapolation really muddies the water when it isn't necessary. The fact that we have so many homeless people and that courts ruled cities are allowed to ban people from camping outside regardless of situation is bad enough.
The effect on homeless people is not some unintended consequence of the original law or of the SC's decision. It was explicitly what the whole case was about: homeless people complained that a law forbidding them from sleeping outside in a municipality was effectively punishing them for being homeless, and a federal judge agreed. The SC also agreed, but found that this doesn't violate their constitutional rights, so that it is constitutionally allowed to punish them for being homeless.
This is an exact illustration of the famous satirical quote about the law being equal to all, equally punishing the rich and the poor for sleeping under bridges. Only this time it's not satire, it's the explicit decision of the SC.
I see a case where a local government made it illegal to sleep outside and a supreme court decision that says this is within local governments' jurisdiction and doesn't violate any federal laws. It specifically doesn't make being poor illegal, though obviously it will greatly impact the homeless.
Its a huge leap you're making to claim that the law or the ruling makes being poor illegal, and I don't see that claim supported by either the new law or the ruling. I get that you strongly disagree with it and find the law to be immoral, and I totally agree with that. But personal emotion doesn't change the words written down and misrepresenting the law doesn't do anyone any good.
The law sucks, but it doesn't make being poor illegal. Plenty of people who are poor still have a roof over their heads, and there are homeless people who sleep in shelters rather than on the streets. If neither of those are illegal then the law couldn't have made being poor illegal.
You don't need to make the leap to misrepresenting the law to point out how terrible it is. The law as written is garbage.
I also don't the the bench said it wasn't a problem. As best I understand it the question was related to (a) jurisdiction and (b) whether the local law is legal under our existing federal laws.
At best a DA is an elected official deciding whether or not to enforce a law on the books.
Wha? No, that's literally not true: Taking a de facto situation and making it more intense doesn't magically transmute it into de jure.
If it is truly de-jure illegal to be poor now, you'd be able to point at a law on the books which says that.
Boise recently had to deal with this.
Passed a law that said it was illegal to sleep on the streets or public property if a shelter bed was available.
Problem? No shelter beds were generally available but two religious shelters said they were "always available", even when they had no actual beds. Ergo, police made arrests because the shelters were available, even if, factually, there wasn't. That the shelters SAID there were was enough for the police to arrest.
Adding to the problem was both of those shelters required both attendance AND participation in multiple religious ceremonies per day as a requisite of you being there, even if there did happen to be a bed.
So now you had a situation where the police were able to arrest homeless for refusing to go to these shelters, which may not have beds available, and that forced religious participation to be there.
That was a law that made it onto the books, until it was rightfully challenged. But the fact it made it to legislation in the first place is problematic.
Shelter with strings attached shouldn't count as a shelter.
ex. it's illegal to be unemployed (enforced against blacks) where unemployed included self-employment. So now you have a large population that is forced to work for any wage or get throw in prison where they're forced into work detail anyways.
You may want to review the Constitution on that one.
> A city cannot, via the threat of prosecution, coerce an individual to attend religion-based treatment programs
-- Judge Marsha S. Berzon, for 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
Now plot post-War housing stock against population. We have more houses than ancient Egypt ergo supply and demand is fake isn’t an argument.
The issue has never been housing inventory in an effort to making housing more affordable. If the past 4 years have shown us anything it's that even with skyrocketing interest rates and new construction matching pre-2007 levels, homes are still 40% more expensive than they were in 2020.
Assuming by houses you mean the high-density housing people are actually saying would help alleviate the issue.
With the majority of homeless, the reason would be easier access to illicit substances.
And a large chunk of the homeless population are drug addicts with serious mental health problems. All the free housing in the world isn't going to help them. So what does an owner forced to rent his property to a homeless person do if that person trashes the place, doesn't pay rent, causes problems in the neighborhood, etc.? Evict them? That just means that some other homeowner is compelled to be a landlord for this person (in your system).
Interest rates have tripled, which should have dropped house prices. Construction is faster than it was before the 2007 Housing Crisis. Both of these factors should have drastically reduced housing costs, however, prices are still 40% higher than they were in 2020.
I'm not saying to confiscate homes. I'm not saying to force people to rent out their homes to homeless people.
>A large chunk of homeless people are drug addicts with serious mental health problems.
Only 26% of homeless people abuse drugs. A vast amount of homeless people are veterans who have complex mental health problems from their service in the military, elderly people who are trying to survive off of insufficient SSI payments, or LGBTQ youth who were kicked out of their homes.
This isn't a problem that can be solved with some witty one-sentence solution. This is a problem that takes layers of support systems ranging from health services, to public transportation, to subsidized housing, to job placement programs.
You were corrected on this above and chose to repeat it.
Concluding price from supply only is nonsense. In your interval, the population and real incomes rose. They rose faster than new housing formation, particularly in the cities which have a homeless problem.
If you look at the places that people actually want to live in the US, there are housing shortages in every major US metro area (https://www.fanniemae.com/research-and-insights/perspectives...).
"My comment on this is that the statement "just build more homes" is not an effective solution to this problem. We have enough homes. The issue is that as homes are viewed as an investment, rather than as a necessity to live a decent life, they must maintain scarcity. If there is not a scarcity, then it will be created. Interest rates have tripled, which should have dropped house prices. Construction is faster than it was before the 2007 Housing Crisis. Both of these factors should have drastically reduced housing costs, however, prices are still 40% higher than they were in 2020.
I'm not saying to confiscate homes. I'm not saying to force people to rent out their homes to homeless people.
>A large chunk of homeless people are drug addicts with serious mental health problems.
Only 26% of homeless people abuse drugs. A vast amount of homeless people are veterans who have complex mental health problems from their service in the military, elderly people who are trying to survive off of insufficient SSI payments, or LGBTQ youth who were kicked out of their homes.
This isn't a problem that can be solved with some witty one-sentence solution. This is a problem that takes layers of support systems ranging from health services, to public transportation, to subsidized housing, to job placement programs."
We don't have enough homes in the right places. That's the point of the report in the article I linked, which lays out the number of homes in the major metro areas that people actually want to live and shows that literally all of them have a shortage.
Well, what's the alternative? Do you believe all local laws such as "FooBar park closes at dusk" are federally unconstitutional, and that actually enforcing any of them is "cruel and unusual punishment" against people who desire to camp there overnight?
Remember: It's perfectly possible to say that certain situations are unlawful/unjust/immoral for other reasons, it's not like "I think it violates the 8th Amendment" is the only option.
However, "it violates the 8th Amendment" is was what got argued in the court, and I think the conclusion is reasonable: The entire category of local laws (which are not new) are generally and by default not-against-the-8th.
Here's a quick "unit test" to apply: Could I steal and eat all the food I want with total impunity, provided I am careful to ensure my wallet is always empty so that paying for it in that moment is never an option?
The majority’s justification that it is fair because it applies to those whom it will never apply to is particularly craven.
No, in this [court] case an entirely different question was brought before the judges. "City policy shoulda been this other thing instead" was never on the menu of potential answers.
The Supreme Court is--fortunately, for now--not some sort of King Solomon dictator that can jump the rails from "whose baby is this" to "all babies must be fingerprinted by midwives."
In that time homelessness has grown to 600,000. It's a pretty obvious correlation.
Having effective and readily available mental health programs is a more critical step IMHO.
> Held: The enforcement of generally applicable laws regulating camping on public property does not constitute “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.
It would still be a violation to ban "homeless" camps, and the decision was very clear that homelessness is a protected status, but just because you have a protected status does not mean you get to break laws that do not target you.
"Under the city’s laws, it makes no difference whether the charged defendant is homeless, a backpacker on vacation passing through town, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building."
As it is said, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."
If someone sees a sign says "Camping prohibited", and they decide to camp there anyway, that's mens rea.
It doesn't depend on whether they had other options, or whether they desired to purposefully harm others, or whether they were very sure they'd be able to avoid harming the grass, etc.
What the Supreme Court case on tent encampments could mean for homeless people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40107034 - April 2024 (88 comments)
This is the further erosion of social safety nets and criminalization of poverty while dodging the responsibility of not helping people who need it.
> Under the city's laws, it makes no difference whether the charged defendant is currently a person experiencing homelessness, a backpacker on vacation, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building.
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-175_19m2.pdf
The real issue should have been intent, but the litigants and lower courts didn’t base the case on lack of capacity to comply / lack of mens rea / etc. They wanted a precedent allowing for urban camping even if you’re not homeless.
> Plaintiffs insist the Court should extend Robinson to prohibit the enforcement of laws that proscribe certain acts that are in some sense “involuntary,” because some homeless individuals cannot help but do what the law forbids. [...] this Court already rejected it in Powell v. Texas [where] a defendant who had been convicted under a Texas statute making it a crime to “ ‘get drunk or be found in a state of intoxication in any public place.’ ” [...] argued that his drunkenness was an “‘involuntary’” byproduct of his status as an alcoholic.
Once again, governments are not being limited in their ability to go out and provide services.
Lots of people claim there are easy solutions, yet not one of them seems to actually work; homelessness exists in every major city today, even the ones where you don't see them as a tourist.
Who claimed they did? The complaint I saw was they made it legal for cities not to provide services.
> I don't understand this notion that court rulings should be based on social policy instead of Constitutional law.
What is cruel and unusual punishment is a constitutional question.
Yes. That's called gentrification. And they don't limit themselves to parks; they'll happily go after your property - not through purchase at a fair price, but through legal maneuvers and political influence that aren't available to people of lesser means. And this is arguably more destructive to the fabric of the existing community than a few tents (whatever you might think of what replaces it).
>Like rich person shit on one's lawn won't bother anyone,
Well, that of their dogs.
>rich people's blood encrusted needles are fine
They get around this by doing blow instead.
>and a rich person tent blocking right of way is an amusement to marvel at?
Every oversized SUV built in the past 2 decades.
No, not really. Gentrification is not rich people camping on the streets and parks, look it up.
>Well, that of their dogs.
Well, I am talking about human shit specifically but homeless have dogs too. So people are not bothered with rich people's dog shit? In the same universe where gentrification is when rich people camp on the streets and pass out from drugs?
>They get around this by doing blow instead.
You completely lost me. Are you just playing associations and type whatever first comes into your head? Good luck with that.
People can't afford to be bothered by rich people's dog shit (which is as bad as people shit, for all intents and purposes), because that would involve passing laws to fine rich people above the "cost of doing business" line and/or taking them to court, both of which are quite expensive ventures.
>Gentrification is not rich people camping on the streets and parks, look it up.
If you don't have the imagination to understand how gentrification could be considered the rich-person equivalent of camping in public places, in that both corrupt existing urban streetscapes to the best of their respective financial abilities, there might not be any reason to continue this conversation.
>You completely lost me.
That much is clear. You seem to be trying really hard to avoid understanding the fairly basic and simple notion that equality under the law is unequal when the laws themselves are. The moral virtue of subjecting everyone to the same standards is undermined by those standards being shaped to punish the likely (immoral) behavior of one group while ignoring the likely (immoral) behavior of another. The only way around this is assuming that rich people just don't do immoral things, which beggars the question; rich people use their money to cast their immoral behavior as moral (or at least amoral). So you end up with this argument, where I say, "Here are the bad things rich people do that are analogous to bad things that poor people do," and you respond, confused, "But those things rich people do aren't all that bad." They'd gotten to you before you'd even known it.
No, gentrification is not "equivalent" to camping, look it up.
Laws are unequal by definition, why would anybody had two equal laws? Laws are different and not equal to each other. It's irrelevant to the topic of the discussion where you obviously understand that we do indeed punish actions and not poverty but since you like the quote so much you are desperately trying to move the discussion into the one about how being rich is easy. Yes it is. People would rather be rich than poor. If you spend more time thinking and less time imagining you might stumble upon the casual relationship between doing things that are punished and being poor and doing things that are rewarded and being rich.
Nominally. The magnitude of the fine matters, because the magnitude of the wealth available to pay the fine is notably higher than any given other person also subject to it. Hence the original quote.
>No, gentrification is not "equivalent" to camping
"both corrupt existing urban streetscapes to the best of their respective financial abilities". "Look it up" is not a get-out-of-jail-free card.
This is what I mean when I say that they've already gotten to you, and that you're beggaring the question. The causal relationship between wealth (which is acquired, at best, amorally) and "things that are punished/rewarded" is that wealth allows one to set those rules themselves. Naturally, the wealthy reward their behavior and punish what offends them. This is a disjointing of morality and criminality, per the whims of the rich, which is the entire point of the quote. Meanwhile, there is behavior common to wealth that SHOULD be punished, but isn't.
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40820994
It's the year 2024 after the birth of Jesus Christ, mankind has produced more wealth and technology than we ever thought it was possible, meanwhile we're living this miserable life, working these shitty jobs, while less than 1% of the population has more money than they could ever spend.
Capitalism should be left behind, we're ruining the only planet we have. It's a system with a critical bug deep in it's core and it'll never be fixed.
If people who don't have a home can't sleep on public land, where can they sleep?
Those were the same in Grants Pass. And nearly 40% of cities according to a cited brief.
https://abc7.com/post/los-angeles-demand-answers-homeless-du...
Grants Pass said nowhere in the city. And nearly 40% of cities according to a cited brief.
I've never heard of a jail capacity shortage in America, so could someone provide some data on this?
Programmers today can feel the angst caused by this dehumanization when they look at LLMs generating code. We can see that our humanity could be ripped from us at any time.
Or they can just look out the window of the former SRO apartment they took over in the Tenderloin.
Sleeping in your car? Jail.
Sleeping under a bridge? Jail.
Sleeping on a park bench? Jail.
Sleeping in the woods? Jail.
It's relevant because there are people with nowhere to sleep. It's not possible for them to not sleep.
Is your solution to jail them all, so that they sleep in jail?
By definition, the homeless don't have that.
Driver's License or State ID. In my state (Georgia) to get these you must also provide a birth certificate or passport, as well as two documents showing Georgia residency (I.E., utility bill/phone bill that must have your address listed on them.
Okay, so those are unavailable to the homeless as they most likely will not have their birth certificate or passport with them (as belongings are routinely confiscated by police during removals of homeless encampments). Nor will they have an address or a utility bill in their name. Oh, also, Georgia requires a residential address for these ID cards so while you can use a PO Box on the card itself, they still need proof of a residential address for their records.
So, how again are the homeless expected to vote when they, legally, can't even get a drivers license or state ID card? This isn't even getting into the $25 it costs to get a copy of your birth certificate or the $32 fee for get a state ID. $57 could potentially feed them for a week, and when you don't know when your next meal is going to be, what's more important to you in that situation?
It's midnight, there are several thousand homeless people in the city, where do they sleep?
To me, who grew up in Central Europe and is obviously biased, that is wild.
But that's just me I guess.
Democracy.
This is useless hyperbole.
The effect would be that smaller towns with limited budgets would face a potential influx of homeless people, since they don't have the resources to build shelters and therefore cannot ban public camping.
Also, the proposed shelter constraint on the law is pretty dubious. Say a town builds a shelter and then it bans public camping. Does that law get nullified if a tornado destroys the shelter space? What if the shelter has 5 beds, but the homeless population grows to 100? At what point does that law become voided?
I call BS, there's thousands of other places in the country aside from downtown SF or other areas where they decide to congregate
SC isn't banning homelessness nationwide, I highly doubt every municipality will ban it at once. It's just giving municipalities that suddenly get hordes of them showing up the ability to make them go elsewhere
If we're going to spend the resources to incarcerate these folks, would not the resources be better spent (with much better potential RoI, no less) on assisting persons in obtaining living situations?
I don’t love this decision. But the endgame to homeless encampments in parks is parks being defunded and sold to developers.
You should want a society where we are all rewarded for looking after each other, in the ways we are each best at. Nothing else can work.
-don't currently suffer from a debilitating mental illness that prevents them from holding down a job or an apartment,
-weren't kicked out of their home by their parents for being LGBT,
-didn't incur a financially crippling medical debt which forced them to choose between housing or their lives
Or one of the myriad other reasons why someone might become homeless through no fault of their own in late-stage American society.
There but for the grace of God go all of us.
"A 2019 article in The New York Times reported that many bus ticket recipients were missing, unreachable, in jail, or homeless within a month after leaving San Francisco, and one out of eight returned to the city within a year.[2]"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_homeless_relocation_pr...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/us/homeless-busing-seattl...