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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

This is insane, so you are at your lowest in life and it is now illegal for you to exist.

I think its more about regulating where you can do certain things vs making it illegal to exist. For example its illegal to urinate and defecate in public despite these being automatic functions, sometimes involuntary and demanding release right then and there wherever you are. Despite this biological reality, we also understand that there are sanitation issues to allowing the body to relieve itself wherever it happens to be, so we have laws that criminalize public urination or defecation and attempt to direct this behavior towards areas where we can better handle that sanitation issue, and we establish guidelines of what that sanitary environment should be through the building code, and have our sewer departments expand capacity to meet this need.

So where do you suggest homeless people sleep

How about we start with 1000 feet away from housing, schools, and businesses?

In shelters the city state or federal government sets up. To me we are essentially hosting a concert with no bathrooms. The answer isn't to let people pee and poop without bathrooms at the concert, the answer is to police that behavior while also providing bathrooms.

The whole point of this judgment is that cities can now illegalize homelessness without needing to build any shelters.

Well, most cities with a homeless crisis today don't exactly have the spare jail capacity to actually enforce anything like that, so I think giving some tools where you can be pragmatic about where an issue is presently taking place while you can attempt to solve it on the back end is useful. My city has already passed laws about homeless camps near dangerous intersections for pedestrians who have to step into the street to avoid the camp, laws about not camping near schools or childcare centers, and its done quite a bit to help the average pedestrian in the neighborhood as a result.

I think the most likely "pragmatic tools" that will show up will amount to homeless people being told "take this bus ticket to NYC or San Francisco or we will make your life hell for the next year with maximally unpleasant prosecution".

That's already done to an extent. Other cities in socal have a bit of a history of dumping homeless people into LA city borders. This was just from this past week, the Burbank PD allegedly dumped someone and it was caught on video (1).

https://abc7.com/post/los-angeles-demand-answers-homeless-du...

> some tools where you can be pragmatic about where an issue is presently taking place

Grants Pass said nowhere in the city. And nearly 40% of cities according to a cited brief.

> most cities with a homeless crisis today don't exactly have the spare jail capacity to actually enforce anything like that

I've never heard of a jail capacity shortage in America, so could someone provide some data on this?

Its highly locally dependent. In LA county the jails are pretty full and have about 12000 inmates in the system. There are over 75,000 homeless people in LA county. Its just not realistic that anyone goes to jail over this unless they are causing a safety issue or a significant disturbance to the community.

> regulating where you can do certain things

If people who don't have a home can't sleep on public land, where can they sleep?

In a shelter. Most recent reports suggest that a lot of the new shelters cities have been building are not being used to their intended capacity. Probably because there isn't a way to implore people to go into shelter beyond offering it and trying to move them along from where they are presently camped using existing rulings (such as no camping near a school and other such laws certain cities have passed recently). If peoples choices are instead shelter in the provided shelter or spend a night in jail (which cities don't even have the space in their jails to jail every homeless person today fwiw), they might start filling these shelters, which might show the public that it is worth while to invest more money into building more of them considering they are getting used.Right now, its too easy to convince the public that homeless spending has been a waste of time and money on part of the poor utilization of present affordances. Sentiment on my local city subreddit about an upcoming homeless service tax program is pretty much in the gutter right now.

They can sleep on public land. Just not public land where it is illegal to sleep. This ruling also allows cities to set up designated camping grounds and banning camping elsewhere which courts ruled was banned in Chico. Why should we accept that the homeless can sleep wherever they like and ruin all the public land for the rest of us?

> They can sleep on public land. Just not public land where it is illegal to sleep.

Those were the same in Grants Pass. And nearly 40% of cities according to a cited brief.

The world is much larger than Grants Pass. There is unincorporated land just outside city limits, and blm land not far

This is quite horrifying, but not particularly surprising. Most Americans have dehumanized homeless people, because if we truly saw them as equal humans, we would have to acknowledge that we all exist in a system where our humanity is contingent on the contents of our bank account.

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.

> Programmers today

Or they can just look out the window of the former SRO apartment they took over in the Tenderloin.

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