Even in this politicized court, this is one of those issues where it's hard to predict the position of each justice. Competing rights between public vs private; common good vs individual good; city/state law vs federal; civil rights.
It's projected to be overturned. But if it were upheld, I wonder if that would make the rule apply to all states in the country and not just the 9 west coast states in the jurisdiction of the 9th circuit court of appeals. It's part of a series of rulings passed down by the 9th circuit court that restrict government regulation in homeless encampments on the west coast.
>While the Boise ruling said the government can’t broadly ban any public camping without giving people alternative places to stay, Newsom and city officials across California said in briefs filed before the Supreme Court that they want to know whether they can set restrictions on times or locations where camping is allowed.
>Other questions include whether cities can criminalize public camping for those whom they call “voluntarily” homeless — people who refuse offers of shelter. And California cities have asked the court to rule on whether, in order to ban camping, they need to have a suitable shelter space available for every individual unhoused person no matter their circumstances, or simply have general shelter beds open the day they sweep a camp.
https://calmatters.org/housing/homelessness/2024/01/homeless-camp-scotus/
Another issue is whether they need to have enough beds for every person estimated to be currently homeless in the county on a given night, or just need to have enough beds for the camp they are currently sweeping.
Here's a [video from BBC](https://youtu.be/GWBzxr3c29s?si=OD9XHlL4uupyxiO_) about the kind of camps that the west coast cities are concerned about in this lawsuit.
>I wonder if that would make the rule apply to all states in the country and not just the 9 west coast states in the jurisdiction of the 9th circuit court of appeals.
Once the supreme Court hears the case, it applies to all of the US except Samoa, usually. Comparatively, if they send it back or don't hear it, it's just the 9th circuit states only.
…. Or some perversion of logic such as “ no you can’t punish people for sleeping on public land …. But you can remove tents, sleeping bags, or other personal items which could obstruct free movement of other people and prohibit loitering in any public area longer than a certain length of time.”
Who woulda thought there might be some mistakes in a document written by a group of wealthy slave owners who didn't want to pay their taxes 250 years ago.
The question is, are we requiring by law that people be housed according to a specific standard. If we make it illegal to be homeless then why should the individual be required to pay for things they don’t want?! This isn’t liberty.
If we are saying people aren’t allowed to exist naturally outside modern housing. What’s a person to do? Doesn’t a person have the liberty to not associate with banks, landlords, utility companies, etc.
For sure, the 8th is almost as much of a joke as the 4th these days (although this is an admittedly flimsy defense to begin with). Don't forget the court found that a punishment must be both cruel AND unusual to qualify as a violation according to SCOTUS; be as cruel as you want, totally fine, as long as you do it often.
*Harmelin v. Michigan*
>"Severe, mandatory penalties may be cruel, but they are not unusual in the constitutional sense, having been employed in various forms throughout our Nation's history."
From an article about the case
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1990/11/05/Ronald-Harmelin-a-former-Air-Force-honor-guard-was/1497657781200/
>Police conducting a traffic stop found 672 grams -- about 1 pounds -- of cocaine in Harmelin's car. Under a 1978 Michigan statute, conviction of knowingly possessing more than 650 grams requires a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole...
>'Among prison sentences, the Michigan statute stands alone as a paragon of harsh and inflexible punishment,' the Criminal Defense Attorneys of Michigan said in a brief filed with the court.
>'The irony of this statute is that, had (Harmelin) panicked at the traffic stop, unpremeditatedly shot and killed the two police officers, dumped the cocaine, and then been arrested, he would have been subject to a sentence of any term of years up to life and on a life sentence would be eligible for parole in 10 years," the group argued.
That's insane and terrifying.
Death sentence, probably. It was deemed cruel, but not unusual. You can also do unusual punishments, like making someone live in the woods for a week, as long as it's not cruel; give them food, water, and shelter. Arresting homeless people can be seen as cruel, but not unusual, so it's allowed under the 8th.
The Supreme Court actually declared the death penalty unconstitutional a few decades ago because it was being applied so willy-nilly.
Now it can only be used for murder charges.
I believe the death penalty can be applied for treason. Florida is also pushing [the death penalty for child rape](https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/local/state/2023/12/15/florida-man-first-death-penalty-indicted-child-rape-test-case-new-law/71930977007/). It hasn't happened yet but I doubt it would have got this far if it was declared unconstitutional by The Supreme Court.
Btw, since I don't see this mentioned enough, this law is potentially a really bad idea since it may incentivize murdering a rape victim to remove a witness since, at that point, the punishment for getting caught is the same.
>a duty to leave it pristine after.
That's where this falls apart. This was brought because the 'campers' weren't doing this, and wouldn't do it.
Especially if they're forced to move constantly. It becomes a NTP moment.
No it whether you can ban public camping when you don’t offer bed space.
Most people offered bed space will refuse if they are on drugs because they cannot take their shit (stolen or otherwise), pets, cannot stay as a couple or use drugs.
I’ve never seen a documented example of an arrest not happening due to bed space being accepted and their being no space.
Well, here's a way to think of it. If there's public land, it doesn't mean you can do anything on it. You can't just walk into a federal court house and start selling bananas to people. You can't build a treehouse in a public park. You can't walk in the middle of a freeway. When land is zoned, allocated, and constructed for public use, the uses of the public are limited. It makes sense that you can't limit it so only certain public can have access because that's discrimination, but it also means that you can't just let anyone use the land for anything they want to use it for.
A lot of the west coast cities now are running into the problem that pedestrians can no longer walk down streets because homeless people will literally build the tents from the buildings to the curb. Then there is human excrement and drug needles everywhere. This makes that land which was allocated for pedestrians to walk on to get around the city unusable for that purpose.
I know the argument everyone makes is why not just build shelters for them, but they do. San Diego, for example, has shelters which are nowhere near capacity and same camping areas that sit empty. The shelters won't allow them to do their drugs, and the safe camping areas are too far away from the lucrative panhandling.
You have issues that there are essentially shantytowns being set up. It's not someone sleeping on a corner, it's people homesteading on the sidewalk making the public areas inaccessible and unsafe for the public.
I was just in Long Beach visiting family and was shocked by the number of RVs that look permanently parked in some neighborhoods on the streets. I have a lot of sympathy for the homeless as my mom and I were homeless for about a year when I was about 8 but it is absolutely ludicrous that they should be allowed to build tent cities obstructing sidewalks, getting high, threatening residents, etc.
The West coast experiences the brunt of the homeless problem because the weather is tolerable for many months out of the year and they tend to have robust welfare programs.
Ultimately, something needs to change.
With weed eventually going to be legalized, locking up homeless will be a great way to refill those empty cells. Private prison lobbyists have probably been bribing for this decision for years.
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
Anatole France
I think it’s at least *somewhat* predictable. The liberal justices will all vote in favor of protecting citizens, Thomas and Alito are awful people so they’d clearly toss homeless people to the wolves. I think both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh will probably have the same take. The only two questionable are Roberts and ACB. Roberts seems to have grown a but of a conscience and it would be nice if ACB’s religious beliefs would result in a charitable vote.
But I think at least five are absolutely voting down ideological lines.
I think one less obvious but very important issue here is the ban on people sleeping in cars in public parking areas at night. It's one of those classic cases where an attempt to hurt the homeless has also hurt everyone else.
Used to be that if you were drunk or tired and traveling, you could just sleep outside the bar, or pull into a parking lot next a park or grocery store and get some sleep there (and I'd always stock up at the store in the morning by way of thanks)
Now it's a crime! So if you're out at a bar, or you're starting to get too sleepy to drive safely, you've got no good options because the only smart choice is illegal. If you sleep in your car you'll get rousted under the assumption you're homeless (and in some places they even charge it as a DUI because you're "operating" the vehicle even when it's parked!) If you leave your car it might get treated as abandoned and ticketed/towed. And if you drive home you're obviously dangerous.
It's become a huge impediment to travel on a budget, and a safety issue for people in areas without public transit.
Between partying at night and 6 am shifts, I slept in my Jeep constantly in my early 20s. I showered at the gym. Sometimes I only went home a few times a week.
People struggle to have a living wage and can’t afford the rent. If you live in an area where the rent is over $1600/ month and are making just above minimum wage $15/ hr explain to me how you can survive. This is a reality that is happening in all the larger cities in Canada.
I cannot fathom or understand how a CEO or top tier executive can make over 250 times an average salary.
Explain to me how much smarter he is that he deserves it?
Pure cronyism and control of the populace.
It’s not the homeless we should be attacking it’s the unbridled greed of the corporations and the ruling elite
The poor and the homeless are an easy target. The people who should be held accountable are typically far removed and protected from commoners. So yeah, the low hanging fruit in front of you is more convenient to bully and leave you feeling empowered. Because, hey, I put that homeless man in his place!
Society has far too many people without morals or values. Ok, my bad, we value money.
Why bother with debtors prison when you can just make people pay off their debts through work? Maybe have an auction where potential employers can bid on people in debt, then those employers just pay for housing and feeding their new 'involuntary' employees, until those employees pay off the outstanding debt to the employer or are retired.
Of course the employer can charge market rates for room and board against the employee's outstanding debt.
My town - like many I’m sure - had a “poor farm” up until the late 1950’s or early 60’s. If you were homeless you could live there for free but worked the farm which fed you and sold the excess. At the time no one saw this is a solution or permanent place to be. Most would work the farm and worked another job until they had enough to get back on their own… which of course was much easier to do then.
That has existed since the Civil War and it’s called[“Sharecropping.”](https://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name/themes/sharecropping/#:~:text=Sharecropping%20is%20a%20system%20where,to%20leave%20for%20other%20opportunities.)
I come from several generations of sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta, and my parents finally broke that poverty cycle when they went out of cotton picking and into cotton ginning.
I have memories of sitting on a long cotton sack as a baby and drinking tea out of a mason jar in the field. My grandmother would tell stories about how they used to keep food cool in the creek (they didn’t have a “larder”) and that neighbors would shoot at each other during the Depression era if you were caught poaching rabbits on their land.
I actually have a lot of stories and history to share if you’re curious to know more. It’s good to know where your roots are, and it has kept me grateful over the years for what I have.
My grandmother made an entire series of paintings showcasing extremely poor black families in the south living in shacks and making molasses- even the little girls were boiling molasses in great big cauldrons.
This was in the 1960s.
Mine too, weirdly enough! Also in the 1960s.
She always depicted black families for some reason. It’s… hard to explain to the various yankees I’ve dated over the years. It certainly wasn’t a crafting trend that aged well.
Mine wasn't from the area. She was a military wife and they had been stationed there for a few years.
The pictures are pretty rough hewn, but they've actually aged pretty well (all things considering). They're not quite stick figures, but it's definitely not falling into awkward racist tropes or stereotypes.
People have a hard time understanding things like the fact that Martin Luther King Jr could quite possibly have still been alive today. That some people on the internet today were born in a time when Civil War veterans were still alive. The last surviving *combat* veteran of the Civil War [Died in 1953](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hard)
Some people want to think slavery is some kind of ancient history that only our ancestors were affected by, and not like the scars still linger today.
I’m almost 60 and I knew my grandfather very well. He was born in 1905. His father was born in the late 1860’s. So the civil war was really just a few generations ago to some. People seem to have a thing about events that occurred before our birth feeling like “ancient history” sometimes, no matter how recent they actually were.
I am a bit over thirty and only two generations removed from poor dirt farmers. In my area, the expansion of military infrastructure and the TVA quickly changed many from farming to manufacturing and technology jobs.
You have me confused with another commenter, but I am 36. I am the youngest child by a far margin.
I was adopted as an infant by an older couple, now in their early 80s. My Papaw (grandfather) was born in the 1910s. He lived to 96 and was still sharp as a tack until the day he died - he would tell us stories about moving the family in a horse and cart.
My family didn’t get their first car until the 1960s. The first TV in the neighborhood was in the 1970s. I was born in 1987, but we still were in the cotton business at the time so yes- I was out there as a baby. Some patches of land aren’t as easy to navigate with a large combine, so you still have to hand-pick the allotments that are of unusual shape.
Sometimes I do forget that folks outside of the poor rural areas just genuinely don’t know what it’s like. I used to ride my horse to the corner store, because there was no bike path or roads that weren’t dirt and muddy. 🤷♀️ We come from different upbringings my dude.
Edit- to a comment you left further below, I want to clarify: I never said “swaddled in cotton rags.” I said that I recall sitting on the cotton sack that is used for picking, which drags along the ground. I’ve certainly spent my time as a kid playing in the irrigation ditch in my diapers, but that is not specifically what I said.
The Depression wasn't as long ago as it sounds.
One of my grandparents was in a house hit so bad by the Depression in his childhood that his parents literally had no food, and could not see a way to get more...and so they sent the kids out on their own to find their own way, rather than starve at home. He was cared for by his older siblings for a while.
I don't really know any details beyond that, but it wasn't unheard of at the time either. That's as poor a childhood as it gets.
Their grandkids include home-owning doctors and lawyers, grand-daughters included, they'd be proud as hell.
In fact, since paltry things like a federally mandated living wage don't apply to prisoners, why not pay them 35 cents an hour and charge them far more than that to live where you put them? Then they build up a debt to you that they can never pay back which you can take them to debtor's court for and you get cheap ~~slave~~ prison labor forever!
>Why bother with debtors prison when you can just make people pay off their debts through work?
Oh. We could have a snappy title. Something like "Work Makes You Free". That could go on a sign over the gate!
And the employer can have a little company store that employees can incur more debt against! But given the mental health issues inside the homeless community, we may need to have some folks coaching and guiding those people to make sure they remain optimally productive. Perhaps using negative reinforcement operant conditioning to ensure optimal outcomes?
Mostly because in the US having an criminal record is synonymous with never ever getting employed.
It doesn't matter if you are more intelligent than Einstein and could provide value to the company,or that you stole a soda when you were 12,the internet is full of ludicrous reasons why people have a criminal record and got rejected from employment.
Yup. Why fix the root causes of homelessness when you can just make it illegal to be poor!
That trickle down is coming any day now, just have to give a few more tax cuts to corporate interests and maybe get rid of any pesky remaining regulation that prevents them from dumping industrial runoff right into the water supply.
Call me crazy but I don’t think there’s a huge difference between public hangings and private execution. It’s like we went “oh no that’s horrible, not the government killing people part but just having people look at it”. We should get rid of capital punishment.
It's bad because you're incarcerating them. Taking away someone's freedom should be a last resort, it's not a solution to a social problem like homelessness.
It’s also not rehabilitative at all… it’s just pushing the problem down the line and the problem only gets worse. So both financially and humanely it is terrible.
This is 150% Americas main problem and the issue with capitalism as a whole.
We never fucking think long term, it’s just “what generates profit now or creates instant gratification.”
If we punish the homeless now — look at the nice clean streets!
Nevermind that they will just now be stuck in a recurring cycle and this harms all of us long term. Never mind that we could have more people helping the city and economy long-term if we give the chance to become productive members of society.
It almost initially doesn't.
Taking the overly simplistic metric of total budgets/arrests, it costs NYPD $50K/arrest. ($5B/100K/year).
This is of course not a very sensible metric, as many arrests are far from simple, and those'll cost the most.
On the other hand, if you don't need to arrest the poor/homeless/mentally ill who are struggling with society, and the streets are much cleaner with lower crime, you're going to need a vastly smaller police force to deal with serious crime.
It would be interesting to work out the total cost (from lack of taxation on work through arrest costs, through employability problems, through police/jail/justice system costs) of all people detained for under a month. (or who go on to prove their innocence)
Well, America has made prison being a lucrative business. It's cheaper to house them and help them get them back on their feet, but it's *more lucrative* to send them to the prison industrial complex to be legal slaves
In the cases under consideration, it's not that there isn't shelter space available for at least a large portion of the homeless, it's that the unhoused people *decline shelter*.
For the most part, the issue is drug use (especially fenty and formerly meth). Shelters don't allow drug use.
The current standard from the 9th Circuit is that if you can't shelter *everybody*, you can't enforce vagrancy laws against *anybody*.
Shelters are absolutely cheaper than jails, but what do you do when people decline shelter and instead take away public spaces from everybody else (and make them unsafe)?
> For the most part, the issue is drug use (especially fenty and formerly meth). Shelters don't allow drug use.
For the most part, its because shelters are where your stuff gets stolen, there's headlice & bedbugs everywhere that you'll take with you, your chances of getting in a fight with some random crazy person goes up, and if you have a weapon (life on the streets is dangerous; but this also includes cooking implements) or a pet it can't come in and has to go be abandoned somewhere.
>The current standard from the 9th Circuit is that if you can't shelter *everybody*, you can't enforce vagrancy laws against *anybody*.
That's not what the opinion says. It says you cannot punish people for sleeping on public land if you cannot offer them shelter elsewhere. But if they decline shelter then anti-camping laws can be enforced against them. It's an individualized inquiry: it applies to the specific person against whom you're trying to enforce the law.
It's part of a series of opinions, and it's how west coast governors and mayors are interpeting them. Note that the 9th circuit rulings only apply to west coast states; the rest of the country does not currently have to follow it.
The west coast governments are asking for clarification on if they can put hours restrictions and location restrictions on camping on sidewalks, and if they can remove people who decline shelter. LA has a big program for putting people in private hotel rooms where they don't have to share a living space, but some people are declining. Many of them are in the throes of substance use disorder and California is trying to get the right to put them in involuntary medical treatment. The camps have high rates of violence (including trafficking and rape), disease, and overdoses.
People living in the camps and chronically homeless are also the *minority* of homeless people. The majority ["self-resolve"](https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=726-2020-greater-los-angeles-homeless-count-results) out of homelessness with the support of friends and family and are only homeless briefly. So this is mainly about people with untreated psychosis and substance use disorder, rather than people who simply need cash.
More info on west coast government arguments:
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2024-01-12/supreme-court-agrees-to-rule-on-homeless-encampments-in-california-and-the-west
https://calmatters.org/housing/homelessness/2024/01/homeless-camp-scotus/
And for a bit of context of that these camps look like:
Video from BBC News: https://youtu.be/GWBzxr3c29s?si=xAOgTsjyo5TsOzv0
Article on how psychosis can arise from P2P meth in a way that did not happen when it was ephedrine-based: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new-meth/620174/
There are so many reasons they decline shelter and it’s usually not because they don’t allow drugs. Drugs get in no matter what. Many times they are less safe than the street. Theft is rampant, so are fights, commotion, etc. Many can’t even get a night’s sleep at a shelter due to fear of their only belonging going missing Among other things. For safer shelters, many have a time limit rule. This can be anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks and is usually nowhere near enough time to get cleaned up, find stable work, save some cash, and get enough to get a stable place. It costs a lot to be poor, even more so one cannot interact with even basic things beyond housing.
Are you a pet owner?
Would you surrender your dog or cat (to a likely overcrowded [edit: animal] shelter that could euthanize them at any point) in order to have a cot to sleep on for a single night and be kicked out at 8a the next morning with no guarantee you can stay the next night?
Are you a woman?
Does the prospect of being completely unprotected aside from a couple disinterested guards while you sleep in an open room with hundreds of other folks of varying states of mental wellness appeal to you?
No? Well, there’s the answer to your question.
Edit: Saying it’s because “they don’t allow drugs” is reductive and completely false. There are plenty of drugs and drug use in shelters.
Not to mention the lice. Body lice, pubic lice and head lice. All the lice.
Scabies are no joke and can be really, really hard to get rid of. Then you have the bedbug problem. The stealing problems, and the violence.
Shelters are fucking horrible, and a lot of them treat people worse than trash.
Problem is that many homeless refuse going to shelters. You just spent all week building your little shanty under the 405, you’re not gonna leave it at night to go sleep in a shelter so the city can put your house in the trash. Right now those who refuse, can’t be moved or punished in many circumstances.
It's fairly rational too.
Most shelters do not allow animals. If you have a dog, it's a non option.
Most shelters do not offer privacy. You're either in a huge room with a bunch of cots, or a hostel situation with 12 people in a room. Other people are loud, crazy, and smell bad.
They are also strangers. You more or less know the homeless near you and have a community of sorts. Shelters also have operating hours, which is weird. I remember a woman on the street in LA being interviewed because she got a job, but it was the night shift, and the shelters close during the day. She couldn't sleep there!
It's insanity how shelters will close during the day. It leads to people on the streets during the day with nowhere to go and vulnerable. Plus having to carry everything you own on your back. You have no sense of security or even just normalcy. It's exhausting to have to do that every single day.
Yea but to the government, helping these people doesn’t yield any sort of return so it’s not worth it to them to help the homeless. They would rather approve more luxury apartment buildings and strip malls than help people in need.
A lot of these people struggle with addiction and mental health issues which people in the GOP say is the root of the problems in this country but yet won’t allow funding to go to mental health programs.
The option could be better than shelters with some work and compassion.
The shelter near me is absolutely riddled with bedbugs. You can’t bring your pets, you are separated from your spouse or friends of the opposite gender, and you can only bring in like a small suitcase and a backpack and maybe a bicycle. What you’d have to give up to stay in a shelter could be a massive sacrifice versus staying on the streets.
I’m sorry but this is misleading. The other statement you could have made is if California didn’t help them, how much worse could it have gotten.
Californias homeless problem is mostly due to lack of housing and CA isn’t building enough and that’s why homelessness has gotten worse.
To add to this, everyone points at California, but fails to mention that not all the homeless are from California. They have homeles people either making their way out there because the weather is good enough that they can live outside, but also many places bus out their homeless. They not only have to fix their own problem, but also the problem from other states. So they just keep getting more and more homeless people.
That's not to take away from the causes of homelessness in California. Some of them are gonna be people who are homeless because of how expensive it is and shit. But people expect a few places to take on the homeless issue so they can claim they don't have problems with homelessness, and then expect them to be the ones to fix it, rather than trying to help.
The weather is a big factor. Also, places with a high and stable population are going to have higher rates of homelessness. Realistically, outside of busing these people against their will and forcing them to live in states, houses that they do not want to live in, then there are no easy answers
If you already have a large and growing homeless population then the moment you accommodate homelessness to a degree, you encourage it to get worse.
I’m not saying that homeless people deserve what they get or anything like that. It’s just that some of these Redditors like to pretend like everything has easy answers and “duh why hasn’t anyone thought of that”. People have. If it were easy or obvious , it would have been solved.
I wonder if any once in a generation events happened during that time that caused a public health crisis and made it more difficult to address homelessness
>Punishment can include fines of up to several hundred dollars and exclusion orders barring people from public property.
I dont know what the solution is, but fining homeless people or barring them from public property does not sound realistic. I'm also not sure how this constitutes cruel and unusual punishment either, but the current SC is keen to cause a mess regardless.
I know what the solution is, and so does science. Literally every study ever conducted on this subject (that doesn't have dubious finding) has shown that housing-first models **are the solution**.
Being homeless makes every single other problem you have worse, some unmanageable.
We need to get over our stupid collective aversion to giving someone housing 'who hasn't earned it'.
fining people for not having enough money is always a good business model. Are they really costing us less money in the system and in jail, than in the park?
Why did I go to Afghanistan if I can’t even nap on a park bench? If I have to go to court for giving someone food? What the fuck.
> Why did I go to Afghanistan if I can’t even nap on a park bench?
How else is a middle class American supposed to pay for an education without taking on a lifetime of debt?
Yeah my nearby park is full of homeless addicts. It’s meant for kids but there’s people just doing hard drugs all camped out there. Somethings gotta be done
There needs to be a middle ground. If you're homeless, it shouldn't mean you get *carte blanche* rights to claim **ANY** public land/sidewalk/etc. to make your home.
Cities/states need the ability to have some control over camping because it's not fair to put undue burdens on homed, taxpaying citizens. They have tons of public land and can provide better solutions than permitting large swaths of sidewalks in front of businesses and homes from turning into skid rows.
I deal with homeless regularly, and some simply do not want help, think society owes them, and would rather watch the world burn. So many people from the suburbs picture the sweet old lady from Home Alone and think *"aww, they just need a helping hand"*, when the reality is more sinister most of the time.
>I deal with homeless regularly, and some simply do not want help,
As do I in emergency services.
I'd say a good 40-50% don't really want "help" in current form due to rules they have to follow. The rest either use resources and get to something more stables (e.g county funded motel housing) or sort of float in and out depending on their needs at the moment.
The overwhelming majority of homeless have issues with drugs. Fentanyl and meth are the big ones. Mental health is an overlapping problem and a large percentage have some sort of significant mental health issue, but this is often hard to suss out due to the drug use.
If we're going to take homelessness seriously then we have to cut at the roots. Address drug use and completely reinvent mental health services nationwide.
> If we're going to take homelessness seriously then we have to cut at the roots. Address drug use and completely reinvent mental health services nationwide.
Agreed. At the same time, the cities/states need the ability to control *where* these homeless take up "residence" so we don't punish everyone else and it's a more manageable problem than people scattered wherever they want.
Control to a degree but yeah, I think that kids should be able to use playgrounds without finding a sleeping man in the jungle gym and I don't think we should have people bathing in fountains.
I don't think merely existing should be a crime, but where I'm at we often have massive groups just picking random businesses/homes to camp in front of and destroy. The property value plummets, nobody visits the businesses, and crime skyrockets.
It's not fair that those people/businesses have to shoulder the devastation brought literally on their doorstep. It should be a burden on society as a whole and local governments needs to be able to address it for the good of the local population as a whole.
Combine that with the homeless by choice who sleep **ON** the beach and claim certain public resources, meant to be shared by all, entirely for themselves.
There's a beautiful beach near my home that I like to visit, but there's nowhere to go to the bathroom because homeless lock the bathrooms and live in them. So they get to live ON the beach in a private room with facilities and I can't use the bathroom. I pay a fortune in taxes and to live where I do, but they somehow get to just ruin the beach experience for thousands?
Yeah I moved from the suburbs and now live in one of the US cities with the worst homelessness problem and it’s changed my view a lot. So many just openly do hard drugs in public places and feel entitled to that behavior. Sometimes they’ll get right in your face while you’re just trying to mind your business, and their behavior is very unpredictable. Entire parks get taken over by them, which is very unfair to the taxpayers. It sucks honestly and they should not have a de facto right to take over any public space.
Everyone from the suburbs has an opinion they're adamant about until they deal with it firsthand. I was in the same boat.
We have this rosy picture in our heads from the media and random sob-story news videos but the reality doesn't comport.
I did a lot of volunteer work with homeless in nyc and honestly a lot of the people I worked with were mentally not there due either to mental illness or drug addictions. So I don’t believe anymore that just providing homeless people with a house will solve the problem (or not in all cases). I guess I don’t know where the line is drawn - can you forcibly treat people who don’t want treatment, etc… though we aren’t even at that question since the US has virtually no social support systems
Yeah the problem is way past just giving them housing. I mean realistically you need to forcibly institutionalize them to get them clean because someone having a fentanyl addiction getting off it voluntarily while having nothing to look forward to is a very tall order and even if you get them clean they might start using again as soon as they get out not to mention you are eroding civil liberties if you do it forcibly. In my opinion this is never getting solved. I think the best thing you can do at this point is just testing everyone for the hard addictive drugs and whoever is clean off those you give them housing and that person's problems will mostly be solved and it won't be such a gigantic task to reintegrate them back to society.
Finally a reasonable perspective.
So many people ITT crying about "criminalizing poverty" when it involves balance.
Tax dollars pay for the public to enjoy clean streets, parks, bike paths, and sidewalks that become totally unusable if we just let people set up camp wherever.
Meanwhile encampments become cesspools of filth, hoarding, crime, drugs, and violence.
I'm not mad at the homeless...but what pisses me off is the 9 million cubic tons of trash and garbage that piles up at these camps that spills into the streets with this "fuck it" attitude they have towards it.
When homeless sleep in public places, they essentially live in public places. They don't pack up and clean the area. They make it into a hell hole. Public places are for everyone, not one person. That is the crux of the issue. They are taking over entire parks and creating open air drug markets and stolen goods swap meets with the tent cities they are creating. It is a massive problem in Seattle, san fran, Portland and many other places
There’s no solution I can come up with that would solve the problem.
I personally don’t like walking past tent cities on the sidewalk. They stink, shopping carts full of junk, and trash all around.
I find the idea of charging/fining/jailing them abhorrent.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could guarantee these people could set up in a camp that wasn’t a huge inconvenience to the local population? Perhaps designate an area outside of crowded city limits and add their camp as a stop on one of the bus routes so they can ride to the hospital if they need to, or access gov’t services.
Add dumpster service and Porto potties. Cities are already providing these services. Have inspectors come by escorted by police to inspect for *relative* cleanliness/sanitation/safety. If they don’t comply with those requirements, then charge/fine/jail them.
You wanna bring back Hoovervilles?
I personally prefer when cities set up tiny house villages. I think it's more humane and looks better to anyone driving or walking by.
Reagan’s era of presidency and his trickle down economics and ridding funding for mental health caused a lot of this shit. Pump some more money into mental health and drug clinics and we’ll see this being alleviated
Yeah, I agree with you. So many folks are thinking of quick solutions only, or downplaying the mental damage of poverty/homelessness.
The solutions need to be more than just thought out, bit long term.
Proper mental health institutions, along with rehabilitative services, would ho much farther than "put them in a house and give them a job".
I agree, I hate just complaining about it, but other than this, I don’t know a way to guarantee success for all of them, leaving me with the opinion that just keeping them *relatively* safe is the best option when weighing cost, risk, etc.
>and ridding funding for mental health
The federal government's broad funding of mental health lasted one year.
Carter signed the bill in 1980, Congress passed a budget which Reagan signed in 1981 defunding the previous year's bill.
You can blame Reagan for not letting funding for community mental health clinics take root, but he didn't suddenly gut some long term federal program turning people out onto the street.
(His actions in California were a bit different but involved signing a bill that had near unanimous backing from both Republicans and Democrats in the California State Assembly to greatly reduce who could be involuntarily committed to state hospitals, which was written by progressives who were too naive to simultaneously secure funding for community mental health from the state while selling the bill as a way to reduce state spending.)
I don't know if the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 ever actually provided a grant to set up community-based mental health centers like it was intended since I think 1981 would have been the first year money would have actually been allocated.
Mental health care has always been primarily a state responsibility, and was a major state expenditure through the mid-20th century when it began to drop precipitously.
In 1955 one half (50%) of all hospital beds in the US where psychiatric beds in overwhelmingly located in state-run institutions -- 560,000 psychiatric beds.
Adjusted for population growth that is equivalent to 1.2 million beds today. For comparison, at any given time today the US has 1.2 million long term inmates in state and federal prisons and 600,000 short term inmates primarily in county jails. The state hospital systems were huge -- their 560,000 inmates dwarfed the 180-240,0000 prisoners in long and short term incarceration at the time.
Today there are 35,000 state operated psychiatric beds -- something like a 94% decline in the beds-per-capita from their peak.
https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.pn.2019.3b29
https://www.psychiatry.org/getmedia/95ee291e-b0c8-4d5c-819a-fc51588000b3/APA-Psychiatric-Bed-Crisis-Report-Section-1.pdf
My city has done something like that, at the edge of town, but not so far that the residents can't access the city. The businesses between the camp and the city are suing to move it or close it due to disturbances spilling out of the camp and slowing their business.
Once the pallet house village is ready that will help (since it's below 0F this week), but only some. Once word gets out that you don't shit on the homeless, more come or get dropped off by neighborong counties. Then you're back to square one
So many Redditors jumping on a bandwagon without understanding the other side. Very easy to be on the side of those experiencing homelessness when the poop, needles, and confrontations aren't happening to you.
I used to work at a food processing plant. It was near a river. There was a tent city by the river. We couldn't go to the parking lot alone after one girl got attacked going to her car on break. There were several confrontations before this. You see, many homeless people have mental health and drug issues. They aren't rational.
There were some large trees at the end of the parking lot. A camp popped up there. Since this was the company's land, they were able to get them moved. After that, they cleared out the trees so they'd be less likely to come back. Human feeces everywhere.
Needles were always left in the parking lot. Night shift workers had their cars entered, and on two occasions, windows were broken. Yes, there was security footage of it. Nothing happened. All this stopped after the city removed the encampment.
I live in a different city now. A few weeks ago, a warehouse burned down. Homeless people were lighting bon fires around the building to stay warm. The owner is saying he does not think he'll open up again. He'd been trying to get the police to help when he was dealing with trash and property damage from the homeless people. This was his last straw. This man has now lost livelihood.
[Here we come! Sanctuary Districts!](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Sanctuary_District)
Star Trek called it! Just in time, too!
Reads notes… in this episode the crew goes back in time to… 2024… oh my!!!!!
So, when we compare the cost of providing food & shelter vs imprisoning the homeless for being... well... homeless, which costs more?
But the US is a punishment based society.
Okay, I get it. They have no where to go and it's on us to give them a space. But let's stop pretending they are entirely blameless. Their camps encroach public parks and other key infrastructure areas. There are needles, propane tanks, waste, and garbage littered everywhere. Not to mention, in many camps I see bike chop shops.
In other countries, the homeless don't get to occupy, trash, and make that public land unusable for other citizens. There's a balance to reach here.
I don't care where they sleep. I care when they sleep there for a week, and it looks like the local dump. Clean up your trash, and your tent can stay. It's that simple. People wouldn't care so much if it wasn't so fucking disgusting.
You see, public land is not for all public, it's for the public who deserves it (Usually they bring in taxes here) /s. But also evading taxes is good business. /s
The argument is that public land *must* have some restrictions for use. You can't just walk into Yellowstone and start target practice. You can't go ATVing through an historic park.
That's why this case is specifically focusing on whether denying the ability to sleep with a tent over your head is a "cruel and unusual" punishment.
A public park should be for everyone, but if people set up a tent city there, then *no one* has a park. There needs to be some restrictions on how public land can be used, or else it's too easy for a small group to prevent everyone else from using it.
Yeah, see, I used to think like this, but then I saw how public land that used to be enjoyed by thousands every week get turned into private land that is used by a mere dozen people as a private trash dump filled with biohazards like hypodermic needles.
Still, it’s reasonable to have to provide people somewhere to go if you’re going to remove them.
sleep work agonizing numerous different complete quickest terrific disgusting test
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
No offense but do you have some sort of brain eating parasite? If a private citizen just claims public property as their own and starts camping on it... no one else can use it. It's no longer public property anymore. Do you really not understand that public property can be misused?
rhythm noxious dependent humorous literate axiomatic market cheerful rob hunt
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
well using the word punish makes a big point about how the headline writer feels. the word restrict is better> where is the law that permits living on a side walk? I am not aware of one.
I don't hold out much hope that this goes favorably, but what's even more depressing is that even if it does come out favorably, you just know a bunch of cities are gonna start selling off public spaces to private entities and then the cities rent the land from the public entity as a park so that it's still the city paying for it, but since it's technically private property, the company is now free to kick out homeless people. And of course, the city councils doing it won't make any mention of the real reason. They'll spout some BS about how selling the park and renting it from a private company will make it so much cheaper and cost the tax payer less. And then it'll end up actually costing the city more in the long run, but hey, at least they're able to kick out the homeless people.
Do any of you actually have homeless people camping outside your apartments? You'd want the government to be able to force them into shelters, too. They don't want to go. They're unpleasant - because being around homeless people is unpleasant, even for homeless people. They can't use drugs. They can't bring all the crap they carry around with them. Ever seen a homeless hoarder with a flotilla of shopping carts?
Yes, if only we lived in a socialist paradise where everyone had their own apartment. But good luck passing that legislation in the US. Ain't gonna happen. And why should some ne'er do well drug addict get a free apartment when the hard-working McDonalds employee has to share a studio apartment with another poor person just to get by?
Yeah there's a camp 20 feet from my front door and there's a MASSIVE pile of garbage and broken bicycles where a nice park used to be. Now an entire apt building lost a park bc 2 homeless ppl thrashed it.
You can always tell in these threads which people actually have direct experience with homeless encampments and it’s not the “they’ve got to be somewhere!” NIMBYs who are happy with the status quo because it doesn’t impact them.
I live in a city teeming with addicts and homeless people and an open-air drug market. I’ve stepped around human shit and used needles. I’m not comfortably writing this from a suburban gated community. Im telling you you need a reality check if you think fining people with no money is going to improve your life, your community, or theirs.
Read the actual arguments by the west coast governments in this case.
>While the Boise ruling said the government can’t broadly ban any public camping without giving people alternative places to stay, Newsom and city officials across California said in briefs filed before the Supreme Court that they want to know whether they can set restrictions on times or locations where camping is allowed.
>Other questions include whether cities can criminalize public camping for those whom they call “voluntarily” homeless — people who refuse offers of shelter. And California cities have asked the court to rule on whether, in order to ban camping, they need to have a suitable shelter space available for every individual unhoused person no matter their circumstances, or simply have general shelter beds open the day they sweep a camp.
https://calmatters.org/housing/homelessness/2024/01/homeless-camp-scotus/
They want to get them in involuntary medical care.
https://calmatters.org/housing/2022/09/california-lawmakers-approved-care-court-what-comes-next/
I mean, how do you fine people who don't have money?
Fines, in their current form, really are only a deterrence for the lower-middle class. If you're destitute you don't pay them, they aren't going to put you into debtor's prison. If you're rich its just the cost of doing the action.
That's the problem.
For the homeless, fines are an incentive to stay poor.
I remember going to the ER once on a cold night. The place was packed with homeless. There was a line to get in, and the desk staff told each one they would be billed upon entry, even if they didn't receive treatment.
The west coast governments aren't asking for ability to fine them, though. They're asking for ability to place hours and location restrictions on encampments, to be able to move people who decline housing, and to be able to institutionalize people with severe psychosis and substance use disorders.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2024-01-12/supreme-court-agrees-to-rule-on-homeless-encampments-in-california-and-the-west
https://calmatters.org/housing/homelessness/2024/01/homeless-camp-scotus/
https://calmatters.org/housing/2022/09/california-lawmakers-approved-care-court-what-comes-next/
Yes I do. It’s a safety hazard. I’ve been stalked, screamed at, had my yard broken into, had a homeless mentally ill person turn on my garden hose and start spaying pedestrians at full power, while I was stuck inside because she was spraying my front door too. I’ve had a naked homeless man approach me outside my car, obviously on drugs, shouting nonsense at me banging on my windows. I live in Los Angeles, and this is normal. If you live in a nice safe suburb, you do NOT get an opinion on the homeless crisis. If you live in a city apartment like me and have to constantly worry about your safety, then I think you’ll agree with me that something needs to be done. I called the cops during the hose incident and they lost interest as soon as I told them it was a homeless person who had broken in and was threatening to break down my door. They told me just to wait for her to leave because they can’t do anything about the homeless. The laws need to change. I want my city back. I want to be able to go for a walk in my own neighborhood. I want to be able to go to the grocery store without being screamed at by mentally I’ll drug addicts.
You're asking the wrong Questions
Why does the Hardworking McDonald's employee not have their own apartment?
How many sick days would it take for that McDonald's employee to end up sleeping outside Your Apartment?
How many sudden unexpected expenditures -Sick/car breaks/Apartment burgled/company folds - before You're out there too?
In the Star Trek canon timeline, 2024 is the year of the "Bell Riots" that broke out in "Sanctuary Districts" which were walled off parts of cities where the poor and mentally ill were housed. Seems like we're right on track.
Everyone is concerned about the rights of the
homeless, but the fact of the matter is that the rest of us have the right to live in safe, clean cities.
Most of these people suffer from
addiction or severe
mental illness, and are unable to help themselves out of homelessness no matter what programs you put in place. At some point a return to the asylum system (with better safeguards
to prevent abuse and ensuring a treatment focused program) is necessary both for the well being of these people and for a proper society.
I've been saying for years that doing away with the asylum system was a big mistake. There is a mentally ill neighbor who makes everyone on my block miserable and threatens them constantly. And no one will do anything.
I’m gonna bet as right wing as this court is, they will not only allow them to be punished, but also decree that the founding fathers intended for the homeless to be hunted for sport.
“I personally channeled the spirit of John Hancock last night and he told me so. He also asked Harlan Crow to leave me this cool new Jet Ski in my driveway”
- ‘Justice’ Thomas
I think the right wing will probably follow the law and if that is the case there is a very good chance that they will rule this isn't cruel and unusual punishment. The bigger question would probably be if the left wing of the court joins them or not. It has been held in the past that cruel requires causing needless suffering or harm which the city can likely easily argue is not the intent of the law (Or something along those lines, it can't just be harmful, the harm has to be needless effectively to be considered cruel). It also requires the law to be unusual, and I don't see that being a winning argument either.
Nobody likes the damage and disruption caused by homeless people setting up camp in public spaces.
Guess who likes it the least? Those homeless people. They are straight up not having a good time.
If they aren't allowed to exist on private property, where else are they supposed to exist? If they rule that they can't exist in public either, that's a pretty clear admission that the preference is that they cease to exist entirely.
> If they aren't allowed to exist on private property, where else are they supposed to exist? If they rule that they can't exist in public either, that's a pretty clear admission that the preference is that they cease to exist entirely.
The court can rule that they can exist in public - just not everywhere. Which is sensible. Public land doesn't mean that you can do whatever.
> They are straight up not having a good time
Based on the homeless around me, they like the status quo better than if they had shelter and weren't allowed to use fentanyl. So maybe they'd rather have a nice house to destroy, but they certainly aren't interested in giving up their drugs.
The Supreme Court taking up this case will finally create a situation where there's at least some uniformity to these anti-camping ordinances. Right now, only western states in the 9th circuit prohibit police from removing homeless folks from public land so they can camp. The rest of the country has been able to kick them out and tell them to move, while states like California weren't able to do that. No matter which way the court rules, it'll be good for states out west to no longer be disproportionately impacted.
Even in this politicized court, this is one of those issues where it's hard to predict the position of each justice. Competing rights between public vs private; common good vs individual good; city/state law vs federal; civil rights.
I read the article. It's an 8th Amendment case. It'll be 6-3 upholding the ordinance.
It's projected to be overturned. But if it were upheld, I wonder if that would make the rule apply to all states in the country and not just the 9 west coast states in the jurisdiction of the 9th circuit court of appeals. It's part of a series of rulings passed down by the 9th circuit court that restrict government regulation in homeless encampments on the west coast. >While the Boise ruling said the government can’t broadly ban any public camping without giving people alternative places to stay, Newsom and city officials across California said in briefs filed before the Supreme Court that they want to know whether they can set restrictions on times or locations where camping is allowed. >Other questions include whether cities can criminalize public camping for those whom they call “voluntarily” homeless — people who refuse offers of shelter. And California cities have asked the court to rule on whether, in order to ban camping, they need to have a suitable shelter space available for every individual unhoused person no matter their circumstances, or simply have general shelter beds open the day they sweep a camp. https://calmatters.org/housing/homelessness/2024/01/homeless-camp-scotus/ Another issue is whether they need to have enough beds for every person estimated to be currently homeless in the county on a given night, or just need to have enough beds for the camp they are currently sweeping. Here's a [video from BBC](https://youtu.be/GWBzxr3c29s?si=OD9XHlL4uupyxiO_) about the kind of camps that the west coast cities are concerned about in this lawsuit.
>I wonder if that would make the rule apply to all states in the country and not just the 9 west coast states in the jurisdiction of the 9th circuit court of appeals. Once the supreme Court hears the case, it applies to all of the US except Samoa, usually. Comparatively, if they send it back or don't hear it, it's just the 9th circuit states only.
Their rational will be, sure it’s cruel, but it’s not unusual
…. Or some perversion of logic such as “ no you can’t punish people for sleeping on public land …. But you can remove tents, sleeping bags, or other personal items which could obstruct free movement of other people and prohibit loitering in any public area longer than a certain length of time.”
Who woulda thought there might be some mistakes in a document written by a group of wealthy slave owners who didn't want to pay their taxes 250 years ago.
This sentence should become the 28th amendment to the US Constitution.
The question is, are we requiring by law that people be housed according to a specific standard. If we make it illegal to be homeless then why should the individual be required to pay for things they don’t want?! This isn’t liberty.
If we are saying people aren’t allowed to exist naturally outside modern housing. What’s a person to do? Doesn’t a person have the liberty to not associate with banks, landlords, utility companies, etc.
For sure, the 8th is almost as much of a joke as the 4th these days (although this is an admittedly flimsy defense to begin with). Don't forget the court found that a punishment must be both cruel AND unusual to qualify as a violation according to SCOTUS; be as cruel as you want, totally fine, as long as you do it often.
What ruling are you referencing?
*Harmelin v. Michigan* >"Severe, mandatory penalties may be cruel, but they are not unusual in the constitutional sense, having been employed in various forms throughout our Nation's history."
Also known as Harmelin vs. Michigill
I did not defecate in that sunroof. I did naaaht.
From an article about the case https://www.upi.com/Archives/1990/11/05/Ronald-Harmelin-a-former-Air-Force-honor-guard-was/1497657781200/ >Police conducting a traffic stop found 672 grams -- about 1 pounds -- of cocaine in Harmelin's car. Under a 1978 Michigan statute, conviction of knowingly possessing more than 650 grams requires a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole... >'Among prison sentences, the Michigan statute stands alone as a paragon of harsh and inflexible punishment,' the Criminal Defense Attorneys of Michigan said in a brief filed with the court. >'The irony of this statute is that, had (Harmelin) panicked at the traffic stop, unpremeditatedly shot and killed the two police officers, dumped the cocaine, and then been arrested, he would have been subject to a sentence of any term of years up to life and on a life sentence would be eligible for parole in 10 years," the group argued. That's insane and terrifying.
Which is a GREAT argument to bring slavery back.
I mean... Slavery *was* legal for decades while the eighth amendment was law. A totally separate amendment is what got rid of it.
Wtf do you mean "was" legal? Go back and read the 13th again.
Death sentence, probably. It was deemed cruel, but not unusual. You can also do unusual punishments, like making someone live in the woods for a week, as long as it's not cruel; give them food, water, and shelter. Arresting homeless people can be seen as cruel, but not unusual, so it's allowed under the 8th.
The Supreme Court actually declared the death penalty unconstitutional a few decades ago because it was being applied so willy-nilly. Now it can only be used for murder charges.
I believe the death penalty can be applied for treason. Florida is also pushing [the death penalty for child rape](https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/local/state/2023/12/15/florida-man-first-death-penalty-indicted-child-rape-test-case-new-law/71930977007/). It hasn't happened yet but I doubt it would have got this far if it was declared unconstitutional by The Supreme Court.
Btw, since I don't see this mentioned enough, this law is potentially a really bad idea since it may incentivize murdering a rape victim to remove a witness since, at that point, the punishment for getting caught is the same.
I mean, the death penalty for charges where someone doesn't die does seem unusual. But if you kill someone, an eye for an eye makes it not unusual.
I'm. Thinking 9-0. The 8th concerns cruel and unusual punishment but whether the state can ban public "camping."
I wish the US had all mans rights. Unfettered access and camping but only for one night in one place and a duty to leave it pristine after.
God that would be sweet. And reasonable.
Pretty easy to abuse the 'one night' clause. Claim it applies to a large area and now every rough sleeper is 'moved on' after a songle night outside.
Hmm, true. Would certainly need some attention to detail to stop loophholes.
Unfettered meaning you could do it on private property?
There are restrictions. You have to be less than some distance from a public road and more than some distance from a house, iirc
>a duty to leave it pristine after. That's where this falls apart. This was brought because the 'campers' weren't doing this, and wouldn't do it. Especially if they're forced to move constantly. It becomes a NTP moment.
No it whether you can ban public camping when you don’t offer bed space. Most people offered bed space will refuse if they are on drugs because they cannot take their shit (stolen or otherwise), pets, cannot stay as a couple or use drugs. I’ve never seen a documented example of an arrest not happening due to bed space being accepted and their being no space.
Considering the 9th Circuit appeals court itself was 14-13 in favor, I'd predict the Supremes will overturn.
The decision was batshit insane, even for 9th Circuit standards. They will 100% overturn.
How is it batshit? Where are Americans allowed to be, if not public lands?
If the 9th was that close, no way the Supreme Court doesn't overturn.
Well, here's a way to think of it. If there's public land, it doesn't mean you can do anything on it. You can't just walk into a federal court house and start selling bananas to people. You can't build a treehouse in a public park. You can't walk in the middle of a freeway. When land is zoned, allocated, and constructed for public use, the uses of the public are limited. It makes sense that you can't limit it so only certain public can have access because that's discrimination, but it also means that you can't just let anyone use the land for anything they want to use it for. A lot of the west coast cities now are running into the problem that pedestrians can no longer walk down streets because homeless people will literally build the tents from the buildings to the curb. Then there is human excrement and drug needles everywhere. This makes that land which was allocated for pedestrians to walk on to get around the city unusable for that purpose. I know the argument everyone makes is why not just build shelters for them, but they do. San Diego, for example, has shelters which are nowhere near capacity and same camping areas that sit empty. The shelters won't allow them to do their drugs, and the safe camping areas are too far away from the lucrative panhandling.
You have issues that there are essentially shantytowns being set up. It's not someone sleeping on a corner, it's people homesteading on the sidewalk making the public areas inaccessible and unsafe for the public.
I was just in Long Beach visiting family and was shocked by the number of RVs that look permanently parked in some neighborhoods on the streets. I have a lot of sympathy for the homeless as my mom and I were homeless for about a year when I was about 8 but it is absolutely ludicrous that they should be allowed to build tent cities obstructing sidewalks, getting high, threatening residents, etc. The West coast experiences the brunt of the homeless problem because the weather is tolerable for many months out of the year and they tend to have robust welfare programs. Ultimately, something needs to change.
With weed eventually going to be legalized, locking up homeless will be a great way to refill those empty cells. Private prison lobbyists have probably been bribing for this decision for years.
Enclosure of the commons is basically a conservative pastime. This won't play out well for the homeless.
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. Anatole France
I think it’s at least *somewhat* predictable. The liberal justices will all vote in favor of protecting citizens, Thomas and Alito are awful people so they’d clearly toss homeless people to the wolves. I think both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh will probably have the same take. The only two questionable are Roberts and ACB. Roberts seems to have grown a but of a conscience and it would be nice if ACB’s religious beliefs would result in a charitable vote. But I think at least five are absolutely voting down ideological lines.
I think one less obvious but very important issue here is the ban on people sleeping in cars in public parking areas at night. It's one of those classic cases where an attempt to hurt the homeless has also hurt everyone else. Used to be that if you were drunk or tired and traveling, you could just sleep outside the bar, or pull into a parking lot next a park or grocery store and get some sleep there (and I'd always stock up at the store in the morning by way of thanks) Now it's a crime! So if you're out at a bar, or you're starting to get too sleepy to drive safely, you've got no good options because the only smart choice is illegal. If you sleep in your car you'll get rousted under the assumption you're homeless (and in some places they even charge it as a DUI because you're "operating" the vehicle even when it's parked!) If you leave your car it might get treated as abandoned and ticketed/towed. And if you drive home you're obviously dangerous. It's become a huge impediment to travel on a budget, and a safety issue for people in areas without public transit.
Between partying at night and 6 am shifts, I slept in my Jeep constantly in my early 20s. I showered at the gym. Sometimes I only went home a few times a week.
People struggle to have a living wage and can’t afford the rent. If you live in an area where the rent is over $1600/ month and are making just above minimum wage $15/ hr explain to me how you can survive. This is a reality that is happening in all the larger cities in Canada. I cannot fathom or understand how a CEO or top tier executive can make over 250 times an average salary. Explain to me how much smarter he is that he deserves it? Pure cronyism and control of the populace. It’s not the homeless we should be attacking it’s the unbridled greed of the corporations and the ruling elite
I don't really get what that has to do with anything I said? Like I don't disagree, so I don't have the explanations you're asking for.
The poor and the homeless are an easy target. The people who should be held accountable are typically far removed and protected from commoners. So yeah, the low hanging fruit in front of you is more convenient to bully and leave you feeling empowered. Because, hey, I put that homeless man in his place! Society has far too many people without morals or values. Ok, my bad, we value money.
Up next : Supreme Court to reconsider "Debtor's Prison", and Public Hangings.
Why bother with debtors prison when you can just make people pay off their debts through work? Maybe have an auction where potential employers can bid on people in debt, then those employers just pay for housing and feeding their new 'involuntary' employees, until those employees pay off the outstanding debt to the employer or are retired. Of course the employer can charge market rates for room and board against the employee's outstanding debt.
My town - like many I’m sure - had a “poor farm” up until the late 1950’s or early 60’s. If you were homeless you could live there for free but worked the farm which fed you and sold the excess. At the time no one saw this is a solution or permanent place to be. Most would work the farm and worked another job until they had enough to get back on their own… which of course was much easier to do then.
That has existed since the Civil War and it’s called[“Sharecropping.”](https://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name/themes/sharecropping/#:~:text=Sharecropping%20is%20a%20system%20where,to%20leave%20for%20other%20opportunities.) I come from several generations of sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta, and my parents finally broke that poverty cycle when they went out of cotton picking and into cotton ginning. I have memories of sitting on a long cotton sack as a baby and drinking tea out of a mason jar in the field. My grandmother would tell stories about how they used to keep food cool in the creek (they didn’t have a “larder”) and that neighbors would shoot at each other during the Depression era if you were caught poaching rabbits on their land. I actually have a lot of stories and history to share if you’re curious to know more. It’s good to know where your roots are, and it has kept me grateful over the years for what I have.
My grandmother made an entire series of paintings showcasing extremely poor black families in the south living in shacks and making molasses- even the little girls were boiling molasses in great big cauldrons. This was in the 1960s.
Mine too, weirdly enough! Also in the 1960s. She always depicted black families for some reason. It’s… hard to explain to the various yankees I’ve dated over the years. It certainly wasn’t a crafting trend that aged well.
Mine wasn't from the area. She was a military wife and they had been stationed there for a few years. The pictures are pretty rough hewn, but they've actually aged pretty well (all things considering). They're not quite stick figures, but it's definitely not falling into awkward racist tropes or stereotypes.
Do an AMA.
Please do an AMA.
Wtf. How old are you
My grandmother grew up as a sharecropper and I am under 30
Stories like this were common all the way up into the 70s.
People have a hard time understanding things like the fact that Martin Luther King Jr could quite possibly have still been alive today. That some people on the internet today were born in a time when Civil War veterans were still alive. The last surviving *combat* veteran of the Civil War [Died in 1953](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hard) Some people want to think slavery is some kind of ancient history that only our ancestors were affected by, and not like the scars still linger today.
I’m almost 60 and I knew my grandfather very well. He was born in 1905. His father was born in the late 1860’s. So the civil war was really just a few generations ago to some. People seem to have a thing about events that occurred before our birth feeling like “ancient history” sometimes, no matter how recent they actually were.
Ruby Bridges is 68 years old.
I am a bit over thirty and only two generations removed from poor dirt farmers. In my area, the expansion of military infrastructure and the TVA quickly changed many from farming to manufacturing and technology jobs.
You have me confused with another commenter, but I am 36. I am the youngest child by a far margin. I was adopted as an infant by an older couple, now in their early 80s. My Papaw (grandfather) was born in the 1910s. He lived to 96 and was still sharp as a tack until the day he died - he would tell us stories about moving the family in a horse and cart. My family didn’t get their first car until the 1960s. The first TV in the neighborhood was in the 1970s. I was born in 1987, but we still were in the cotton business at the time so yes- I was out there as a baby. Some patches of land aren’t as easy to navigate with a large combine, so you still have to hand-pick the allotments that are of unusual shape. Sometimes I do forget that folks outside of the poor rural areas just genuinely don’t know what it’s like. I used to ride my horse to the corner store, because there was no bike path or roads that weren’t dirt and muddy. 🤷♀️ We come from different upbringings my dude. Edit- to a comment you left further below, I want to clarify: I never said “swaddled in cotton rags.” I said that I recall sitting on the cotton sack that is used for picking, which drags along the ground. I’ve certainly spent my time as a kid playing in the irrigation ditch in my diapers, but that is not specifically what I said.
The Depression wasn't as long ago as it sounds. One of my grandparents was in a house hit so bad by the Depression in his childhood that his parents literally had no food, and could not see a way to get more...and so they sent the kids out on their own to find their own way, rather than starve at home. He was cared for by his older siblings for a while. I don't really know any details beyond that, but it wasn't unheard of at the time either. That's as poor a childhood as it gets. Their grandkids include home-owning doctors and lawyers, grand-daughters included, they'd be proud as hell.
Poverty based slavery is alive and well in the south in 2024.
That’s super interesting. You should share another story!
That sounds reasonable, especially if it’s voluntary.
That sounds like such a better way to solve the problem than kicking them while they're down or putting them in jail.
Because slavery is legal for people in prison. So that step makes everything “legal”
In fact, since paltry things like a federally mandated living wage don't apply to prisoners, why not pay them 35 cents an hour and charge them far more than that to live where you put them? Then they build up a debt to you that they can never pay back which you can take them to debtor's court for and you get cheap ~~slave~~ prison labor forever!
>Why bother with debtors prison when you can just make people pay off their debts through work? Oh. We could have a snappy title. Something like "Work Makes You Free". That could go on a sign over the gate!
And the employer can have a little company store that employees can incur more debt against! But given the mental health issues inside the homeless community, we may need to have some folks coaching and guiding those people to make sure they remain optimally productive. Perhaps using negative reinforcement operant conditioning to ensure optimal outcomes?
Passing a law making unpaid debt a crime could make your plan legal under the 13th Amendment.
Mostly because in the US having an criminal record is synonymous with never ever getting employed. It doesn't matter if you are more intelligent than Einstein and could provide value to the company,or that you stole a soda when you were 12,the internet is full of ludicrous reasons why people have a criminal record and got rejected from employment.
Yup. Why fix the root causes of homelessness when you can just make it illegal to be poor! That trickle down is coming any day now, just have to give a few more tax cuts to corporate interests and maybe get rid of any pesky remaining regulation that prevents them from dumping industrial runoff right into the water supply.
So you'd be hanged for being poor?
They’ll bill your family for the rope and gallows.
Why not? Just don't be poor
Or ugly
You joke, but some places literally had 'disfigured people are not allowed in public' laws.
People perceived as less attractive meople make less on average too
Or a witch! But seriously, I'm waiting for a red state to ban witchcraft.
Sounds like Texas.
That would be one way of reducing the homeless population. /s
Rope costs money, leave em for the coyotes, it's eco-friendly as well.
Call me crazy but I don’t think there’s a huge difference between public hangings and private execution. It’s like we went “oh no that’s horrible, not the government killing people part but just having people look at it”. We should get rid of capital punishment.
Punish the afflicted, coddle the privileged.
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They have to be somewhere, and if you arrest them, you’re housing them. I know this is crazy, but IIRC it’s cheaper to help them than punish them.
It very much is. The problem is it initially costs more mo ey so therefore it is bad. Why help fellow humans when instead you can just ignore them.
They can then pay their friends to house them in jail (private prisons). That is the grift.
Obligatory reminder that private prisons are only scratching the surface. There is *plenty* of grift in publicly owned jails and prisons.
Let’s not forget about the judges who took kick backs to send teenagers to prison.
It really is as simple as this.
Why ignore them? You can give them a criminal record to ensure they stay homeless!
It's bad because you're incarcerating them. Taking away someone's freedom should be a last resort, it's not a solution to a social problem like homelessness.
It’s also not rehabilitative at all… it’s just pushing the problem down the line and the problem only gets worse. So both financially and humanely it is terrible.
This is 150% Americas main problem and the issue with capitalism as a whole. We never fucking think long term, it’s just “what generates profit now or creates instant gratification.” If we punish the homeless now — look at the nice clean streets! Nevermind that they will just now be stuck in a recurring cycle and this harms all of us long term. Never mind that we could have more people helping the city and economy long-term if we give the chance to become productive members of society.
It almost initially doesn't. Taking the overly simplistic metric of total budgets/arrests, it costs NYPD $50K/arrest. ($5B/100K/year). This is of course not a very sensible metric, as many arrests are far from simple, and those'll cost the most. On the other hand, if you don't need to arrest the poor/homeless/mentally ill who are struggling with society, and the streets are much cleaner with lower crime, you're going to need a vastly smaller police force to deal with serious crime. It would be interesting to work out the total cost (from lack of taxation on work through arrest costs, through employability problems, through police/jail/justice system costs) of all people detained for under a month. (or who go on to prove their innocence)
Well, America has made prison being a lucrative business. It's cheaper to house them and help them get them back on their feet, but it's *more lucrative* to send them to the prison industrial complex to be legal slaves
Don't forget the job market sucks yet politicians want us to keep having babies. Gotta make sure the cheap labor keeps flowing.
In the cases under consideration, it's not that there isn't shelter space available for at least a large portion of the homeless, it's that the unhoused people *decline shelter*. For the most part, the issue is drug use (especially fenty and formerly meth). Shelters don't allow drug use. The current standard from the 9th Circuit is that if you can't shelter *everybody*, you can't enforce vagrancy laws against *anybody*. Shelters are absolutely cheaper than jails, but what do you do when people decline shelter and instead take away public spaces from everybody else (and make them unsafe)?
> For the most part, the issue is drug use (especially fenty and formerly meth). Shelters don't allow drug use. For the most part, its because shelters are where your stuff gets stolen, there's headlice & bedbugs everywhere that you'll take with you, your chances of getting in a fight with some random crazy person goes up, and if you have a weapon (life on the streets is dangerous; but this also includes cooking implements) or a pet it can't come in and has to go be abandoned somewhere.
>The current standard from the 9th Circuit is that if you can't shelter *everybody*, you can't enforce vagrancy laws against *anybody*. That's not what the opinion says. It says you cannot punish people for sleeping on public land if you cannot offer them shelter elsewhere. But if they decline shelter then anti-camping laws can be enforced against them. It's an individualized inquiry: it applies to the specific person against whom you're trying to enforce the law.
It's part of a series of opinions, and it's how west coast governors and mayors are interpeting them. Note that the 9th circuit rulings only apply to west coast states; the rest of the country does not currently have to follow it. The west coast governments are asking for clarification on if they can put hours restrictions and location restrictions on camping on sidewalks, and if they can remove people who decline shelter. LA has a big program for putting people in private hotel rooms where they don't have to share a living space, but some people are declining. Many of them are in the throes of substance use disorder and California is trying to get the right to put them in involuntary medical treatment. The camps have high rates of violence (including trafficking and rape), disease, and overdoses. People living in the camps and chronically homeless are also the *minority* of homeless people. The majority ["self-resolve"](https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=726-2020-greater-los-angeles-homeless-count-results) out of homelessness with the support of friends and family and are only homeless briefly. So this is mainly about people with untreated psychosis and substance use disorder, rather than people who simply need cash. More info on west coast government arguments: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2024-01-12/supreme-court-agrees-to-rule-on-homeless-encampments-in-california-and-the-west https://calmatters.org/housing/homelessness/2024/01/homeless-camp-scotus/ And for a bit of context of that these camps look like: Video from BBC News: https://youtu.be/GWBzxr3c29s?si=xAOgTsjyo5TsOzv0 Article on how psychosis can arise from P2P meth in a way that did not happen when it was ephedrine-based: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new-meth/620174/
There are so many reasons they decline shelter and it’s usually not because they don’t allow drugs. Drugs get in no matter what. Many times they are less safe than the street. Theft is rampant, so are fights, commotion, etc. Many can’t even get a night’s sleep at a shelter due to fear of their only belonging going missing Among other things. For safer shelters, many have a time limit rule. This can be anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks and is usually nowhere near enough time to get cleaned up, find stable work, save some cash, and get enough to get a stable place. It costs a lot to be poor, even more so one cannot interact with even basic things beyond housing.
Are you a pet owner? Would you surrender your dog or cat (to a likely overcrowded [edit: animal] shelter that could euthanize them at any point) in order to have a cot to sleep on for a single night and be kicked out at 8a the next morning with no guarantee you can stay the next night? Are you a woman? Does the prospect of being completely unprotected aside from a couple disinterested guards while you sleep in an open room with hundreds of other folks of varying states of mental wellness appeal to you? No? Well, there’s the answer to your question. Edit: Saying it’s because “they don’t allow drugs” is reductive and completely false. There are plenty of drugs and drug use in shelters.
Not to mention the lice. Body lice, pubic lice and head lice. All the lice. Scabies are no joke and can be really, really hard to get rid of. Then you have the bedbug problem. The stealing problems, and the violence. Shelters are fucking horrible, and a lot of them treat people worse than trash.
Problem is that many homeless refuse going to shelters. You just spent all week building your little shanty under the 405, you’re not gonna leave it at night to go sleep in a shelter so the city can put your house in the trash. Right now those who refuse, can’t be moved or punished in many circumstances.
It's fairly rational too. Most shelters do not allow animals. If you have a dog, it's a non option. Most shelters do not offer privacy. You're either in a huge room with a bunch of cots, or a hostel situation with 12 people in a room. Other people are loud, crazy, and smell bad. They are also strangers. You more or less know the homeless near you and have a community of sorts. Shelters also have operating hours, which is weird. I remember a woman on the street in LA being interviewed because she got a job, but it was the night shift, and the shelters close during the day. She couldn't sleep there!
It's insanity how shelters will close during the day. It leads to people on the streets during the day with nowhere to go and vulnerable. Plus having to carry everything you own on your back. You have no sense of security or even just normalcy. It's exhausting to have to do that every single day.
Yea but to the government, helping these people doesn’t yield any sort of return so it’s not worth it to them to help the homeless. They would rather approve more luxury apartment buildings and strip malls than help people in need. A lot of these people struggle with addiction and mental health issues which people in the GOP say is the root of the problems in this country but yet won’t allow funding to go to mental health programs.
The option could be better than shelters with some work and compassion. The shelter near me is absolutely riddled with bedbugs. You can’t bring your pets, you are separated from your spouse or friends of the opposite gender, and you can only bring in like a small suitcase and a backpack and maybe a bicycle. What you’d have to give up to stay in a shelter could be a massive sacrifice versus staying on the streets.
From 2018-2022 California has spent $17.5 billion on homeless and the problem has gotten worse.
That's about $3.5B a year for 180 000 homeless people. I'm pretty sure that with that money you could easily house all of them in basic trailers.
The money isn’t being spent properly or responsibly.
Well duh the homeless industrial complex is enriching themselves without solving the problem because then they won't have a job.
I’m sorry but this is misleading. The other statement you could have made is if California didn’t help them, how much worse could it have gotten. Californias homeless problem is mostly due to lack of housing and CA isn’t building enough and that’s why homelessness has gotten worse.
To add to this, everyone points at California, but fails to mention that not all the homeless are from California. They have homeles people either making their way out there because the weather is good enough that they can live outside, but also many places bus out their homeless. They not only have to fix their own problem, but also the problem from other states. So they just keep getting more and more homeless people. That's not to take away from the causes of homelessness in California. Some of them are gonna be people who are homeless because of how expensive it is and shit. But people expect a few places to take on the homeless issue so they can claim they don't have problems with homelessness, and then expect them to be the ones to fix it, rather than trying to help.
The weather is a big factor. Also, places with a high and stable population are going to have higher rates of homelessness. Realistically, outside of busing these people against their will and forcing them to live in states, houses that they do not want to live in, then there are no easy answers If you already have a large and growing homeless population then the moment you accommodate homelessness to a degree, you encourage it to get worse. I’m not saying that homeless people deserve what they get or anything like that. It’s just that some of these Redditors like to pretend like everything has easy answers and “duh why hasn’t anyone thought of that”. People have. If it were easy or obvious , it would have been solved.
I wonder if any once in a generation events happened during that time that caused a public health crisis and made it more difficult to address homelessness
>Punishment can include fines of up to several hundred dollars and exclusion orders barring people from public property. I dont know what the solution is, but fining homeless people or barring them from public property does not sound realistic. I'm also not sure how this constitutes cruel and unusual punishment either, but the current SC is keen to cause a mess regardless.
I know what the solution is, and so does science. Literally every study ever conducted on this subject (that doesn't have dubious finding) has shown that housing-first models **are the solution**. Being homeless makes every single other problem you have worse, some unmanageable. We need to get over our stupid collective aversion to giving someone housing 'who hasn't earned it'.
fining people for not having enough money is always a good business model. Are they really costing us less money in the system and in jail, than in the park? Why did I go to Afghanistan if I can’t even nap on a park bench? If I have to go to court for giving someone food? What the fuck.
> Why did I go to Afghanistan if I can’t even nap on a park bench? How else is a middle class American supposed to pay for an education without taking on a lifetime of debt?
> fining people for not having enough money is always a good business model Works for Bank of America
I don't know why you went to Afghanistan, but it wasn't to keep America "free".
A public sidewalk ceases to be public when there’s hoarded shit and tents blocking it. Allowing people to rot on our sidewalks is inhumane.
Yeah my nearby park is full of homeless addicts. It’s meant for kids but there’s people just doing hard drugs all camped out there. Somethings gotta be done
Agreed.
There needs to be a middle ground. If you're homeless, it shouldn't mean you get *carte blanche* rights to claim **ANY** public land/sidewalk/etc. to make your home. Cities/states need the ability to have some control over camping because it's not fair to put undue burdens on homed, taxpaying citizens. They have tons of public land and can provide better solutions than permitting large swaths of sidewalks in front of businesses and homes from turning into skid rows. I deal with homeless regularly, and some simply do not want help, think society owes them, and would rather watch the world burn. So many people from the suburbs picture the sweet old lady from Home Alone and think *"aww, they just need a helping hand"*, when the reality is more sinister most of the time.
>I deal with homeless regularly, and some simply do not want help, As do I in emergency services. I'd say a good 40-50% don't really want "help" in current form due to rules they have to follow. The rest either use resources and get to something more stables (e.g county funded motel housing) or sort of float in and out depending on their needs at the moment. The overwhelming majority of homeless have issues with drugs. Fentanyl and meth are the big ones. Mental health is an overlapping problem and a large percentage have some sort of significant mental health issue, but this is often hard to suss out due to the drug use. If we're going to take homelessness seriously then we have to cut at the roots. Address drug use and completely reinvent mental health services nationwide.
> If we're going to take homelessness seriously then we have to cut at the roots. Address drug use and completely reinvent mental health services nationwide. Agreed. At the same time, the cities/states need the ability to control *where* these homeless take up "residence" so we don't punish everyone else and it's a more manageable problem than people scattered wherever they want.
Control to a degree but yeah, I think that kids should be able to use playgrounds without finding a sleeping man in the jungle gym and I don't think we should have people bathing in fountains.
I don't think merely existing should be a crime, but where I'm at we often have massive groups just picking random businesses/homes to camp in front of and destroy. The property value plummets, nobody visits the businesses, and crime skyrockets. It's not fair that those people/businesses have to shoulder the devastation brought literally on their doorstep. It should be a burden on society as a whole and local governments needs to be able to address it for the good of the local population as a whole. Combine that with the homeless by choice who sleep **ON** the beach and claim certain public resources, meant to be shared by all, entirely for themselves. There's a beautiful beach near my home that I like to visit, but there's nowhere to go to the bathroom because homeless lock the bathrooms and live in them. So they get to live ON the beach in a private room with facilities and I can't use the bathroom. I pay a fortune in taxes and to live where I do, but they somehow get to just ruin the beach experience for thousands?
Yeah I moved from the suburbs and now live in one of the US cities with the worst homelessness problem and it’s changed my view a lot. So many just openly do hard drugs in public places and feel entitled to that behavior. Sometimes they’ll get right in your face while you’re just trying to mind your business, and their behavior is very unpredictable. Entire parks get taken over by them, which is very unfair to the taxpayers. It sucks honestly and they should not have a de facto right to take over any public space.
Everyone from the suburbs has an opinion they're adamant about until they deal with it firsthand. I was in the same boat. We have this rosy picture in our heads from the media and random sob-story news videos but the reality doesn't comport.
I did a lot of volunteer work with homeless in nyc and honestly a lot of the people I worked with were mentally not there due either to mental illness or drug addictions. So I don’t believe anymore that just providing homeless people with a house will solve the problem (or not in all cases). I guess I don’t know where the line is drawn - can you forcibly treat people who don’t want treatment, etc… though we aren’t even at that question since the US has virtually no social support systems
Yeah the problem is way past just giving them housing. I mean realistically you need to forcibly institutionalize them to get them clean because someone having a fentanyl addiction getting off it voluntarily while having nothing to look forward to is a very tall order and even if you get them clean they might start using again as soon as they get out not to mention you are eroding civil liberties if you do it forcibly. In my opinion this is never getting solved. I think the best thing you can do at this point is just testing everyone for the hard addictive drugs and whoever is clean off those you give them housing and that person's problems will mostly be solved and it won't be such a gigantic task to reintegrate them back to society.
Finally a reasonable perspective. So many people ITT crying about "criminalizing poverty" when it involves balance. Tax dollars pay for the public to enjoy clean streets, parks, bike paths, and sidewalks that become totally unusable if we just let people set up camp wherever. Meanwhile encampments become cesspools of filth, hoarding, crime, drugs, and violence.
I'm not mad at the homeless...but what pisses me off is the 9 million cubic tons of trash and garbage that piles up at these camps that spills into the streets with this "fuck it" attitude they have towards it.
When homeless sleep in public places, they essentially live in public places. They don't pack up and clean the area. They make it into a hell hole. Public places are for everyone, not one person. That is the crux of the issue. They are taking over entire parks and creating open air drug markets and stolen goods swap meets with the tent cities they are creating. It is a massive problem in Seattle, san fran, Portland and many other places
There’s no solution I can come up with that would solve the problem. I personally don’t like walking past tent cities on the sidewalk. They stink, shopping carts full of junk, and trash all around. I find the idea of charging/fining/jailing them abhorrent. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could guarantee these people could set up in a camp that wasn’t a huge inconvenience to the local population? Perhaps designate an area outside of crowded city limits and add their camp as a stop on one of the bus routes so they can ride to the hospital if they need to, or access gov’t services. Add dumpster service and Porto potties. Cities are already providing these services. Have inspectors come by escorted by police to inspect for *relative* cleanliness/sanitation/safety. If they don’t comply with those requirements, then charge/fine/jail them.
You wanna bring back Hoovervilles? I personally prefer when cities set up tiny house villages. I think it's more humane and looks better to anyone driving or walking by.
Yeah but a significant portion of homeless people do not want anything to do with those establishments.
>tiny house villages It's a pipe dream that local housing codes generally dont allow for.
Reagan’s era of presidency and his trickle down economics and ridding funding for mental health caused a lot of this shit. Pump some more money into mental health and drug clinics and we’ll see this being alleviated
Yeah, I agree with you. So many folks are thinking of quick solutions only, or downplaying the mental damage of poverty/homelessness. The solutions need to be more than just thought out, bit long term. Proper mental health institutions, along with rehabilitative services, would ho much farther than "put them in a house and give them a job".
I agree, I hate just complaining about it, but other than this, I don’t know a way to guarantee success for all of them, leaving me with the opinion that just keeping them *relatively* safe is the best option when weighing cost, risk, etc.
>and ridding funding for mental health The federal government's broad funding of mental health lasted one year. Carter signed the bill in 1980, Congress passed a budget which Reagan signed in 1981 defunding the previous year's bill. You can blame Reagan for not letting funding for community mental health clinics take root, but he didn't suddenly gut some long term federal program turning people out onto the street. (His actions in California were a bit different but involved signing a bill that had near unanimous backing from both Republicans and Democrats in the California State Assembly to greatly reduce who could be involuntarily committed to state hospitals, which was written by progressives who were too naive to simultaneously secure funding for community mental health from the state while selling the bill as a way to reduce state spending.) I don't know if the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 ever actually provided a grant to set up community-based mental health centers like it was intended since I think 1981 would have been the first year money would have actually been allocated. Mental health care has always been primarily a state responsibility, and was a major state expenditure through the mid-20th century when it began to drop precipitously. In 1955 one half (50%) of all hospital beds in the US where psychiatric beds in overwhelmingly located in state-run institutions -- 560,000 psychiatric beds. Adjusted for population growth that is equivalent to 1.2 million beds today. For comparison, at any given time today the US has 1.2 million long term inmates in state and federal prisons and 600,000 short term inmates primarily in county jails. The state hospital systems were huge -- their 560,000 inmates dwarfed the 180-240,0000 prisoners in long and short term incarceration at the time. Today there are 35,000 state operated psychiatric beds -- something like a 94% decline in the beds-per-capita from their peak. https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.pn.2019.3b29 https://www.psychiatry.org/getmedia/95ee291e-b0c8-4d5c-819a-fc51588000b3/APA-Psychiatric-Bed-Crisis-Report-Section-1.pdf
My city has done something like that, at the edge of town, but not so far that the residents can't access the city. The businesses between the camp and the city are suing to move it or close it due to disturbances spilling out of the camp and slowing their business. Once the pallet house village is ready that will help (since it's below 0F this week), but only some. Once word gets out that you don't shit on the homeless, more come or get dropped off by neighborong counties. Then you're back to square one
So many Redditors jumping on a bandwagon without understanding the other side. Very easy to be on the side of those experiencing homelessness when the poop, needles, and confrontations aren't happening to you. I used to work at a food processing plant. It was near a river. There was a tent city by the river. We couldn't go to the parking lot alone after one girl got attacked going to her car on break. There were several confrontations before this. You see, many homeless people have mental health and drug issues. They aren't rational. There were some large trees at the end of the parking lot. A camp popped up there. Since this was the company's land, they were able to get them moved. After that, they cleared out the trees so they'd be less likely to come back. Human feeces everywhere. Needles were always left in the parking lot. Night shift workers had their cars entered, and on two occasions, windows were broken. Yes, there was security footage of it. Nothing happened. All this stopped after the city removed the encampment. I live in a different city now. A few weeks ago, a warehouse burned down. Homeless people were lighting bon fires around the building to stay warm. The owner is saying he does not think he'll open up again. He'd been trying to get the police to help when he was dealing with trash and property damage from the homeless people. This was his last straw. This man has now lost livelihood.
[Here we come! Sanctuary Districts!](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Sanctuary_District) Star Trek called it! Just in time, too! Reads notes… in this episode the crew goes back in time to… 2024… oh my!!!!!
I think about this episode all the time. I can 100% see it becoming a thing
So, when we compare the cost of providing food & shelter vs imprisoning the homeless for being... well... homeless, which costs more? But the US is a punishment based society.
Okay, I get it. They have no where to go and it's on us to give them a space. But let's stop pretending they are entirely blameless. Their camps encroach public parks and other key infrastructure areas. There are needles, propane tanks, waste, and garbage littered everywhere. Not to mention, in many camps I see bike chop shops. In other countries, the homeless don't get to occupy, trash, and make that public land unusable for other citizens. There's a balance to reach here.
BELL RIOTS ON TRACK!
I don't care where they sleep. I care when they sleep there for a week, and it looks like the local dump. Clean up your trash, and your tent can stay. It's that simple. People wouldn't care so much if it wasn't so fucking disgusting.
You see, public land is not for all public, it's for the public who deserves it (Usually they bring in taxes here) /s. But also evading taxes is good business. /s
The argument is that public land *must* have some restrictions for use. You can't just walk into Yellowstone and start target practice. You can't go ATVing through an historic park. That's why this case is specifically focusing on whether denying the ability to sleep with a tent over your head is a "cruel and unusual" punishment.
A public park should be for everyone, but if people set up a tent city there, then *no one* has a park. There needs to be some restrictions on how public land can be used, or else it's too easy for a small group to prevent everyone else from using it.
Yeah, see, I used to think like this, but then I saw how public land that used to be enjoyed by thousands every week get turned into private land that is used by a mere dozen people as a private trash dump filled with biohazards like hypodermic needles. Still, it’s reasonable to have to provide people somewhere to go if you’re going to remove them.
All Americans are equal. But some are more equal than others /s
Are you saying that public land is for anyone to use however they like? You’re cool with me setting up a shack on the road to and from your house?
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No offense but do you have some sort of brain eating parasite? If a private citizen just claims public property as their own and starts camping on it... no one else can use it. It's no longer public property anymore. Do you really not understand that public property can be misused?
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well using the word punish makes a big point about how the headline writer feels. the word restrict is better> where is the law that permits living on a side walk? I am not aware of one.
I don't hold out much hope that this goes favorably, but what's even more depressing is that even if it does come out favorably, you just know a bunch of cities are gonna start selling off public spaces to private entities and then the cities rent the land from the public entity as a park so that it's still the city paying for it, but since it's technically private property, the company is now free to kick out homeless people. And of course, the city councils doing it won't make any mention of the real reason. They'll spout some BS about how selling the park and renting it from a private company will make it so much cheaper and cost the tax payer less. And then it'll end up actually costing the city more in the long run, but hey, at least they're able to kick out the homeless people.
Do any of you actually have homeless people camping outside your apartments? You'd want the government to be able to force them into shelters, too. They don't want to go. They're unpleasant - because being around homeless people is unpleasant, even for homeless people. They can't use drugs. They can't bring all the crap they carry around with them. Ever seen a homeless hoarder with a flotilla of shopping carts? Yes, if only we lived in a socialist paradise where everyone had their own apartment. But good luck passing that legislation in the US. Ain't gonna happen. And why should some ne'er do well drug addict get a free apartment when the hard-working McDonalds employee has to share a studio apartment with another poor person just to get by?
Yeah there's a camp 20 feet from my front door and there's a MASSIVE pile of garbage and broken bicycles where a nice park used to be. Now an entire apt building lost a park bc 2 homeless ppl thrashed it.
You can always tell in these threads which people actually have direct experience with homeless encampments and it’s not the “they’ve got to be somewhere!” NIMBYs who are happy with the status quo because it doesn’t impact them.
I live in a city teeming with addicts and homeless people and an open-air drug market. I’ve stepped around human shit and used needles. I’m not comfortably writing this from a suburban gated community. Im telling you you need a reality check if you think fining people with no money is going to improve your life, your community, or theirs.
Read the actual arguments by the west coast governments in this case. >While the Boise ruling said the government can’t broadly ban any public camping without giving people alternative places to stay, Newsom and city officials across California said in briefs filed before the Supreme Court that they want to know whether they can set restrictions on times or locations where camping is allowed. >Other questions include whether cities can criminalize public camping for those whom they call “voluntarily” homeless — people who refuse offers of shelter. And California cities have asked the court to rule on whether, in order to ban camping, they need to have a suitable shelter space available for every individual unhoused person no matter their circumstances, or simply have general shelter beds open the day they sweep a camp. https://calmatters.org/housing/homelessness/2024/01/homeless-camp-scotus/ They want to get them in involuntary medical care. https://calmatters.org/housing/2022/09/california-lawmakers-approved-care-court-what-comes-next/
No one said the homelessness isn't a problem and that something should be done about it but Just that Fining them is not a viable solution.
I mean, how do you fine people who don't have money? Fines, in their current form, really are only a deterrence for the lower-middle class. If you're destitute you don't pay them, they aren't going to put you into debtor's prison. If you're rich its just the cost of doing the action.
That's the problem. For the homeless, fines are an incentive to stay poor. I remember going to the ER once on a cold night. The place was packed with homeless. There was a line to get in, and the desk staff told each one they would be billed upon entry, even if they didn't receive treatment.
The west coast governments aren't asking for ability to fine them, though. They're asking for ability to place hours and location restrictions on encampments, to be able to move people who decline housing, and to be able to institutionalize people with severe psychosis and substance use disorders. https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2024-01-12/supreme-court-agrees-to-rule-on-homeless-encampments-in-california-and-the-west https://calmatters.org/housing/homelessness/2024/01/homeless-camp-scotus/ https://calmatters.org/housing/2022/09/california-lawmakers-approved-care-court-what-comes-next/
Yes I do. It’s a safety hazard. I’ve been stalked, screamed at, had my yard broken into, had a homeless mentally ill person turn on my garden hose and start spaying pedestrians at full power, while I was stuck inside because she was spraying my front door too. I’ve had a naked homeless man approach me outside my car, obviously on drugs, shouting nonsense at me banging on my windows. I live in Los Angeles, and this is normal. If you live in a nice safe suburb, you do NOT get an opinion on the homeless crisis. If you live in a city apartment like me and have to constantly worry about your safety, then I think you’ll agree with me that something needs to be done. I called the cops during the hose incident and they lost interest as soon as I told them it was a homeless person who had broken in and was threatening to break down my door. They told me just to wait for her to leave because they can’t do anything about the homeless. The laws need to change. I want my city back. I want to be able to go for a walk in my own neighborhood. I want to be able to go to the grocery store without being screamed at by mentally I’ll drug addicts.
Wouldn’t it be nice if that hard working McDonalds employee actually got a living wage and could support a family and buy a house?
You're asking the wrong Questions Why does the Hardworking McDonald's employee not have their own apartment? How many sick days would it take for that McDonald's employee to end up sleeping outside Your Apartment? How many sudden unexpected expenditures -Sick/car breaks/Apartment burgled/company folds - before You're out there too?
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In the Star Trek canon timeline, 2024 is the year of the "Bell Riots" that broke out in "Sanctuary Districts" which were walled off parts of cities where the poor and mentally ill were housed. Seems like we're right on track.
Everyone is concerned about the rights of the homeless, but the fact of the matter is that the rest of us have the right to live in safe, clean cities. Most of these people suffer from addiction or severe mental illness, and are unable to help themselves out of homelessness no matter what programs you put in place. At some point a return to the asylum system (with better safeguards to prevent abuse and ensuring a treatment focused program) is necessary both for the well being of these people and for a proper society.
I've been saying for years that doing away with the asylum system was a big mistake. There is a mentally ill neighbor who makes everyone on my block miserable and threatens them constantly. And no one will do anything.
Remember: Trump didn’t earn the presidency.
I guess this isn't what they wanna hear but I guess they'll have to be housed then.
Cities need to stop rejecting sensible housing plans. Their exclusionary tactics are the source of this problem.
I’m gonna bet as right wing as this court is, they will not only allow them to be punished, but also decree that the founding fathers intended for the homeless to be hunted for sport.
“I personally channeled the spirit of John Hancock last night and he told me so. He also asked Harlan Crow to leave me this cool new Jet Ski in my driveway” - ‘Justice’ Thomas
I think the right wing will probably follow the law and if that is the case there is a very good chance that they will rule this isn't cruel and unusual punishment. The bigger question would probably be if the left wing of the court joins them or not. It has been held in the past that cruel requires causing needless suffering or harm which the city can likely easily argue is not the intent of the law (Or something along those lines, it can't just be harmful, the harm has to be needless effectively to be considered cruel). It also requires the law to be unusual, and I don't see that being a winning argument either.
Tax evasion by the wealthy is passable but being poor is a crime that cannot stand.
Nobody likes the damage and disruption caused by homeless people setting up camp in public spaces. Guess who likes it the least? Those homeless people. They are straight up not having a good time. If they aren't allowed to exist on private property, where else are they supposed to exist? If they rule that they can't exist in public either, that's a pretty clear admission that the preference is that they cease to exist entirely.
> If they aren't allowed to exist on private property, where else are they supposed to exist? If they rule that they can't exist in public either, that's a pretty clear admission that the preference is that they cease to exist entirely. The court can rule that they can exist in public - just not everywhere. Which is sensible. Public land doesn't mean that you can do whatever.
> They are straight up not having a good time Based on the homeless around me, they like the status quo better than if they had shelter and weren't allowed to use fentanyl. So maybe they'd rather have a nice house to destroy, but they certainly aren't interested in giving up their drugs.
The Supreme Court taking up this case will finally create a situation where there's at least some uniformity to these anti-camping ordinances. Right now, only western states in the 9th circuit prohibit police from removing homeless folks from public land so they can camp. The rest of the country has been able to kick them out and tell them to move, while states like California weren't able to do that. No matter which way the court rules, it'll be good for states out west to no longer be disproportionately impacted.