> Plaintiffs insist the Court should extend Robinson to prohibit the enforcement of laws that proscribe certain acts that are in some sense “involuntary,” because some homeless individuals cannot help but do what the law forbids. The Ninth Circuit pursued this line of thinking below and in Martin, but this Court already rejected it in Powell v. Texas. In Powell, the Court confronted a defendant who had been convicted under a Texas statute making it a crime to “get drunk or be found in a state of intoxication in any public place.” Like the plaintiffs here, Powell argued that his drunkenness was an “involuntary” byproduct of his status as an alcoholic. The Court did not agree that Texas’s law effectively criminalized Powell’s status as an alcoholic... This case is no different.
If you told me this quote was from an Onion article, I'd say "well obviously."
I feel like the outcome of this is unilaterally bad.
Most homeless are elderly and mentally Ill. The solutions are institutionalization and retirement housing/pensions but no state did this after Reagan and instead made homelessness an issue to ignore.
Faced with the ability to legally incarcerate nearly 600,000 people, states likely won't hesitate to do just that without a second thought.
For a country that prides itself on freedom and liberty, having the largest prison population in the world is surely a damning indictment of the conviction.
> Most homeless are elderly and mentally Ill. The solutions are institutionalization and retirement housing/pensions but no state did this after Reagan and instead made homelessness an issue to ignore.
Most homeless people are working age and homeless under a year. Costs of living are the strongest correlates of homelessness rates.
>Costs of living are the strongest correlates of homelessness rates.
I suspect this is strongly skewed by half of all homeless living in California where they seem to be mostly from out of state and coming here for the weather, lenient drug laws, and many social benefits. You can just ask them and they will tell you--most of them are from red states where they'd be locked up for what they do here. As such, they came to California because they can get away with it and it's the easiest place to survive on the bottom as a drug user since you have temperate weather and lots of social programs giving you money, clothes, tends, and food. Why be homeless in California rather than move somewhere you can actually afford? It's the drug laws like Prop 47 that decriminalized hard drugs and theft up to $950 per incident (not even per day).
You seem to be under an assumption that unhoused people are making detailed plans to travel cross-country to do drugs in California. As opposed to the reality that most unhoused Americans migrate here because our laws and weather are a bit less cruel.
Seems fairly obvious that outlawing sleeping on the streets will make homelessness itself a defacto crime, which will ultimately benefit the prison industrial complex by providing a whole new stream of nearly free labor, thanks to the 13th Amendment. Tack on the housing swiftly becoming unaffordable almost anywhere in the country (major metropolitan areas especially) and you’ve got a recipe for dystopian profits.
I became homeless in SF 6 years ago, probably would have been out after like a year if not for pandemic. Same program over and over, feels like I'm about to get off the street again 3 hours outside SF. Housing here is so reasonable. $1,000 for a 2 bedroom right in town. Plenty of employment. Not saying where I am until I'm off the street. But I've been working on survival guides and my 'Homeless Guy' vlog videos are popping my channel off.
We really need to get homeless people distributed to small towns. Centralizing them in big cities is so backwards. There are indeed 2+ strata of homeless as another has mentioned, I'd call them addicts and life happened-ers. I'm the latter, life happened and pandemic and more life happenings made it into a complex/non-linear situation.
Literally been working 6 years to get like $20k to fix my life with. Used to be a software engineer, got into a legal dispute and that messed me up bad, gotta get into housing before I try to fix that and then try to get back into tech. Not interested in free jobs that I don't go through the normal pipeline for, happy enough working as a dish washer / grocery clerk for the past several years. I'm not available by email or phone, too difficult to communicate logistics. Can't wait to get back to meaningful tech work tho.
I'm one case, the life happened-ers are all different. But I think getting them to small towns to rebuild is definitely the way. Really easy for me to save money and nobody knows I'm homeless, just very very slow. But it's fair and sustainable.
It's amazing how people who don't know homelessness talk about it. I never see my own experiences reflected in these hot takes. Something about the topic breaks people's brains. I suspect people are simply terrified of homelessness and will do anything to distance themselves from the reality that there but for the grace of God they go.
it's the 80/20 rule man. the minority of homeless that are drug addicts or violently mentally ill leave such a sour taste in the average person's mouth that a going nuclear on the homeless policy seems like a great idea. The majority of homeless that are only a very minor inconvenience or are no problem at all are completely overshadowed by the minority screaming on the street, taking dumps in alleys (or in the middle of the street!), and causing other major problems pretty much continuously.
You can't really blame people for their hot takes either, when you're on month 32+ of powerwashing your alley and front sidewalk every day to try and get a few hours of the place not smelling like poorly maintained urinals/horse stables your overton window starts to shift to making more extreme solutions acceptable just because you are so supremely fed up with how things are and your sympathy was all used up years ago.
There is a huge bias against homeless populations throughout the states. They’ve been depicted and demonized unilaterally as drug users and law breakers/undesirables but that couldn’t be farther from the truth for many many people. Homelessness is the direct result of a societal failure to secure our populations basic needs and that means we are all to blame to a certain extent. They are people from our communities that we’ve sidelined and largely ignored but nobody likes to think they’re the bad guy.
Your california bias is showing. Seattle and Vancouver BC (and Vancouver WA, the northern suburb of Portland OR, along with Portland) have even worse homeless issues than the bay area, and they don't have favorable climates for the unhoused. Try almost 300 days a year of rain, and winter temperatures that often dip to the 20s. Your arguments would imply that New Mexico, a poor blue state with a favorable south-western climate should be full of homeless people
It's the other factors you mention, and "Cascadia/The PNW" has more in common with each other than it does with the rest of its countries (This is bioregionalism and it's strong out here). The only reason you'd know you went to Canada when you arrived at Vancouver BC from WA state is that you'll see a lot of tim hortons around. SF bay area and Vancouver BC have the same exact problems despite wildly different weather. It's culture and laws.
Honestly, our culture and laws which allow this to happen are super based and awesome, and having a large homeless population as externalities of booming economies, and lax drug laws is worth it. The rest of the world wishes it was the PNW, and being the "Prussia of the USA" is the position that California will naturally find itself in as a result of its northern half having the same factors which drive it to have so many unhoused.
Never do this. No one cares what you "suspect" but never bothered to investigate. And you're completely incorrect. People study these things. You could just read what they wrote.
> most of them are from red states where they'd be locked up for what they do here. As such, they came to California because they can get away with it and it's the easiest place to survive
This sounds eerily similar to the origin story of the early American colonies
> Faced with the ability to legally incarcerate nearly 600,000 people, states likely won't hesitate to do just that without a second thought.
Prisoners cost ~ $40k a year annually in taxes. It's actually cheaper to house them - so I don't think states are going to be gung-ho about doing either.
There's plenty of political support across the US to imprison people, no matter how much it costs. There's almost none to build people housing, even if it's cheap. People are illogical like that.
Incarceration being expensive is a feature. The drive comes from a profit motive in private prison concerns.
Sending the poor to use expensive military kit on vulnerable foreign populations and arresting the non compliant is much more profitable than just providing every one of them with shelter and job opportunities. Society doesn't optimize globally for good will, it optimizes locally for profit.
> Prisoners cost ~ $40k a year annually in taxes. It's actually cheaper to house them - so I don't think states are going to be gung-ho about doing either.
San Jose CA has a homeless budget of approximately $120M per year. It has 500 beds. That's $240k/bed-year.
Of course, a lot of that $120M does NOT go to those beds, and there are some other facilities, but that $120M isn't all of the spending either.
The racket is that many prisions are private for-profit companies. So this is a way to funnel taxpayer money into those corporations. Who in turn are friends and campaign contributors of the politicians who push for more people into prisions. So it all feeds itself and the cost doesn't matter. The more cost, the better (to them).
What is the relevant population of prisoners who could be in a profit system? I have seen that only a small single digit percentage of prisons are for profit. It would be great to estimate the scale of those so I understand if this is a base case or edge.
There's much more profit in incarceration in general than just running private prisons. The whole system, much like the industrial military complex, is geared towards spending tax money on expensive contracts. There are no private wars out there (yet), it doesn't make defense any less profitable.
I don't think they're going to hunt them down like the gestapo
If the homeless just kept to themselves and weren't actively causing public disturbances in places like SF, this wouldn't be an issue
And it's an issue that affects some municipalities more than others. If a horde of homeless just show up in SF one day and strain infrastructure, I don't think it's unreasonable for SF to be able to do something about that
>I feel like the outcome of this is unilaterally bad.
As a resident of California, I wholeheartedly disagree. The status quo could not continue. We need law and order. We can't have people just sleeping and camping wherever they want like California has been allowing. Many many public parks and open spaces are now taken over by open drug scenes (homeless camps) where crime thrives.
Agree, and I feel like when people say “sleeping” it sounds innocuous. But what do these people do if they need to go number 2 in the middle of the night? There is a reason we have campsites, sanitation and just basic limits on insane behavior. “Where should they go” is something I hear often. Well, guess what, if we create significant disincentives to just doing whatever you feel like just because, at least some fraction of these people will find somewhere to go, a family member, a shelter, somewhere. And we can build more shelters, sure, but this has gotten out of control.
I don't think it's a good plan, but if you incarcerate the homeless, you're housing them and meeting their basic needs. At least until the prisons become overcrowded.
There's lots of reasons why it's not a good solution, but having encampments in public parks isn't a good solution either.
But I think this ruling allows governments to disrupt encampments without providing shelter or incarceration. Forcing people to disperse from an encampment with nowhere in particular to disperse to, is probably a worse result for the people in the camps, and is likely not to be effective for the communities impacted by the camps; the camps may move around more often, but they'll likely start up again with the same few places in rotation.
But you’re not _just_ housing them, are you? They also end up with criminal records making it harder to get secure jobs and housing in the future. Investing in building more affordable high density housing would be better for the people while costing less money for the taxpayer.
Isn't there a lot of rose-colored glasses around institutionalization of the mentally ill? The reason we got rid of it is because it is essentially imprisonment, with all sorts of abuses and not some sort of all-inclusive luxury resort.
They were absolutely torture palaces for society's undesirables, but that's not why Reagan got rid of them. He just didn't care. The psych ward is perhaps more oppressive than prison. At least in prison, you have an idea when you might get out, forced drugging is minimal, and no one pretends they're doing it for your own good. To hear today's tech workers talk, most would be happy to bring back the torture palaces if it made their commute more comfortable.
I don't really understand how it could be any other way.
If you envision a hypothetical city which has too many unhoused persons relative to the city's financial ability to support those people - then what? The unhoused just die in the street unable to be moved somewhere that has sufficient resources to support them?
I get that there's a lot more nuance to this problem and that the ruling can be abused/used to enforce NIMBYism/jail the unhoused, but, fundamentally, cities have to have the ability to move citizens because the city is aware of its own financial ability to provide support, but the citizens within are allowed to be uninformed.
This is like saying that a company, which is going bankrupt and may close, has the resources to keep all their employees employed and are laying people off because they would rather prioritize something else. It can feel true because there's a lot of complexity to the system, but complex systems can still fail given enough structural instability. At some point tough decisions must be made which feel bad to those impacted and weigh heavily on those enforcing the cuts.
On some level, the answer is likely none because there's not much in it for them. That said, cities declare themselves as "sanctuary cities" well enough so it's not unreasonable to think this could be extended - although immigrants provide more economic benefits than the unhoused.
Still, it doesn't have to be ungrounded in numbers. Take GDP per capita for a city, normalize it by cost of living, and pass a federal law saying cities are only required to support an unhoused population that represents a percentage of the normalized cost burden.
Cities already bus unhoused people to other cities to try and shift the burden of responsibility. We could at least orchestrate the process in a way that fairly divides the economic cost. As it stands, it's just whoever acts faster and with fewer morals benefits and relatively poor areas with desirable outdoor weather shoulder the burden.
It's a myth that homeless people move to better cities. If we could do that, we wouldn't be homeless. People tend to be homeless near the last place they were housed.
No it is not. This is incredibly easy to see by just visiting different cities. Northern cities like chicago and minneapolis have very small homeless populations. Its not because no one in these cities lost their job or because the cities are dealing with homelessness better than west coast cities. The homeless in the these cities leave.
First: the west-coast homeless population is overwhelmingly indigenous, consisting of people who had (and mostly will again) stable housing in the region before experiencing homelessness.
Secondly: the much more salient reason the midwest sees less homelessness is that housing is much, much more affordable here. The homeless in the midwest leave homelessness, for apartments; they don't leave the region to be homeless elsewhere.
Third: there are huge numbers of homeless people in Chicago. Chicago is drastically bigger than Portland or San Francisco, where the homeless problem is more visible. Drive down Chicago Ave through Humboldt Park. People don't erect tent cities in the middle of San Francisco as a political statement; there just isn't anywhere else to put them. Chicago doesn't have that problem.
> Third: there are huge numbers of homeless people in Chicago. Chicago is drastically bigger than Portland or San Francisco, where the homeless problem is more visible. Drive down Chicago Ave through Humboldt Park.
Humboldt has less than 10 homeless people. Its a tiny problem relative to the west coast.
Homelessness that people care about are the drug addicts who can not take care of themselves, these people would be homeless if housing cost $100 a month. Their status has nothing to do with housing costs. These types of homeless in SF are not overwhelmingly indigenous.
That's just obviously not true, regarding Humboldt Park. It's so not true, it's Google Maps not true. "Humboldt Park t-" literally autocompletes to "tent city" in an incognito window for me. And, like, I drive through there a couple times a week and believe my lying eyes.
Regarding the origin of California homeless people, this is an empirically studied question; you don't have to derive your answer from first principles.
Are we better at getting people off the street than California? Indubitably. But the scale of our problem is, if not per-capita identical, then at least comparable, by the numbers.
I walk through humboldt daily. The tent city is 3 tents. People make a big deal of it because our homeless problem is so small compared to the west coasts.
Oh, really? I didn't know that. I lived in a small town in northern Washington state and there were no unhoused people. I assumed it was due to the cold weather making it not very practical. I then moved to California to a similarly sized city (both 30-40k people) and suddenly there were people on the streets. Just anecdotal evidence though
"Indeed, 48% of the unsheltered homeless population is found in California and Florida alone, while just 15% of the United States population lives in these two states. Conventional wisdom among local officials and experts in cities with warm climates is that warm temperatures are major draws for homeless individuals.1
Similarly, research has generally affirmed that homelessness, and particularly the unsheltered type, is more common in warmer areas."
Many people misunderstand what this case was about.
> Homeless need shelter and help. It is inhumane that we let them rot on the streets.
The issue being argued was not that homeless should be able to camp where ever and whenever they want. This issue was that if you don't provide shelter then you cannot kick them out of public spaces.
If that was the law, then it would mean you need to build shelters if you don't want homeless in the streets.
What this new verdict means is:
- You can forcibly remove homeless people who have nowhere else to go
- Thus homelessness can be effectively illegal
- The only realistic solutions now are:
- Put the homeless in prisons
- Move them to cities and towns that don't have the resources to remove them.
I genuinely expect mass arrests and quasi-deportations of the homeless (along the lines of "we won't prosecute you if you take this bus ticket to San Francisco") over the next few months in red states and in red cities in blue states.
The Grant's Pass law provides repeat homeless campers with shelter and keeps them off the streets for up to 30 days per offense.
That's expensive, of course, so cities will have the incentive to do what the city of Chico did when it provided an outdoor shelter facility for the homeless. A district court refused to allow Chico to enforce it's ban on camping even though it had that facility, because it was an outdoor facility not an indoor one. This ruling gives cities the ability to say "you can camp here, not there".
> court rules that it is not cruel or unusual to arrest and jail people for camping in public
It rules that the Eighth Amendment doesn’t substantially restrict what constitutes a crime, just the punishment. (It restricts criminalising status. So the court mostly focussed on whether the law criminalises homelessness, versus specific actions, which it found it does not.)
So let me get this straight... People unable to afford a home, with no communal shelter, are fined for making alternate arrangements. Of course, given that they're already in a bad financial situation, they won't be able to pay the fines. So it's jail time. I guess that's a kind of shelter, but then what happens when the jails become full? Where do the extras go then? And what happens to those released with fresh marks on their record and still no way to afford anything? Maybe start culling the flock? I'm seeing no path forward where any of this makes sense.
In that case, having a record may become more or less normalized it seems. If the conditions are acceptable, then the jails will just become like regular shelters. The only downside is a potential employer would have access to the knowledge that someone got to the point of using one.
This is not about criminalizing homeless. This was San Francisco's position in their brief:
To address the homelessness crisis.” San Francisco Brief 7. The city “uses enforcement of its laws prohibiting camping” not to criminalize homelessness, but “as one important tool among others to encourage individuals experiencing homelessness to accept services and to help ensure safe and accessible sidewalks and public spaces.”
Well, what's the alternative? Do you believe all local laws such as "FooBar park closes at dusk" are federally unconstitutional, and that actually enforcing any of them is "cruel and unusual punishment" against people who desire to camp there overnight?
Remember: It's perfectly possible to say that certain situations are unlawful/unjust/immoral for other reasons, it's not like "I think it violates the 8th Amendment" is the only option.
However, "it violates the 8th Amendment" is was what got argued in the court, and I think the conclusion is reasonable: The entire category of local laws (which are not new) are generally and by default not-against-the-8th.
P.S.: To reiterate, exactly what do you think the "not dumb" result should have been? What sentence of words could the Supreme Court have responded with that would satisfy you while (A) not wildly overstepping their own powers and (B) not upending centuries of other law considered good and (C) not creating massive new problems and loopholes?
Here's a quick "unit test" to apply: Could I steal and eat all the food I want with total impunity, provided I am careful to ensure my wallet is always empty so that paying for it in that moment is never an option?
In this case, an alternative was the city providing a homeless shelter. The only shelter in town required those staying there to participate in religious activities. So the homeless people had to choose between (1) arrest (2) forced religious participation, or (3) leaving town.
> In this case, an alternative was the city providing a homeless shelter.
No, in this [court] case an entirely different question was brought before the judges. "City policy shoulda been this other thing instead" was never on the menu of potential answers.
The Supreme Court is--fortunately, for now--not some sort of King Solomon dictator that can jump the rails from "whose baby is this" to "all babies must be fingerprinted by midwives."
I believe "cruel and unusual" is obviously context dependent and intended to prohibit the government from applying punishments that are technically permissible under the law but which society considers completely unreasonable under the circumstances. The argument that fining a homeless person is not cruel because fining a rich person is not cruel and thus fines can not be cruel is absurd.
Yeah man. Punishing someone for being is poor and living outside of society by making them poorer and pushing them further outside society is cruel and unusual.
The majority’s justification that it is fair because it applies to those whom it will never apply to is particularly craven.
The best solution to homelessness is to crash the housing market so thoroughly that the idea of residential homes as investments becomes anathema for 2 or 3 generations. Then you enact Georgist land policy and loosen zoning and Bob's your uncle.
Because the institutional response was explicitly to backstop housing as an investment instead of as a basic need/resource. If they'd let the banks fail, nationalized the toxic assets that no one else wanted, and wrote off the mortgages as losses, no one in their right mind would have written a new one for years. Which sucks if you make your money off mortgages, but I'm unconvinced that it would have destroyed our ability to build houses.
A bunch of cheap land or vacant homes 3000 miles away aren't going to solve the homeless problem in your city, or any other major urban area. Ultimately people stay where they want to stay, for a variety of reasons.
Yep, fifty vacant houses in and around a tiny losing-10%-population-per-decade 500-pop town in the middle of Wyoming doesn’t help anyone. No jobs, and good luck efficiently delivering public support to the person you stick in that one house with a mold problem and sewage tank that needed to be replaced years ago, a half-mile down a dirt road six miles outside of town. Without a car.
26% is a massive number and more than sufficient for the stereotype to fit. If 26% of x demographic had murdered somebody, a stereotype that x are murderers would be well deserved.
And who's going to rent their property to every homeless person? You? I'm unclear on what the volume of available housing has to do with this. That housing is owned by people who are free to rent it or not rent it as they see fit. Are you saying that the federal government should just confiscate it so it can be given to homeless people free of charge? Or that those owners should be forced to sign leases with homeless people? Who gets to decide which homeless people get which vacant houses?
And a large chunk of the homeless population are drug addicts with serious mental health problems. All the free housing in the world isn't going to help them. So what does an owner forced to rent his property to a homeless person do if that person trashes the place, doesn't pay rent, causes problems in the neighborhood, etc.? Evict them? That just means that some other homeowner is compelled to be a landlord for this person (in your system).
My comment on this is that the statement "just build more homes" is not an effective solution to this problem. We have enough homes. The issue is that as homes are viewed as an investment, rather than as a necessity to live a decent life, they must maintain scarcity. If there is not a scarcity, then it will be created.
Interest rates have tripled, which should have dropped house prices. Construction is faster than it was before the 2007 Housing Crisis. Both of these factors should have drastically reduced housing costs, however, prices are still 40% higher than they were in 2020.
I'm not saying to confiscate homes. I'm not saying to force people to rent out their homes to homeless people.
>A large chunk of homeless people are drug addicts with serious mental health problems.
Only 26% of homeless people abuse drugs. A vast amount of homeless people are veterans who have complex mental health problems from their service in the military, elderly people who are trying to survive off of insufficient SSI payments, or LGBTQ youth who were kicked out of their homes.
This isn't a problem that can be solved with some witty one-sentence solution. This is a problem that takes layers of support systems ranging from health services, to public transportation, to subsidized housing, to job placement programs.
> Construction is faster than it was before the 2007 Housing Crisis. Both of these factors should have drastically reduced housing costs, however, prices are still 40% higher than they were in 2020
You were corrected on this above and chose to repeat it.
Concluding price from supply only is nonsense. In your interval, the population and real incomes rose. They rose faster than new housing formation, particularly in the cities which have a homeless problem.
This is a vacuous argument. The vacant homes are largely either temporary (moving out before prepping to sell) or in the wrong places (no jobs). The homeless need more homes where they live and work (or seek work).
Have you seen the housing market in the past few years? Skyrocketing interest rates and construction levels not seen since before 2007, all which (to any economist who passed ECON 101 would say would lower housing costs) and homes are still 40% more expensive than they were in 2020.
Copying from my other comment. My comment points out the failure of the "just build more homes" idea as a solution for homelessness.
"My comment on this is that the statement "just build more homes" is not an effective solution to this problem. We have enough homes. The issue is that as homes are viewed as an investment, rather than as a necessity to live a decent life, they must maintain scarcity. If there is not a scarcity, then it will be created.
Interest rates have tripled, which should have dropped house prices. Construction is faster than it was before the 2007 Housing Crisis. Both of these factors should have drastically reduced housing costs, however, prices are still 40% higher than they were in 2020.
I'm not saying to confiscate homes. I'm not saying to force people to rent out their homes to homeless people.
>A large chunk of homeless people are drug addicts with serious mental health problems.
Only 26% of homeless people abuse drugs. A vast amount of homeless people are veterans who have complex mental health problems from their service in the military, elderly people who are trying to survive off of insufficient SSI payments, or LGBTQ youth who were kicked out of their homes.
This isn't a problem that can be solved with some witty one-sentence solution. This is a problem that takes layers of support systems ranging from health services, to public transportation, to subsidized housing, to job placement programs."
We don't have enough homes in the right places. That's the point of the report in the article I linked, which lays out the number of homes in the major metro areas that people actually want to live and shows that literally all of them have a shortage.
There are not. The census definition of "vacant" clung to by people pushing this viewpoint includes uninhabitable construction sites that happen to have the doors and windows installed, homes that have already been rented or sold but the new occupant hasn't moved in yet, homes of deceased people still in estate probate, homes being repaired between tenants, and many others. Only about 9% of census-vacant homes are what a normal person thinks of as a "vacant home".
Great, if only 9% of vacant homes are what a normal person would think of as a vacant home, we can still give every homeless person 2 homes each!
The issue has never been housing inventory in an effort to making housing more affordable. If the past 4 years have shown us anything it's that even with skyrocketing interest rates and new construction matching pre-2007 levels, homes are still 40% more expensive than they were in 2020.
> If it is truly de-jure illegal to be poor now, you'd be able to point at a law on the books which says that.
Boise recently had to deal with this.
Passed a law that said it was illegal to sleep on the streets or public property if a shelter bed was available.
Problem? No shelter beds were generally available but two religious shelters said they were "always available", even when they had no actual beds. Ergo, police made arrests because the shelters were available, even if, factually, there wasn't. That the shelters SAID there were was enough for the police to arrest.
Adding to the problem was both of those shelters required both attendance AND participation in multiple religious ceremonies per day as a requisite of you being there, even if there did happen to be a bed.
So now you had a situation where the police were able to arrest homeless for refusing to go to these shelters, which may not have beds available, and that forced religious participation to be there.
That was a law that made it onto the books, until it was rightfully challenged. But the fact it made it to legislation in the first place is problematic.
If you staying in someone's house you generally have to follow their rules. Unless said rules are... over the top. Is attendance and - at least token - participation in religious activity considered over the top? What if it was a case of starvation instead of (or in addition to) the homelessness?
That isn't there case though. You're being subject to arrest for failing to use an available shelter. The religious conditions are a side effect. Similar to how taking a dump is a side effect of eating, and so if you want to avoid taking one, you'd have to avoid eating, but you have to deal with the prospect of death as a consequence. You don't die from not taking a dump (usually), but from not eating.
Well, it turned out it was the case, and as it wound through the appeals process, this was upheld, because when the City knows that this is happening and continues to enforce, it becomes a de facto situation, that the Court specifically called out in their decision:
> A city cannot, via the threat of prosecution, coerce an individual to attend religion-based treatment programs
-- Judge Marsha S. Berzon, for 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
Sure. I don't see a problem if the work is within reasonable parameters. This is a private entity offering use of their property under reasonable terms.
Keep in mind this was also how a lot of jim crow laws worked.
ex. it's illegal to be unemployed (enforced against blacks) where unemployed included self-employment. So now you have a large population that is forced to work for any wage or get throw in prison where they're forced into work detail anyways.
I know you're not actually asking for answer but the US spends trillions of dollars a year supporting homeless and otherwise disadvantaged people. There are public programs that exist solely to provide these people the help they need. In most cities something like half the homeless refuse free shelter.
In most cities, free shelter sucks. It's only available on a day by day basis (sometimes requiring waiting in line in a specific place as late as 7 or 8 pm to know if there will be any beds open), or it has weird hours that get in the way of working schedules, or it requires people to participate in religious activities, or it puts everyone in one big room with no safety measures, or it has no way to store even minimal possessions securely, or it has nowhere to plug in a phone charger, or it has all the spaces to plug in phone chargers in one heap where it's easy for someone to steal a phone as everyone's being made to rush out the door at 7 AM, or it doesn't allow even well-behaved animals, or...
And on top of that, there's almost always a drastic shortage in shelter beds, so even people who jump through all the hoops only have a small chance of getting a spot. For example, Portland here, which is considered pretty homeless-friendly by a lot of people, only has enough shelter beds for about 1/5th of the homeless population.
For a lot of people, even perfectly functional, non-mentally-ill people, this makes it a perfectly logical move to look at shelters as only a measure of last resort and otherwise sleep in a car or find somewhere out of the way that will let them put their energy into trying to improve their situation rather than into trying to satisfy a new shelter's rules every day.
It doesn't technically make being poor illegal. The sad truth is that plenty of people will living on the streets may now be breaking the law simply by having nowhere else to go, but that shit will roll up hill eventually. Courts and jails don't have the capacity to deal with charging everyone in that situation. Either cops will avoid arresting people for it or cities will eventually have to dramatically expand housing options for the homeless.
In the meantime, yeah this is terrible for anyone who is homeless. It could very well do a disservice describing eh ruling as making being poor illegal though. The ruling only covers homeless camps, there are still a ton of poor people who do still have a roof over their heads that aren't breaking the law by being poor.
Something can be illegal even if cops are not resting everyone who does it. That's the worse situation in fact, when it becomes the sole discretion of individual police officers who to punish.
I totally agree. My point, though, was that being poor isn't illegal. The ruling keeps the jurisdictions for camping in public at the city level, it isn't specific to why someone is camping or broadly about being poor.
If cops have to stop enforcing it the laws will eventually be overturned. If cops do enforce it courts and jails will back up, eventually the law would either be dropped or more support would be built out to help those in need.
That's not to say I like the law. I would much prefer it didn't pass, and in general I disagree with a legal system that is focused on punishing citizens rather than helping them.
The point is though that, at least in some jurisdictions, being so poor that you can't afford a house is now effectively illegal. Sure, the same law prevents the rich from camping outside, but that is irrelevant. The relevant thing is that there is no legal way to be homeless in those jurisdictions.
And note that cops don't have to actually arrest people in order to enforce those laws. They can simply prevent them from sleeping, endlessly.
We can agree, though, that the ruling doesn't make being poor illegal though? Right?
I get that you are saying functionally its illegal to be poor, but that isn't actually what the ruling covered.
At least in my opinion, that extrapolation really muddies the water when it isn't necessary. The fact that we have so many homeless people and that courts ruled cities are allowed to ban people from camping outside regardless of situation is bad enough.
No, I think it's important to keep pointing out what this decision was really about. They didn't hear a case about camping outside at night, they explicitly heard a case about making it illegal to be homeless in a jurisdiction. All of the most relevant arguments related specifically to homeless people.
The effect on homeless people is not some unintended consequence of the original law or of the SC's decision. It was explicitly what the whole case was about: homeless people complained that a law forbidding them from sleeping outside in a municipality was effectively punishing them for being homeless, and a federal judge agreed. The SC also agreed, but found that this doesn't violate their constitutional rights, so that it is constitutionally allowed to punish them for being homeless.
This is an exact illustration of the famous satirical quote about the law being equal to all, equally punishing the rich and the poor for sleeping under bridges. Only this time it's not satire, it's the explicit decision of the SC.
You and I clearly read completely different court opinions here.
I see a case where a local government made it illegal to sleep outside and a supreme court decision that says this is within local governments' jurisdiction and doesn't violate any federal laws. It specifically doesn't make being poor illegal, though obviously it will greatly impact the homeless.
Its a huge leap you're making to claim that the law or the ruling makes being poor illegal, and I don't see that claim supported by either the new law or the ruling. I get that you strongly disagree with it and find the law to be immoral, and I totally agree with that. But personal emotion doesn't change the words written down and misrepresenting the law doesn't do anyone any good.
The law sucks, but it doesn't make being poor illegal. Plenty of people who are poor still have a roof over their heads, and there are homeless people who sleep in shelters rather than on the streets. If neither of those are illegal then the law couldn't have made being poor illegal.
You don't need to make the leap to misrepresenting the law to point out how terrible it is. The law as written is garbage.
You're again ignoring the fact that the law was before the Supreme Court specifically because it makes it illegal to be homeless. And the Supreme Court agreed with that, but found that it is not a problem.
I'm not ignoring that, I just don't see being homeless and being poor as equivalent. Would you only consider someone poor if they're living in the street?
I also don't the the bench said it wasn't a problem. As best I understand it the question was related to (a) jurisdiction and (b) whether the local law is legal under our existing federal laws.
The DAs decide whether to pursue a specific case, but it's the police department that starts the case, not the DA. The DA is not out there patrolling the streets finding people in violation and deciding whether to call the cops. The cops patrol, find a person they don't like, take them to the station, and then the DA can decide whether to charge them with a crime or not.
Before this case went to the supreme court, if a city offered someone on the street access to a homeless shelter then they were allowed to force the person to move. It was only when the city did not have shelter space that they were no longer allowed to criminalize the person for existing on public property.
Now the city doesn't even have to offer bed space.
What if just all municipalities forbid homeless encampments? The result of this will be a race to the bottom, as more and more municipalities ban homeless camps, the negative effects will concentrate on fewer and fewer municipalities, making the issue worse and worse. This will in turn drive them to forbid camps as well.
Of course, eventually that will lead to a growing number of people just giving up and either accumulating tickets they will never be able to pay or actively draining city money by spending every other day in jail (which also happens to be temperature-controlled and have free food).
> What if just all municipalities forbid homeless encampments?
If all municipalities did this instantly and provided transportation to the homeless - either unincorporated parts of a state, or jail, most would choose jail. Nobody wants to try to survive in the wilderness.
How is that anyhow helpful? Jail is much worse for the homeless and it's actually much more expensive to society than providing a home. If the goal is harm reduction, provide them with housing and support. The cruelty of the law is the point.
You might not, but nobody? There are those that do. There are even TV shows, multiple reality shows for watching people do just that. It’s not easy living for sure but getting a cabin out in the woods and trying to live off the land is totally a thing people do.
For a real world example, you don’t go to the woods outside of Seattle because there are unhoused people living there and it's dangerous to go there.
Nobody does. Bear Grylls wouldn't be popular if the overwhelming majority of the planet didn't choose lounging on the couch watching TV over survivalist practice.
> but getting a cabin out in the woods and trying to live off the land is totally a thing people do.
And not a realistic option for the homeless unless you can afford land to live on. What kind of bizzaro country do you live in where this is remotely realistic or legal? The real world isn't Minecraft.
Allemansrätten is a Swedish word that means right to roam. What it means, is that as long as you respect nature, you're allowed to enjoy nature by walking, cycling, riding, skiing, camping, etc.
I'm not Swedish but I spent some time there. you can just go camping anywhere, just don't leave trash or mess it up. But the US has untold acres of unpatrolled national parks and private land that nobody is watching. Sure, legally, you can't just live there, but without anybody to enforce it, yeah you can.
If you live on a national park in the United States, whether you are kind to your surroundings or not, you will be arrested once discovered and escorted off the property. Trust me when I say there is no sliding window of self-sufficiency that makes this a legal (let alone feasible) option for America's homeless.
It's genuinely insulting to log onto this website and listen to people repeat travel magazine advice as their solution to homelessness.
You know what all of those shows have in common? The protagonist has thousands or tens of thousands to spend on setting up the basic infrastructure needed.
And they only have to survive three weeks. How is that relevant?
Edit: and looking over some episode summaries, it's not like they reliably came out in great health, despite going in in more or less peak condition. Unless your point was that even short periods of homelessness has severe health risks and consequences?
Article: "The homeless residents said those penalties violated the Eighth Amendment of the US constitution because the city did not have any public shelters."
The shelters are full and other areas are in the same situation. When you see people living on the street that means the system is overloaded. The "visible" homeless are the tip of an enormous iceberg.
> There is a charity run homeless shelter in the town where they were camping on public grounds.
That "charity" is a religious organization which requires all residents to abide by strict "Christian values" including immediate abstinence from all drugs (even nicotine) and sex, attendance to multiple daily sermons, etc. while also working for the organization.
The group filed a brief with the court arguing for the ruling we got, stating that people were choosing to camp on the streets instead of go to the shelter as if that weren't an indictment of their offering that they believe a significant portion of their residents were only there because they would otherwise be arrested and not because it was actually a better choice than being on the street.
It's not "church or jail". The shelter is just one option. They could also crash on a friend's couch, or go somewhere with a shelter that doesn't require religious service.
Or they could just stop being poor and buy a mansion.
No one is sleeping outside because they don't want to sleep on a friend's couch. It's a government ultimatum to force people to attend religious services, plain and simple.
Yes. It is what ultimatum means, because they can no longer flout the law without punishment.
They are "members of the public". That doesn't mean they can unilaterally dictate the laws of society. If they were "the public", then they could just change the law. I wonder why they can't? Because most people don't want anyone setting up their household in a public park.
They weren't unilaterally dictating the laws of society, until 5 hours ago it was the US constitution which said this was the law in this country. 6 people unilaterally dictated the new law of society that enables the mob to ignore the rights of the few.
Believe it or not, but the legitimacy of our institutions aren't in question after a ruling you dislike.
And I will enjoy my park. Maybe the rate at which I have been hearing stories about children getting pricked with dirty needles will lessen with this ruling.
Actually, in Boise, it literally was. If a religious shelter said they had a bed (and one of them said they would "always take someone in", even if they didn't have a bed), it was an arrestable offense to be sleeping on public property.
> They could also crash on a friend's couch
Ahhh, AirBnB for the homeless, of course. Because when you're profoundly troubled by mental illness, or addiction issues, everyone opens their doors and homes to you.
There aren't even nearly enough homeless shelters. That holds the same basically everywhere in the US with a significant homeless population, except for those specific locations with a right to shelter law, like NYC.
> Held: The enforcement of generally applicable laws regulating camping
on public property does not constitute “cruel and unusual punishment”
prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.
In part because the Eighth Amendment “prohibits certain methods a government may impose after a criminal conviction, but it does not ‘impose [any] substantive limits on what conduct a state may criminalise.’”
It would still be a violation to ban "homeless" camps, and the decision was very clear that homelessness is a protected status, but just because you have a protected status does not mean you get to break laws that do not target you.
"Under the city’s laws, it makes no difference whether the charged defendant is homeless, a backpacker on vacation passing through town, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building."
IANAL but I think that's confusing mens rea with something else more like malice.
If someone sees a sign says "Camping prohibited", and they decide to camp there anyway, that's mens rea.
It doesn't depend on whether they had other options, or whether they desired to purposefully harm others, or whether they were very sure they'd be able to avoid harming the grass, etc.
As it is said, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."
I'd check for an uptick in prison related stocks and commodities, except they're buried under the post-debate slump. Maybe in a few days. Supreme Court decisions probably take a few days to filter out to the somewhat less news obsessive parts of society.
> Under the city's laws, it makes no difference whether the charged defendant is currently a person experiencing homelessness, a backpacker on vacation, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building.
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.
Yes and no. They said it’s not cruel and unusual punishment to be fined / spend a few days in jail.
The real issue should have been intent, but the litigants and lower courts didn’t base the case on lack of capacity to comply / lack of mens rea / etc. They wanted a precedent allowing for urban camping even if you’re not homeless.
I'm not sure if the plaintiffs' arguments were quite that bad, since the ruling mentions that they raised questions of capacity and "involuntary" situations, ex:
> Plaintiffs insist the Court should extend Robinson to prohibit the
enforcement of laws that proscribe certain acts that are in some sense
“involuntary,” because some homeless individuals cannot help but do
what the law forbids. [...] this Court already rejected it in Powell v. Texas [where] a defendant who had been convicted under a Texas statute making it a crime to “ ‘get drunk or be found in a
state of intoxication in any public place.’ ” [...] argued that his drunkenness was an “‘involuntary’” byproduct of his status as an alcoholic.
This really makes me sad. I used to struggle with housing and spent time living out of my car. I got lucky and was able to work my way into a tech career over a decade, but it feels like criminalization of hardship is just pulling the rug out from under people that really just need someone to care.
The Court didn't make it illegal for cities to provide services to the homeless. Some, many, (most?) simply find it easier to push homeless around between each other and off into the margins (outside of their municipal boundaries) instead of addressing the issue. The Court isn't a social services agency and rulings shouldn't be made on that basis. Cites, states, and even the federal government have the power to address homelessness. Using homeless camps as a perverse bottom tier safety net isn't a solution and is completely tangential to the legality of regulating their existence. I don't understand this notion that court rulings should be based on social policy instead of Constitutional law.
Once again, governments are not being limited in their ability to go out and provide services.
Probably because it is easier than addressing the issue, since no one has ever really solved the problem of homeless throughout recorded history.
Lots of people claim there are easy solutions, yet not one of them seems to actually work; homelessness exists in every major city today, even the ones where you don't see them as a tourist.
This is paraphrased unironically right there in the majority opinion. "The public-camping laws prohibit actions undertaken by any person, regardless of status."
Yes. Why do many people quote it as if something profound here (there are at least half a dozen of instances of this quote by different authors and some just repeat it in multiple threads)? This is the essential rule of law: nobody is above it. It appears that people posting this quote believe that the law should be different for different people? I mean, the original author was a monarchist and did not believe a democracy was good or just so it makes sense. Are people repeating this also all monarchists who believe the law for different classes should be different or just made up by the Crown for each situation?
Because a hypothetical opposite - “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to use money to improve their dwelling, to purchase unnecessary luxury goods, and to pay for basic goods a rate commensurate with their means” - does not exist. The laws that "nobody is above" punish poverty, but not wealth. That's the distinction.
From what I could understand from your message, you are saying that the law is designed to punish poverty and the actual actions (loitering, theft and harassment) are just excuses? E.g. in the topical case, people would be fine with the encampments on the streets and in the parks if they consisted of rich people? Like rich person shit on one's lawn won't bother anyone, rich people's blood encrusted needles are fine children toys and a rich person tent blocking right of way is an amusement to marvel at?
>E.g. in the topical case, people would be fine with the encampments on the streets and in the parks if they consisted of rich people?
Yes. That's called gentrification. And they don't limit themselves to parks; they'll happily go after your property - not through purchase at a fair price, but through legal maneuvers and political influence that aren't available to people of lesser means. And this is arguably more destructive to the fabric of the existing community than a few tents (whatever you might think of what replaces it).
>Like rich person shit on one's lawn won't bother anyone,
Well, that of their dogs.
>rich people's blood encrusted needles are fine
They get around this by doing blow instead.
>and a rich person tent blocking right of way is an amusement to marvel at?
No, not really. Gentrification is not rich people camping on the streets and parks, look it up.
>Well, that of their dogs.
Well, I am talking about human shit specifically but homeless have dogs too. So people are not bothered with rich people's dog shit? In the same universe where gentrification is when rich people camp on the streets and pass out from drugs?
>They get around this by doing blow instead.
You completely lost me. Are you just playing associations and type whatever first comes into your head? Good luck with that.
>So people are not bothered with rich people's dog shit?
People can't afford to be bothered by rich people's dog shit (which is as bad as people shit, for all intents and purposes), because that would involve passing laws to fine rich people above the "cost of doing business" line and/or taking them to court, both of which are quite expensive ventures.
>Gentrification is not rich people camping on the streets and parks, look it up.
If you don't have the imagination to understand how gentrification could be considered the rich-person equivalent of camping in public places, in that both corrupt existing urban streetscapes to the best of their respective financial abilities, there might not be any reason to continue this conversation.
>You completely lost me.
That much is clear. You seem to be trying really hard to avoid understanding the fairly basic and simple notion that equality under the law is unequal when the laws themselves are. The moral virtue of subjecting everyone to the same standards is undermined by those standards being shaped to punish the likely (immoral) behavior of one group while ignoring the likely (immoral) behavior of another. The only way around this is assuming that rich people just don't do immoral things, which beggars the question; rich people use their money to cast their immoral behavior as moral (or at least amoral). So you end up with this argument, where I say, "Here are the bad things rich people do that are analogous to bad things that poor people do," and you respond, confused, "But those things rich people do aren't all that bad." They'd gotten to you before you'd even known it.
Yes, there are laws about not picking up shit after dogs and they apply to rich people who get ticketed and sued for that, don't use your imagination, use Google to check basic facts about the real world.
No, gentrification is not "equivalent" to camping, look it up.
Laws are unequal by definition, why would anybody had two equal laws? Laws are different and not equal to each other. It's irrelevant to the topic of the discussion where you obviously understand that we do indeed punish actions and not poverty but since you like the quote so much you are desperately trying to move the discussion into the one about how being rich is easy. Yes it is. People would rather be rich than poor. If you spend more time thinking and less time imagining you might stumble upon the casual relationship between doing things that are punished and being poor and doing things that are rewarded and being rich.
Nominally. The magnitude of the fine matters, because the magnitude of the wealth available to pay the fine is notably higher than any given other person also subject to it. Hence the original quote.
>No, gentrification is not "equivalent" to camping
"both corrupt existing urban streetscapes to the best of their respective financial abilities". "Look it up" is not a get-out-of-jail-free card.
This is what I mean when I say that they've already gotten to you, and that you're beggaring the question. The causal relationship between wealth (which is acquired, at best, amorally) and "things that are punished/rewarded" is that wealth allows one to set those rules themselves. Naturally, the wealthy reward their behavior and punish what offends them. This is a disjointing of morality and criminality, per the whims of the rich, which is the entire point of the quote. Meanwhile, there is behavior common to wealth that SHOULD be punished, but isn't.
Can't have a home if you don't have a job. Can't get a job if you're homeless.
It's the year 2024 after the birth of Jesus Christ, mankind has produced more wealth and technology than we ever thought it was possible, meanwhile we're living this miserable life, working these shitty jobs, while less than 1% of the population has more money than they could ever spend.
Capitalism should be left behind, we're ruining the only planet we have. It's a system with a critical bug deep in it's core and it'll never be fixed.
I think its more about regulating where you can do certain things vs making it illegal to exist. For example its illegal to urinate and defecate in public despite these being automatic functions, sometimes involuntary and demanding release right then and there wherever you are. Despite this biological reality, we also understand that there are sanitation issues to allowing the body to relieve itself wherever it happens to be, so we have laws that criminalize public urination or defecation and attempt to direct this behavior towards areas where we can better handle that sanitation issue, and we establish guidelines of what that sanitary environment should be through the building code, and have our sewer departments expand capacity to meet this need.
In shelters the city state or federal government sets up. To me we are essentially hosting a concert with no bathrooms. The answer isn't to let people pee and poop without bathrooms at the concert, the answer is to police that behavior while also providing bathrooms.
Well, most cities with a homeless crisis today don't exactly have the spare jail capacity to actually enforce anything like that, so I think giving some tools where you can be pragmatic about where an issue is presently taking place while you can attempt to solve it on the back end is useful. My city has already passed laws about homeless camps near dangerous intersections for pedestrians who have to step into the street to avoid the camp, laws about not camping near schools or childcare centers, and its done quite a bit to help the average pedestrian in the neighborhood as a result.
I think the most likely "pragmatic tools" that will show up will amount to homeless people being told "take this bus ticket to NYC or San Francisco or we will make your life hell for the next year with maximally unpleasant prosecution".
That's already done to an extent. Other cities in socal have a bit of a history of dumping homeless people into LA city borders. This was just from this past week, the Burbank PD allegedly dumped someone and it was caught on video (1).
Its highly locally dependent. In LA county the jails are pretty full and have about 12000 inmates in the system. There are over 75,000 homeless people in LA county. Its just not realistic that anyone goes to jail over this unless they are causing a safety issue or a significant disturbance to the community.
In a shelter. Most recent reports suggest that a lot of the new shelters cities have been building are not being used to their intended capacity. Probably because there isn't a way to implore people to go into shelter beyond offering it and trying to move them along from where they are presently camped using existing rulings (such as no camping near a school and other such laws certain cities have passed recently). If peoples choices are instead shelter in the provided shelter or spend a night in jail (which cities don't even have the space in their jails to jail every homeless person today fwiw), they might start filling these shelters, which might show the public that it is worth while to invest more money into building more of them considering they are getting used.Right now, its too easy to convince the public that homeless spending has been a waste of time and money on part of the poor utilization of present affordances. Sentiment on my local city subreddit about an upcoming homeless service tax program is pretty much in the gutter right now.
They can sleep on public land. Just not public land where it is illegal to sleep. This ruling also allows cities to set up designated camping grounds and banning camping elsewhere which courts ruled was banned in Chico. Why should we accept that the homeless can sleep wherever they like and ruin all the public land for the rest of us?
This is quite horrifying, but not particularly surprising. Most Americans have dehumanized homeless people, because if we truly saw them as equal humans, we would have to acknowledge that we all exist in a system where our humanity is contingent on the contents of our bank account.
Programmers today can feel the angst caused by this dehumanization when they look at LLMs generating code. We can see that our humanity could be ripped from us at any time.
One city banned camping in public, it was challenged, SC said "yep, that's a fair law". After this decision other cities may also ban camping, while some cities may welcome public camping. The SC is leaving it to the lowest level of government to decide for themselves, upholding a democratic principle.
IDK man, I think arresting people for just existing in public who have nowhere else to go is a morally reprehensible act and has no right existing in a form of government that should operate under the best interest of it's citizens.
There's no great answer here, unfortunately. Let's say the Supreme Court had ruled the other way and said "You cannot ban camping on public spaces if you don't have adequate shelter."
The effect would be that smaller towns with limited budgets would face a potential influx of homeless people, since they don't have the resources to build shelters and therefore cannot ban public camping.
Also, the proposed shelter constraint on the law is pretty dubious. Say a town builds a shelter and then it bans public camping. Does that law get nullified if a tornado destroys the shelter space? What if the shelter has 5 beds, but the homeless population grows to 100? At what point does that law become voided?
No problem, go to your municipal meetings and let them know you are in favor of allowing camping in public spaces in your municipality. If you vote in your local elections your representatives may also have similar opinions to yours. Talk to your friends and neighbors to ask how they feel about it too, maybe they agree.
I call BS, there's thousands of other places in the country aside from downtown SF or other areas where they decide to congregate
SC isn't banning homelessness nationwide, I highly doubt every municipality will ban it at once. It's just giving municipalities that suddenly get hordes of them showing up the ability to make them go elsewhere
The homeless have permission to be in many places at many different times. If they are unhappy with the current place and time limitations then they should vote for representatives to change such limitations.
Driver's License or State ID. In my state (Georgia) to get these you must also provide a birth certificate or passport, as well as two documents showing Georgia residency (I.E., utility bill/phone bill that must have your address listed on them.
Okay, so those are unavailable to the homeless as they most likely will not have their birth certificate or passport with them (as belongings are routinely confiscated by police during removals of homeless encampments). Nor will they have an address or a utility bill in their name. Oh, also, Georgia requires a residential address for these ID cards so while you can use a PO Box on the card itself, they still need proof of a residential address for their records.
So, how again are the homeless expected to vote when they, legally, can't even get a drivers license or state ID card? This isn't even getting into the $25 it costs to get a copy of your birth certificate or the $32 fee for get a state ID. $57 could potentially feed them for a week, and when you don't know when your next meal is going to be, what's more important to you in that situation?
None of those are trespassing. You're permitted to be in your car, you're permitted to be on a park bench, you're permitted to be under a bridge, you're permitted to be in the woods. It's only when you need to be there that it's a crime.
Some parks have rules against smoking, grilling, flying kites, bringing dogs, playing lawn darts, being there after 9pm (that's the trespassing part), and yes, even camping. And those are all voted on by elected officials. If you don't like it, vote for different councilmen.
A bus ticket to some declining town with lots of unused houses? San Francisco did this until 2017.[1]
"A 2019 article in The New York Times reported that many bus ticket recipients were missing, unreachable, in jail, or homeless within a month after leaving San Francisco, and one out of eight returned to the city within a year.[2]"
If we're going to spend the resources to incarcerate these folks, would not the resources be better spent (with much better potential RoI, no less) on assisting persons in obtaining living situations?
Good news, instead of spending $45K/year of your hard earned tax money to keep Homeless Joe in jail, we're going to spend $10K of your hard earned tax money to keep him housed.
If they don't have compassion and understanding for someone who is at the lowest point of their life because it's "unfair" then I'm not particularly interested in talking to them.
That they were exploited, because no one should have to "bust their ass" to an exceptional level in order to afford a necessity. Also that we're going to make it up to them in some other fashion. Also pointing out that home-ownership is financially advantageous for tax purposes, so it already has been made up to them, to some degree.
You (and the rest of the scolds in this thread) are allowed to do whatever you want with your money. A $3000/mo mortgage spread between ten (or more!) like-minded friends makes for a very affordable hobby. Get you a second house, open it up to all and sundry, and be the change you want to see in the world. No, it won't solve homelessness overnight, but it's not nothing. You'd be doing something in-line with your values, without forcing others to spend their tax-dollars on it, and you get ALL the points. If you blog/vlog/whatever about it regularly, you might get others interested and following your example. Bam - homegrown grass-roots homelessness dent, without third-party involvement.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-175_19m2.pdf