US cities can now punish homelessness. Will it help or hurt a crisis?
US cities can now punish homelessness. Will it help or hurt a crisis?
Experts argue arresting the homeless will make a crisis worse - but cities face mounting pressure to take quick action.
The high court’s ruling is already having a ripple effect on cities across the country, which have been emboldened to take harsher measures to clear out homeless camps that have grown in the aftermath of the pandemic.
Many US cities have been wrestling with how to combat the growing crisis. The issue has been at the heart of recent election cycles on the West Coast, where officials have poured record amounts of money into creating shelters and building affordable housing.
Leaders face mounting pressure as long-term solutions - from housing and shelters to voluntary treatment services and eviction help - take time.
“It’s not easy and it will take a time to put into place solutions that work, so there’s a little bit of political theatre going on here," Scout Katovich, an attorney who focuses on these issues for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told the BBC.
"Politicians want to be able to say they’re doing something,”
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To whoever wrote the headline: How can it possibly help?
It "helps" the NIMBYs who want them off the streets by any means necessary.
"My heart goes out to the homeless, but I don't want to see or be reminded of them"
--Those same NIMBY's, probably
The irony here is that housing-first strategies are the best way to do that. They’re also the one these asshats are against.
The best way that isn't cruel. But since homeless people supposedly deserve it... you have to punish the poor for being poor after all. Sure, they can't afford the bootstraps, but that's not excuse not to pull themselves up by them.
Except the means of helping to get them homes of course.
These sorts of "concerned citizens" are happy to give the homeless a prison cell for a home.
they'll happily spend $150,000 a head to make sure those homeless people are housed in a prison instead of near their community
Not saying I agree with this position, but I’ll pass along the argument that CA’s governor makes.
CA has a lot of empty shelter beds, and they couldn’t clear some camps unless they had enough beds to house everyone. It was all or nothing. They couldn’t say “we have enough beds in the county for half of the encampments, so we’ll only clear the half that have the largest public health and safety problems.”
Basically, CA only wants to jail people if a bed exists and isn’t being used. Problem is, some states / counties will look at this broad ruling and will just people in jail, bed or not.
Also, this ruling doesn’t account for shelter quality. Sometimes the street is actually safer than a shelter, and arresting a person for prioritizing safety is pretty shitty.
I know it sounds rational but that's not a good faith argument from the governor. What he wants is to be able to force people into subpar living conditions instead of making shelters and temporary housing actually work.
It's just another way for them to use the police while telling everyone they're really actually helping.
Doesn't California notoriously have an extreme shortage of shelter beds? I've heard it compared unfavorable to New York this way plenty of times.
Overall the state has a major shortage of beds. Cities and counties across California reported in 2023 a little more than 71,131 beds in either an emergency shelter or transitional housing. The state would need more than twice that number to accommodate everyone.
http://calmatters.org/explainers/californias-homelessness-crisis-explained/
Yes. CA only has enough beds for half of the unhoused population, but significantly less than half of the unhoused population is claiming a bed.
For example, even though San Francisco and Oakland have fewer beds than unhoused people, last year SF had 10% of its beds empty and a few years before that, Oakland was coming in at 36% vacant. I don’t know what the current numbers are.
I don’t agree with this policy, but CA wants to jail people when there is a vacancy and someone is refusing to take the bed. Before this court ruling, CA could not do that.
Ah, I understand now. Ya, that's not good. And I know what you mean about some shelters being less than the streets. Like, not personally, but I've heard stories about lots of thefts in those places, or things like that.
Yeah, IMHO, the high court should’ve said that you need a safe place for someone to stay if you’re going to force an individual off the street. If you don’t have nearly enough shelter beds for your entire homeless population, and a 1/3rd of your shelter beds are not being used, then there is something about that shelter system that probably needs to be fixed.
And that said, at least CA is trying to fill vacancies. There are places that are going to arrest people even if no bed exists. And that is just going to continue to push more and more unhoused people to coastal states that are less cruel.
Was it written by a human with no sense or by an AI (also with no sense)? 🤔
It's the BBC, so I'm giving the benefit of doubt that it was just written by a really out of touch human. The actual article is pretty good coverage and highlights why it's such a terrible decision.
The only thing in the article that even slightly implies "help" is this line:
Jailing the homeless? ‘At least I’ll have a bed’
So, headline seems to be intentionally click/rage bait even though the article itself is pretty sound.
It’s a headline intended to illicit a response and it seems to have worked.
Exactly
I was homeless through some pretty terrible circumstances but it turns out it's illegal to be homeless, so I decided not to be homeless anymore /s
It's clearly rage-bait 🙄 congrats, you're their target demographic