Supreme Court allows cities to ban homeless people sleeping outside, even when shelter space is lacking
Supreme Court allows cities to ban homeless people sleeping outside, even when shelter space is lacking
The Oregon case decided Friday is the most significant to come before the high court in decades on the issue and comes as a rising number of people in the U.S. are without a permanent place to live.
The Oregon case decided Friday is the most significant to come before the high court in decades on the issue and comes as a rising number of people in the U.S. are without a permanent place to live.
"That includes California, which is home to one-third of the country’s homeless population."
Why do these statements never follow immediately stating that California is also 10% of the ENTIRE country's population and it's where all of the livable weather is if you have no option but to sleep outside. Of course a lot of them are in California. We need a new deal.
Forcing people into shelters or jail is super fucked up. If I decide I want to camp out in a tent and remove myself from the capitalist grind I should be able to do it unmolested. These fucking vampires think they own every grain of sand.
For communities that do this, the goal is to...
A) Drive out the homeless so they go to other, more charitable communities, and become someone else's problem, and then...
B) Point out the higher rate of homelessness (and higher taxes necessary to deal with it) in those other communities and say, "Look how awful those communities are!"
I was hoping the ruling was narrow and that nuance would make available solutions to move forward, but no. This is a broad decision that allows criminalizing using a pillow in public (that is part of the law in Grants Pass, which was ruled as acceptable). Justice Sotomayor said it correctly: sleeping is a biological necessity. If you don't have a place to sleep, you have to choose between not living and going to jail.
This is really interesting in contrast to where I live in Ontario, Canada. A municipality wanted an injunction to make it crystal clear they could evict a homeless encampment on municipal property. Instead, they got a judgement that doing so would violate those people's Charter rights. This ruling means basically every municipality in the province now legally has to do something about the homelessness crisis.
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.
Overall, the dissent is good. But it makes 1 fundamental mistake of constitutional analysis:
The Constitution cannot be evaded by such formalistic distinctions
As I recall, Gavin Newsom has basically been pushing to look at available shelter space, and clear portions of encampments based on that available space. Problem has been, legally, CA couldn’t clear encampments unless it could demonstrate that it had beds for everyone. As a result, CA has a lot of unclaimed shelter beds. Some counties don’t have enough for everyone, but they do have enough to start moving large portions of people inside.
That said, the conversations around this seem to miss one of the fundamental reasons why people are not excited take a shelter bed. Many shelters have been dirty, hostile, or down right unsafe. People have felt safer in tent communities where they could know and chose their neighbors.
I’m of two minds on this. The all or nothing rule on shelter beds was weird, but shelters need to be safe, help people get care, let people keep belongings, and not kick people out every morning at the crack of dawn.
Talk about kicking someone when already down..
Time to camp on SCOTUS lawns.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-175_19m2.pdf
Link to the opinion
And imma keep advocating for kicking those selfrighteous fuckwads off their collective benches so they can get a more upclose view of their shit
You can predict the outcome of this court's decisions with two questions:
A: Will it cause chaos?B: Is it cruel?
They seem to feel it's bonus points if the answer to both is yes.
Can we get a class action lawsuit to sue for housing? Isn't this almost entrapment like if the government doesn't supply space for people to sleep but the population is still growing and the border isn't completely sealed(not my solution I want) then shouldn't the government be forced to build new homes or at least bunkhouses?
Fucking conservatives
It smaller towns the homeless could protest this by just camping out in Central Park openly. If they arrest them all the jails will fill up pretty quickly and the costs would be higher than if you paid for all of their rent
state's rights is some fake ass bullshit
You probably don't choose to be homeless, but you do choose where to put your tent.
Sleeping is a biological necessity. So is shitting. WHY CAN'T I SHIT WHEREVER I WANT?! America sucks.