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,”
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.
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.
I can only speak to Portland, but entirely too many people here refuse shelter for a variety of reasons, #1 being they can't bring their drugs and alcohol with them.
"...entirely too many people here refuse shelter for a variety of reasons..."
Have you ever spent time in a shelter? Like tried to sleep there? Undoubtedly no. Because if you had you'd know that the only way they are tolerable and the only way you can block out that they are obviously unsafe, noisy, and completely not conducive to good sleep is to dull your pain with drugs or alcohol.
Storming the Bastille was done (in part) to free prisoners who were being indefinitely held for reasons related to being poor. I'm mostly just bringing that up because history has lots of interesting themes we should all be considering in our decision making during daily life.
Now now. It’s all in how you frame it. If the crisis was homeowners having to see people living in poverty and on the edge of society, this is a big win.
Same place where tobacco taxes, opioid settlements, lottery money and any other money-raising idea states come up with go- anywhere but where they're supposed to.
Nations with their citizen's health as an actual priority have (mostly) solved these problems. The US is not a developed nation, nor a humanitarian one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First
Finally we can put these homeless people under a solid roof with their own bed where the government will pay for all their meals and ensure they have time for recreation and socializing.
The only way this question makes sense is if you're one of millions of sociopathic Americans (not entirely most of their fault, they were encouraged to be so through for profit media and simply fell for the ego stroking lies of "you're better than them, so enjoy the suffering they obviously deserve for some reason") that don't consider homeless Americans to be human at all, want them out of their eyeline, and literally despise suffering people far worse off than them for...🤮... "lowering their property values."
Literally the same market capitalist deluded useful idiots that want public schools defunded into further ruin because they themselves don't personally currently have a child that attends public school.
The people hurting almost everyone with their basically infinite resources, private shareholder capitalist sociopaths, managed to convince it seems like most Americans that the reason the economy works against them despite perpetual record profits for said private shareholders are those people down the street living in an old tent in the park starving and dying of exposure to the elements.
Some groups of people will be hurt, and other groups will be helped. The groups that will be helped are the ones that vote and pay taxes, and even in liberal areas these groups are running out of patience with being on the giving end of expensive but apparently ineffective local programs to deal with homelessness the nice way.
"I don't care where you go but you can't stay here" doesn't work if it's the policy everywhere, but the alternative appears to be a situation where cities that do more to help the homeless simply attract homeless people from other places until they too are overwhelmed. (It's a big issue in NYC with the large numbers of migrants arriving here, but the city is required to provide them with shelter by the state constitution so the Supreme Court ruling won't have a direct effect.)
I think local and state level solutions are fundamentally unsuited to actually solving the problem but I don't expect a federal solution either, especially if Trump is elected. So it seems like LA, San Francisco, and other places with an insurmountable liberal majority and good weather all year are simply screwed.
ineffective local programs to deal with homelessness the nice way.
We don't actually attempt to deal with homelessness in the nice way here, and we virtually never have. Giving these people housing is seen as a handout instead of what it actually is: a solution that costs less, reduces violence, reduces drug use, is more likely to be accepted, AND has less recidivism - there is literally no drawback, when you consider how much empty real estate there is (another problem we refuse to actually address).
But this is America, we don't want any of that. We just want prisoners for the for-profit prisons. We want the cruelty against people we see as "lazy." We want the perceived moral victory of not being one of them.
San Francisco (for example) has spent a billion dollars a year attempting to address the problem and apparently not succeeding. I think people would be entitled to ask where the hell the money is going if it isn't dealing with homelessness the nice way.