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,”
Jesus. How could locking up homeless folk make things better? The headline is bad, and the article is not informative.
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.
What this does is strongly encourage people to accept the help when offered.
What this does is strongly encourage people to accept the help when offered.
Because people have the FREEDOM to choose.
I would think that fundamental right would be fucking obvious.
When they’re doing fentanyl and pissing and shitting in the streets they’ve abdicated personal freedom.
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I’m sorry, but yes. They clearly can’t care for themselves anymore.
Then deal with the drug problem. But I’ll tell you right now that most homeless people do not have the money or time to do drugs unless they’re homeless because of drugs. The majority of homeless people work as many hours as they can and are constantly trying to become not homeless.
Oh, we are NOW. Finally! It took a repeal of our drug legalization law first. That was when the problems started:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Oregon_Ballot_Measure_110
If you think this problem started in 2021, you must be new to the area.
It definitely accelerated after 110 passed.
Yeah they did that policy completely backwards. The Portugal experiment works, but you have to actually do what they did and Oregon did none of the follow up work the Portuguese did.
But you shouldn’t be punishing homeless people for that, at best it’s some sort of venn diagram and critics want to make it look like a circle.
Oregon’s problem was assuming the drug addicted want assistance. They don’t. All they wanted was clean needles.
“…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.
You are better off on the street.
The street, which is obviously unsafe, noisy, completely not conducive to good sleep, and open to the elements.
The street, which is obviously unsafe, noisy, completely not conducive to good sleep, and open to the elements
It seems to me that this is not something with which you’ve had personal experience. Yours is a reasonable speculation but it’s at odds with the reality for most people who have been homeless. I grant my own experience is limited to two shelters, but both were horrendous and I’ve never once heard a good word about any of them.
Here, I found a random article explaining why: https://www.kqed.org/news/11668623/why-do-thousands-of-l-a-s-homeless-shelter-beds-sit-empty-each-night-rats-roaches-bedbugs-mold
No, what this actually does is simply provide more slaves for the prison labor market.
You know what actually strongly ecourages people to accept help? Housing-first policies.
Yeah, because that works out so well…
Wow, one person was the victim of a crime therefore housing isn’t the solution to homelessness.
That’s just the most recent example. Just giving people housing brushes the problems under the rug and concentrates them, it doesn’t solve them.
As opposed to concentrating and housing them in jail at 10x the cost of normal housing only to kick them right back onto the streets? What a solution.
The goal is to convince them to enter treatment. If the alternative is prison, that’s a strong incentive to get treatment.
that anecdote sure does contradict statistical evidence! if it doesn’t work perfectly the first time it’s not worth doing
They have to fill the prisons since a bunch are getting out from old cannabis charges.
It puts more people in prison, making private prisons’ income better. This kind of shit is never about helping anyone but the lobbyists.
Not just private prisons but also public prisons. More inmates means bigger budgets and more power.
And then prisons rent out these people’s labor to corpos for slave wages. It’s a win-win.
Don’t be homeless or I’ll give you three squares and a cot is an odd threat.
It will hurt. Terrible idea.
Hurt. No question.
You aren’t thinking this through and all the wonderful possibilities.
Just imagine if we let private prisons “loan” out low risk prisoners to local businesses.
BAM! Now you get to spread the cost savings of prison labor to the wider economy.
And that’s just me spitballing. I got so many good ideas on what we can do with our newly enslaved poors, err… I mean criminally homeless deviants.
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.
To whoever wrote the headline: How can it possibly help?
It’s clearly rage-bait 🙄 congrats, you’re their target demographic
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 “helps” the NIMBYs who want them off the streets by any means necessary.
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.
“My heart goes out to the homeless, but I don’t want to see or be reminded of them”
–Those same NIMBY’s, probably
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Next step, work camps. Who else do you think is going to replace the immigrants in the fields? All part of the plan.
While we’re at it, maybe we can solve the healthcare crisis by punishing sickness!
I think the 2025 people reading this just got an idea. You can’t be sick if it’s illegal. Thanks for giving them ideas.
Don’t we already, with what amount to astronomical fines for getting sick?
We already punish mental illness. Might as well.
Cancer diagnosis? Believe it or not, straight to jail.
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.
Aurora Colorado used Cannabis profits to build a sweet homeless shelter a few years back. Where does all this revenue go in other states?
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.
Politicians pockets.
It will help a whole lot with any private prison which is having trouble making a profit. So there’s that.
Plus it’s also free labor they can lease out since there’s that handy-dandy loophole in the 13th Amendment 😡
“It’s not easy…”, sure it is. Ban corporations from owning residential housing for rent, real estate prices drop, buy the cheaper houses, give homeless a permannent roof, done.
Jfc this country is falling apart
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.
Politicians want to SAY they are doing something without actually DOING anything to help homeless people.
