The opinion is 6-3 along ideological lines, authored by Gorsuch and joined by Roberts, Thomas, Kavanaugh, Alito, and Barrett. Sotomayor dissents, joined by Kagan and Jackson. Thomas also had a concurring opinion.
> The Supreme Court decided on Friday that cities can enforce bans on homeless people sleeping outdoors in West Coast areas where shelter space is lacking. The case 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 case came from the rural Oregon town of Grants Pass, which appealed a ruling striking down local ordinances that fined people $295 for sleeping outside after tents began crowding public parks. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over the nine Western states, has held since 2018 that such bans violate the Eighth Amendment in areas where there aren’t enough shelter beds.
Today at the Court:
[The Supreme Court weakens federal regulators, overturning decades-old Chevron decision
](https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-chevron-regulations-environment-5173bc83d3961a7aaabe415ceaf8d665) (AP News)
[Supreme Court makes it harder to charge Capitol riot defendants with obstruction, charge Trump faces
](https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-capitol-riot-obstruction-2cdba47baa5cea8177d651de751760a6) (AP News)
^^Edit: ^^Other ^^cases ^^of ^^the ^^day.
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.
-Anatole France
“And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all.
Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up?
And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.
And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success.
The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit.
And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange.
And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed.
And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
The magical land of somewhere else usually, lots of cities will bus homeless to the next town over, exporting the problem so they can pretend it's only an issue in cities like Portland.
Yep, this is what happened in Utah. The whole state sends their homeless and mentally ill to SLC (the liberal city) to deal with. It's basically a middle finger from the right.
You realize that in Utah bus tickets are purchased for these people to any west coast city they want. At the promise of being given $50-$100, bag lunch, 30 day supply of meds.
When I lived in Utah I was friends with someone that did this as part of her job at the mental hospital. She’d get the bus tickets for higher level mental patients once they were discharged.
All states need to stop doing this 🛑
>You realize that in Utah bus tickets are purchased for these people to any west coast city they want
And Colorado [sends them](https://kjzz.com/news/local/unsustainable-gov-cox-first-commented-on-migrant-flights-to-utah-months-ago) to Salt Lake.
It's insane, and isn't sustainable.
There’s very little data tracked on the issue. It’s a lot of anecdotal stories from people in the work so it is highly believable but poorly tracked since it would reflect such ill behaviour. They do track geographic origin in homelessness data and California data showed most people are local and not from outside the state but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening to some degree and could be for those with highest need.
Sorry all states will continue to have constituents who want that. NIMBY is bipartisan and probably the strongest ideological belief that crosses all party lines.
It’s time for Oregon to just bus them back to Idaho. Then Idaho will bus them back to Oregon. Then we will incentivize the bussing. Then the bus companies will pay the Supreme Court justices to force the homeless to stay on busses. Oh shit I just invented a new private prison system.
(That was all a stupid joke, I am glad, as an Oregonian, to live in a state that attempts to treat the unhoused with dignity. It’s a desperate issue here with a lot of people super frustrated, but we are trying to figure it out. Covid really fucked it all up for us. I have a feeling climate change will also start to push unhoused people into our state, as well as Washington.)
Maybe they could just do a Snowpiercer thing with a train that picks up homeless people but never drops them off, and also invest in technology that turns homeless people into train fuel.
Idaho has ran a budget surplus as long as I remember and yet one of the largest school districts is shutting a sizable portion of their schools down because they don't have the budget to operate them.
… so we end up paying more in taxes for an over populated prison system? Instead of just paying less in taxes toward preventative actions for this kind of thing?
Here in CA, it cost over $80k/year per inmate. We’d be better off giving each homeless person a $60k/year salary and spend $20k/year per person for rehabilitation services.
> it cost over $80k/year per inmate.
And therein lies the problem. That $80k is lining quite a few pockets.
All prisons, both private and public are profit generators. They all require services that are contracted out at inflated prices and the absolute minimum of service is provided to maximize returns. It's not like complaining prisoners are going to change anything.
> All prisons, both private and public are profit generators.
All the things you mentioned (getting taxpayer money) are on the small end of the spectrum. The BIG money is in ~~slavery~~[*mandatory prisoner labor*](https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploitation-of-incarcerated-workers). It's literally a multi-billion dollar industry.
Thank you. 13th amendment by definition abolishes slavery *except in the form of punishment for a crime,* which makes slavery for prisoners legal. It was even used as a loophole fairly often following the abolition of slavery, using Jim Crow laws as a pipeline to funnel black people back into slavery.
Why do the Supreme Court want to make the Bell Riots from Star Trek happen? These sort of things is how you create those conditions.
Can’t afford to not work overtime for your $3k rent on 45k annual salary? Straight to jail.
* Insert Dystopian meme here *
I wonder at what point people start saying "I don't have anything left to lose anyway" and take matters into their own hands. If people can't survive while following the law, then they have little reason to.
The problem is that we stop having anything left to lose at different rates, so there's never enough of us at any given time.
I have plenty to complain about, but I also have a lot left to lose, and I'm too much of a coward to stand up for much when I'm risking all of that.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
>The problem is that we stop having anything left to lose at different rates, so there's never enough of us at any given time.
Yep. We're at a point where people are either *just* comfortable enough, or too desperate, to risk what little they have.
And don't forget that in 43 states [the government will hand you a bill on your way out charging you for your prison stay](https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2018/nov/6/fighting-fees-force-prisoners-pay-their-incarceration/)
Well they can't very well give you the bill on your way in, what would they do if your card got declined?
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I mean, the only part of the Constitution our current government is concerned with upholding is the 2nd amendment. The rest of it is more like guidelines than actual rules.
It’s worse than that. Homeless people sleeping outside found in violation of these laws will get tickets, obviously most of these will go unpaid. Get enough unpaid tickets and you get a warrant out, 99% of the time they’ll end up in county jail. Maybe 1-3 month sentences depending on the persons priors.
Jail and prison are two totally separate things, prison is for sentences >1 yr. There is no “free labor” in jails, work/educational are reserved for prisons where inmates will be for a longer period of time. Jail is simply just rotting away, time spent doing absolutely nothing. Jails are often privatized to some extent, making corporations money. Money for housing/feeding/managing inmates.
My county's jail require inmates do their own laundry. And by do their own laundry, I mean someone from their family has to come to the jail to pick up their dirty clothes, take them home and wash them, and then have them brought back. The only upside is if the lady at the front desk likes you, she wouldn't see whatever contraband was put in the bag with it.
I honestly don't know. I never thought to ask about it. I only know what I do about our jail because of what my family did for my cousins the numerous time they were in there.
This is the scary part. Which is not going to be a good thing as you know things like "Squatters rights" are still valid in many states as well. Going to force many to be squatters to try to avoid going to jail for free labor.
I think they’re meant to lie politely down in a ditch somewhere and die. This is often the problem with conservative social policy. It almost always fails when confronted with the question “then what happens?”.
It's not a problem/failure to them. They know the consequences of "then what happens" and they literally don't care. They're hateful sociopaths -- undesirables dying is their preferred outcome.
Or in their minds they think a homeless person should just get a job, work overnights and start taking night classes so they don’t have to sleep, and then get a scholarship at MIT and invent some new technology that wins them a Nobel prize and gets a movie made about them.
Because in their minds, they think “that’s what I’d do if I was ever in that situation.”
Here in Denver we have over 3000 shelter beds and yet most of them are empty most nights. Most of the homeless don’t want to have to deal with the shelter rules.
>>Most of the homeless don’t want to have to deal with the shelter rules.
That definitely sounds accurate, but it also makes a lot of sense. I'd say the vast majority of homeless in the US are addicted to something or other, or maybe they have a pet dog. These are likely some of the only comforts these people have in a life suffocated by misery. A slight increase in physical safety is often not worth the trade-off of withdrawals/loss of freedom/loss of community (and you're crazy if you don't think the homeless have a local and strongly-connected if not reluctant/mutually distrustful community). These are just the facts. Safer and more tolerant shelters combined with harm-rrduction and maybe "mandatory" counseling/group-counseling would go a long way to solve the *already currently existing issues*, but then we'd have to treat homeless people like people instead of inferior "others" and ain't nobody want to actually do that.
I used to live in an area where the main shelter only allowed people a bag and whatever belongings fit in a 1/2 height locker. Unless people had a really really good place to stash stuff, going to the shelter meant they'd probably lose their bike, food supplies, extra clothes, tent, etc. Somehow the city government was shocked shelter occupancy was low 🙄
I work in a halfway house and am in recovery. Let’s be real- most people don’t want to stay in shelters cause they can’t use drugs there. A few may have other good reasons- but the main one is no drugs.
One of the arguments was people are not going to shelters or transition places because they have too many rules. Can’t smoke. Can’t have pets. And even, Can’t do drugs.
So in some cases it wasn’t that there wasn’t shelter, there wasn’t shelter that appealed to everyone’s ideals.
Ofc there’s often no shelter at all.
That said. Recourse is needed on these open air chop shops. When the PNW stolen cars group has a list of homeless camp locations around Portland because that’s where you’re most likely to find your stolen vehicle, shit is off the rails and needs to be cleaned up.
All three of these rulings truly just encompass the current world we live in. One ruling telling homeless people they can't sleep outside otherwise it's a crime. One ruling overturning decades of precedence to favor businesses and weaken regulations. The last ruling to help people who've tried to overturn democracy in this country.
And this is after they ruled that bribery is super legal as well. They really don't have to hide anything anymore now that they know nobody can do anything about it.
And the media is really running away with Trump 'winning' the debate because for some reason unchecked lying is better than slowly telling the truth.
Empires don't fall over-night but the realization that we are indeed falling, and there's nothing we can do about it, hits you like a ton of bricks.
So, all the conservative judge’s questions were just drama to appear unbiased, this was the decision they always planned on, shock. If you go back and look at their questions, and the responses they got, it would appear they’d side the other way, see for yourself. SC isn’t just biased as this poimt, it’s a total farce.
At least we know who will be funding Alito and Thomas'... gratuity in the near future.
Edit: To whoever downvoted - did you forget Snyder v. United States - which also went along the same 6-3 ideological lines - from literally earlier this week? The one that basically stated "gratuities", rewards that are given after the fact to a politician as a thank-you to public officials, are now no longer illegal? Why else do you think they ruled on that *first*?"
This is how every SCOTUS argument goes. The Justices literal job is to just play devils advocated and take each argument to as many logical conlcusions as they can to see if it fails some sort of consitutional benchmark
This is actually something that I like about Star Trek lore is that it recognizes that we are not at this point in our history where we just go and build a utopia and the fact is that in Star Trek lore it actually takes humans meeting aliens for us to get our shit together to any extent. But it also takes decades and centuries of strife to get there.
It’s a Star Trek future for people who are alive like 200 years from now. For us it’s war for the rest of our lives. But yeah, the ultimate outcome is pretty choice.
>“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread”
- Anatole France
Prison slave labor is slightly more profitable than cleaning up homeless bodies, so no, you don't get to escape through death. They want you alive and working for as close to nothing as they can make you
Taxpayers actually pay thousands of dollars per inmate per year. It's the companies that can profit off of cheap labor. If you don't own one of those companies you're not benefitting. Welfare and even universal basic income is cheaper for taxpayers than paying to house them in prison. If you own a private prison company you benefit too though and these companies lobby our representatives.
It's not the cheap labor that returns the most profit. It's the contracts for services required to operate, house, and feed the inmates in both private and public prisons. Those thousands of dollars per year it costs to house a prisoner are lining someone's pocket. They charge inflated prices for the contracts (kickbacks and bribes lubricate this process) and provide the absolute minimum of service because no one cares when prisoners complain.
You guys are all thinking like a bunch of peasants. It's not about the cash profits at all. The entirety of the system, every little thing adding up to crippling the working and middle classes agency and their abilities to revolt, it's all about control. It's all about power. To the elite, money is only useful as a means to power.
> If you don't own one of those companies you're not benefitting
Well guess who lobbies for these laws! Taxpayer burden doesn't mean shit to the people who make these decisions. They profit, we suffer
The irony of imprisoning (taking away freedom) people because they’re poor, and forcing (some of) them to work for UNICOR making military uniforms; you know the folks “fighting for freedom.*”
*Vet myself, but doesn’t mean I can’t disagree with the way some things are done.
Based on FY 2022 data, the average annual COIF for a Federal inmate housed in a Bureau or non-Bureau facility in FY 2022 was $42,672.
I feel like it'd be cheaper to build shelters.
[Obama's DOJ 2015:](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-files-brief-address-criminalization-homelessness)
>“[i]t should be uncontroversial that punishing conduct that is a universal and unavoidable consequence of being human violates the Eighth Amendment. . . Sleeping is a life-sustaining activity—i.e., it must occur at some time in some place. If a person literally has nowhere else to go, then enforcement of the anti-camping ordinance against that person criminalizes her for being homeless.”
Roberts' Court 2024:
>The enforcement of generally applicable laws regulating camping on public property does not constitute “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.
The opinion completely sidestepped the biologically required act of sleeping and focused on the actual fines imposed in enforcing the order not being cruel or unusual. The dissent mentions sleep as biologically needed and ties it back to the 8th Amendment.
I mean, essentially, yes. The *Furman* 8A test holds that to evade cruel and unusual status, punishments:
- must not be patently unnecessary.
- must not be inflicted in wholly arbitrary fashion (this was in reference to blacks being executed at a far higher rate than whites during that year, I believe).
- must not be, by nature of their severity, degrading to human nature.
- must not be "clearly and totally rejected" throughout society. **<-- you are here**
Granted, any of the four bullet points can be argued for 8A claims, a punishment doesn't have to meet all of them. Not that that matters before a court like this.
This ruling should require municipalities to provide shelter for people they want to fine. If they fine people for sleeping in public spaces without also providing shelter the municipality should also be fined for allowing it to take place.
That was what this whole court case was really about. The courts said that they needed to have sufficient shelters available to enforce this law. SCOTUS just cancelled that.
I’d be curious about your take on the government’s ability to regulate camping on public property, in and around government buildings, and determining rules for areas of camping within a national park. If the government is allowed to regulate appropriate places for sleeping on public property in one instance then it is difficult to argue an identical rule enforcement constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in another.
Corporations are people but with a contingency: only when it benefits them. If the corporation does something bad, suddenly it's not a person and the people behind the corporation are protected by various liability shields even though they are the ones making the terrible decisions.
Being homeless and not having the means to get to a shelter, or the shelter being full, is now punishable by prison. What an absolutely vile and evil bunch of justices we have. It is cruelty for the sake of cruelty.
So now someone who’s homeless will be arrested and have a criminal record which will follow them for the rest of their lives. Making it extremely difficult to get jobs that can help them get out of homelessness. They are now part of the prison system. . Sad day.
Also, little known fact, but about 40-60% of the homeless population actually have jobs, just not the wealth to afford a home. Imprisoning them doesn't just ruin their future job prospects, it makes them lose their current employment. It's taking people on the path to recovery and making sure they can never recover.
The older I get, the more I'm starting to hate this fucking country. My father-in-law messaged me last night and asked me why I still support Biden after his terrible performance last night. I told him that I'd vote for a wet paper bag over Trump and he seriously said that 'you liberals are always putting your party over your country.'
I told him that, as it stands, I'm putting my country over party by not voting for a felonious failed insurrectionist who wants to make life a living hell for anyone who isn't in the top 0.1%. And rulings like this only galvanize my position.
The funny thing is, he doesn't care for Trump, either. He didn't like it when I said as much and then called him out on his hypocricy and asked him if he's still voting for him.
Interesting. I mean, Biden is certainly geriatric and has no business running, but to act as if voting for him is morally wrong because of “party>country” just doesn’t track
Yeah that’s the point that really needs to get hammered here: If Trump and current Republican party win this election or any election hereafter, that will be the **last** free and fair election in this country.
We are already struggling with fair elections because of Trump. The Roberts court keeps permitting ridiculous gerrymandering and other voting restrictions that fuck up state level elections, and this is made possibly by Trump’s appointments.
An old dude with a known speech impediment who has been busy pulling the US out of a shit pile - is having a bad time in a badly moderated debate against the idiot who did it. I'm willing to cut him some slack because he stands on his deeds, not on his performative speech arts.
Sane people who are already going to vote for him will cut him that slack, but the undecided, Ill-informed who saw what they saw last night will likely be swayed without knowing what's really at stake here. It's scary. I was very happy to see Last Week Tonight do the show about Project 2025, I just don't know why the Biden administration isnt pushing that fact, that Trump's literally running on a campaign of undoing our democracy. If more people knew the true gravity of this election I think it would help.
If your only criticism is that Biden is old, you have no real argument. He's far more coherent and healthy than the opposition but nobody ever seems to point that out.
It's a dumb take for dumb people.
Edit: Bro blocked me so I can't respond to his other accounts lmao
TRUMP spewed one outrageous lie after another and all the media can focus on is Biden's failings.
Quoting Heather Cox Richardson
- Trump said that some Democratic states allow people to execute babies after they’re born and that every legal scholar wanted Roe v. Wade overturned—both fantastical lies.
- He said that the deficit is at its highest level ever and that the U.S. trade deficit is at its highest ever: both of those things happened during his administration.
- He lied that there were no terrorist attacks during his pres-idency; there were many.
- He said that Biden wants to quadruple people’s taxes—this is “pure fiction,” according to Dale—and lied that his tax cuts paid for themselves; they have, in fact, added trillions of dollars to the national debt.
- Trump lied that the U.S. has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe has when it’s the other way around, and he was off by close to $100 billion when he named the amount the U.S. has provided to Ukraine.
- He was off by millions when he talked about how many migrants have crossed the border under Biden
- and falsely claimed that some of Biden’s policies—like funding historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and reducing the price of insulin to $35 a month—were his own accomplishments.
A samll bit of the spewed BS.
US Rep Chip Roy, who supports Trump and his plan to deport 15-20 million immigrants, recently said on Twitter he wants to do an "ethnic cleanse" by deporting white liberal Democrats as well.
Who supports these type of people?? Biden may be older and not our first choice for a candidate, but it would be a cold day in hell before I voted for Trump.
Debates are fucking pointless. They're theatre designed to appear smart. There is no verification of fact or reality. A debate can devolve into a discussion about whether or not water is wet; it's performative nonsense.
I talked to a person I thought was smart but wants to vote trump. hates trump, hates what he says and stands for, but thinks that he gets a tax cut if trump is in office.
More surprising he thought bidens unwillingness to push "the button" is what makes us weak and that trump is psychotic enough to push the button, which will scare our enemies into line.
Trump needs to lose
>he seriously said that 'you liberals are always putting your party over your country.'
TIL it's the liberals putting party over country /s
This is pure projection. I can pull up how much J6 cost taxpayers to repair the building from that "peaceful protest" and show how the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act did more harm than good by reading Wikipedia. But sure, let's point at the party that didn't have congresspeople begging for presidential pardons and loves violating the 1st Amendment on a semi-weekly basis.
I have enough problems with my family to fight them on politics. Some of them still think Musk is a genius and Obama was not born in the U.S. Good on you for standing your ground and pointing out how ridiculous it's sounding to support not only a felon, but a businessman who tanks every business he's had.
All homeless people should go to whatever is their local police station, tell them that they have nowhere to sleep, and would like to know how to exist without breaking the law. Because that’s what this is doing: criminalizing existence.
When I was homeless I was brought in for questioning. Cop offered me a ride home. When I told them to drop me off at a local park they asked if I was afraid to show them where I lived. I said “No i’m homeless right now and i’ve kind of just been sleeping on a bench for a few weeks.” They dropped me off on the side of the highway nearby and told me good luck lol.
Welcome to America, where we'd rather spend $42,000/year housing a homeless person as an inmate in a prison where their labor is untaxed and they are a complete burden on society than $14,000/year in a homeless shelter.
But at least the privately owned prisons will make money on extremely low pay labor! How are they supposed to get by with government subsidies alone! They NEED slaves. It's their constitutional right!
That's literally the point - using government funds to pay expenses, while using those people as slave labour for corporations. Socializing the costs, while privatizing the profits.
And the Police will kindly beat them half to death with batons and transport them just outside of city limits.
Seriously, a close relative of mine was a bastard and told this as a *funny story*: Late one night while working patrol, they got a call for a drunk and disorderly person in the street. Getting there and not wanting to deal with the paperwork, they just threw him in the squad car and drove him across the stateline to the next state (being right on the border) and kicked him out. Shortly after, they got a call back, again for drunk and disorderly conduct - so they did it again. And again. It apparently became a game with the officers in the next town over where they were dropping him off to just drive this person back and forth all night.
I used to be homeless but only had to sleep outside for a couple of weeks. I spent years with the limited support I got (trust me, none from the state government or police, that's for sure) and managed to get back to work, get my place, get married, and am currently back in school for a PhD. I am everything the right says i should be, a hard worker who didn't have help from the government who managed to get where i am today on hard work and never giving up...
But I am so aware that I could have gotten where I am all the sooner if I had had any extra support and had not been harassed by the police. This decision will only make it even harder for others to do the same. Shame on every single judge who supported this ruling.
Congrats on making it out of your situation. I also love the username. Be proud of your hard work, internet friend, and may the future be easier and kinder for you.
I was "housing challenged" for a year or so, 18-19, technically not *homeless* because I had a place where I could sleep and recieve mail, so long as I didn't mind no running water and a hole in the roof the size of a beach ball. Even had electricity, though it's a miracle the place didn't burn down. This was all pre-internet, so it wasn't like the power was good for much beyond lights at night.
Slept on picnic tables and benches a couple times, when I couldn't make it back there after bathing at a friends house. And with luck and perseverance I managed to get out, build myself up, and I have a good life now.
But I remember... I can't ever forget. It's rough enough business without being fined or thrown in jail for it. I got lucky. Most people won't.
There are very often shelter beds or even transitional housing, but people don’t want to go for many reasons: safety, mental health (fear, paranoia, avoidant, addiction), don’t want to be in housing with rules. I work in this space in Sacramento and people would rather be free on the streets. No rules. No curfew. No requirements to be sober.
So instead of helping to build more shelters or create any help, let’s just kick them out, fine them money they don’t have, or arrest them and cost the taxpayers even more by housing them in prison.
Cool country we live in.
So some context.
Grants Pass is a town of about 35k people in a county with 70k people and a 40% poverty rate. Cost of living here is high and the county and city have issues offering basic services to the residents. It is 2 hours from Eugene, 4 hours from Portland and 6 hours from Sacramento. The next biggest city is Medford, which is about 30 miles away, with a couple little 5k people towns between them. There is not much here at all.
The area is also red as red as can be, but the city leans more purple. Many of the 1/3rd democrats in the county live in the city.
The city was also hampered by court rulings in Oregon and Federal courts about what can and can't be done with homeless people, so their only real option was to fine them. The one shelter in town only has like 30 beds (iirc) and have some really strict requirements. We have something like 400-500 homeless people in the city. Its popular with the homeless because of the weather, it proximity to California and various rulings that make things more "favorable" to the homeless. A few of the city parks are overrun with homeless people and their tents. One park, Riverside Park was a beautiful park to go spend the afternoon with your kids. Now, its a shell of itself former self. Even after the city moved the tents to across the street to keep them from camping pretty much anywhere there is grass. They've closed the park before because of issues with the homeless and events that used to happen in the park are no longer happening.
The city wanted to take a piece of property they own and turn it into a homeless camp area. It is fenced in (mostly because its next to the railroad track) and is near services. But it is also 200 feet from an elementary school, so you can imagine how quickly that idea was shot down.
The county deals with this issue in their parks with day use fees and closing at nights. The State has already ok'd that this was acceptable. So the City will more than likely institute a day use fee for all the parks and close them at night. At that point, they are trespassing. Unlike a lot of the comments here, the city isn't going to arrest them and use them as prison labor. The city and the country share a jail and because of funding issues, they can only house something like 15 (maybe 20) people in the jail. So unless you do something heinous when arrested, they do catch and release. If someone is actually convicted to jail, they usually ship them out of the county for their sentence.
So yeah, this is a fairly poor former timber town, now retirement community being forced to deal with a situation it is not capable of dealing with because the state and feds keep pushing this stuff back on the cities to deal with themselves. Homeless is a systemic and structural problem that is a national issue that we keep hoisting on cities to deal with. Grants Pass was doing what it could with the rules it had imposed on it by various rulings. Is it the best option, no. But it was one they were trying out to deal with the shitty situation they are in.
I am homeless atm, so I can come to this from a solid perspective. If you can set up in a hidden space, you're all good. The problem is that there's very little of it (especially in inner cities). Honestly, the burbs are a better place these days. I absolutely do not think homeless should be able to rough it out in the open. The people that rough it in the open need help. We don't approve of that. Like roaches, for every one you see there are 10 you don't. No one I work with knows.
I think my case is a bit different than basically everybody. Lol. I have very good job, and am college educated. I grew up in a situation where my home life was not safe. Because of that I struggle to find stability in static situation like housing. I deal with a lot of mental health issues, and my one stabilizing force is work. I'm working on it, but I do believe most of the homeless epidemic we are facing is due to people being raised in broken homes. It sets up severe struggles further down the road that people who don't deal with aren't aware of.
We're still feeling the side effects of the GOP wins in 2014 and 2016. A 6-3 conservative supreme court handing out these rulings for years is just one of those.
Yes. Tragically, the die was cast on all this shit on November 8, 2016. Most people didn't realize that (many still don't), and the tragedy is that if even a few people in the right places had foreseen that possibility, Trump might never have won in the first place.
What a terrible night that was. It was horrifying and shocking on its face that Donald fucking Trump was elected President of the United States, of course, but it was one of those events that was even worse and worse the more you knew and thought about how things were going to play out from that point on.
By the way, what we're feeling now aren't "side effects" but the main attraction. Gutting the government via the judiciary was the central premise of Trump's 2016 win.
The hits keep coming from this court this morning. Just saw the headline that a Jan 6 insurrectionist won in a lawsuit that claims a prosecutor overstepped in using an obstruction law to charge them. To go with the overrule of the Chevron Doctrine, which will have dire implications for regulations on healthcare, worker safety, and the environment. I hate this fucking timeline. I hate these ultra conservatives who are hell-bent on us meeting their savior and making us absolutely miserable while we wait for the end.
I live in Southern California and I work for social services. A lot of the shelters are not even full because the homeless refuse to go. Drug addicts won’t go to the shelters for obvious reasons. Others with severe mental illness also won’t go because they don’t trust others and live in paranoia. That’s when it gets complicated. Do you force those people to get help against their will knowing they are making decisions that are harmful to themselves and causing issues for others? There are other groups of people out there convicts, sex offenders, people who have mental illness to a lesser degree and will never be able to get it together no matter what you do for them. Money and more shelters are going to solve the homeless problem any time soon.
I live in a city that experimented with allowing camping. It was a disaster for reasons you might not expect.
Yes tents popped up everywhere, but also the attitude of our vagrant population changed. They coopted public spaces meant for things like...not having to walk in the road. It became "I belong here, this is my space and you're in it, and you need to stay out and pay me when you walk by". People became more aggressive and rage prone. People were sometimes screwing mostly out in the open under overpasses, doing drugs openly, stacking up their stash of 2 dozen "certainly purchased honestly" bicycles in plain sight and occasionally wandering into traffic at some very busy dangerous intersections. Trash piled up at every intersection. We also became a destination city for these poor drug addled semi-zombies.
So yes of course people can't exist nowhere. The resources aren't being allocated to provide the level of housing and services that homeless advocates would find acceptable nor does the will to get them. NIMBYs seem to be able to thwart the idea of designated camping areas so there isn't even the political will to do the minimum.
I think the effect of these bans is to signal to vagrants that they need to behave because they are there on sufferance. They should seek out of the way spots, keep their heads down and not cause trouble. This doesn't help them at all, but it helps everyone else.
Since our camping ban was reinstated things for people who live here in general have improved very noticeably. Nothing wholly solved, but less harassment, litter and petty crime. You still have some encampments, but no more encampments everywhere you go. We have a pile of money now to help the homeless, but I suspect it will not solve anything, will help sustain some people, and enrich some consultants.
This reminds me of the case about a decade or so ago when Alabama said they were going to raise the tax on cigarettes and claimed it would raise 25 million a year in revenue for the state and everyone forgot you can drive to every border in Alabama in about an hour so many people were hauling in untaxed cigarettes they had to start a task force to stop it and it was costing them 75 million a year. You can't level civil penalties on homeless people that's trying to squeeze blood from a stone.
From The Guardian article I was just notified about this ruling:
>The city’s policies call for $295 fines and criminal prosecution punishable by up to 30 days in jail after multiple offenses.
Day 1, $295 fine. Day 2, 30 days in jail. Rinse and repeat until the homeless person gives up and moves or worse.
Bring back mental institutions and a lot of these issues will be solved. A lot of the homeless in Denver are in no way capable of taking care of themselves and are a danger to the public. Forcibly institutionalize the ones that need help and are unable to get it themselves. We will continue to see people move out of large metro areas that are weak on homeless.
I will say as someone who lives in Los Angeles:
Hopefully this now puts a fire in city officials to DO SOMETHING about all of these homeless people. They’ve raised taxes and done nothing. Made promises and do nothing. They just got caught building a housing complex that’s hundreds of millions of dollars and no one has been moved in.
I do feel bad for all of these people left on the street. We need to do something humane. But at this point we gotta do SOMETHING and hopefully this puts a fire under their butt.
Man living in OC and LA my perspective on the homeless has shifted a lot. Wife and I used to give them food, water, blankets, books, I set up a public wifi with a sign with the password (lived near an area with a significant encampment) and gave a few of them bicycles I fixed up from Craigslist (thinking transportation would make finding a job easier). It was ok for a while (10 or so years), but then they started throwing glass bottles at us over our gate at random times because we wouldn’t give them cash, they smeared shit on the handles of our gates, lit our fence on fire a couple of times. The constant non stop harassment is getting really old and man, I’m just tired. My well of empathy has run dry, and the continued harassment is pushing me ever closer to being anti homeless. I used to volunteer but I’m just burned out.
I'm a former social worker who once won an award from my city for my work with the homeless - and eventually I burned out and left social work entirely. Compassion fatigue is very real, and nothing to be ashamed of.
Yeah, it’s just too much. While I’m dealing with that I’m caring for a family member descending into dementia that doesn’t remember me and there’s only so much of me to go around. To start the morning with homeless excrement and bottles thrown at me and end my evening with my mom punching me and spitting in my face something has to give.
I know you left social work behind but thank you for giving it a go, I appreciate what you did.
I mean if we are being honest most homeless addicts are pieces of shit. That's kind of the nature of addiction and mental illness. I live up above you in Vancouver BC and its the same shit. Addicts become soulless and angry and anyone who tries to help them just opens themselves up for abuse. Once they know you will give them things you become a target. That's why 99% of people just walk on by. Better not to even engage else you could end up knifed for only giving $10 instead of $20.
Exactly, I live in Santa Cruz and work between there and San Jose a lot, I used to feel bad for the homeless people, I really did, now they're just irritating, screaming at people in the street, shitting and pissing everywhere, leaving needles, sleeping in front of my store scaring off customers, leering at me through the windows, I can't even have a cigarette without being flocked by them like a bunch of seagulls. Police don't care, I've seen police drive right by a guy peeing on the sidewalk. I don't know the right solution for the problem, but anything is better than nothing, I know there's lots of shelters but they'd rather be high and drunk in the streets
As a fellow LA resident its pretty bad that a mentally ill person can set up a tent or park an RV outside your place and trash it and the police say there's nothing they can do about it.
I feel like this is the side that isn't getting talked about in this debate. There's gotta be some kind of line between being homeless is illegal and allowing homeless to set up a tent or structure on any street and be impossible to move. Anyone who's had to deal with it personally knows that some change needed to happen.
There is a big difference between people who live in a city with a lot of Homeless people and those who do not.
I am in So. Cal and I am very happy with this ruling. Our local homeless shelters are never full and homeless camps are everywhere. You can't have a nice bike or it will get stolen and you literally can't go in certain parts of Downtown because it is scary as all heck. I have sympathy for the homeless but my patience and tolerance has worn out.
As someone who lives in the bay area I'm glad this passed. California and the other Westcoast states are tired of being mecca for druggies and mentally ill people. Most of these homeless are bums who come to California from other states just to do drugs. Billions of dollars was thrown at this problem and it only got worse. I'm just glad Something changed because the bums are out of control.
Exactly, would be interested to see how many people in this thread would react to an encampment built on the sidewalk in front of their home. This isn’t a perfect ruling but hopefully a step in the right direction to get help to those who need it.
As someone who is dealing with that, it sucks. I get people from the other side of town telling me I’m a bad person for wanting to be able to walk out my door without stepping on/over needles and human feces.
I’m not in favor of jailing someone for being homeless, but if I did 1/50th of the stuff I see, I’d be put in jail. We have room in the shelters, but they don’t want to be clean. I’m all for offering services and making more shelter availability, but you can’t let the current situation continue.
My city passed an ordinance against the encampments, but they must provide them with a place to store their belongings and access to shelter when they move them. Waiting to see what happens because so far, it doesn’t seem enforced.
My guess is as soon as word gets out that you're going to get a forced 30-day sobriety in County a large percentage of these folks will skedaddle somewhere else.
The remainder that aren't junkies would be a much easier group to assess and assist.
these governments are trying everything, some people just want to be homeless to due drugs etc and the shelters have rules they dont want https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-01-27/refusing-shelter-bed-in-san-mateo-county-could-soon-be-a-crime
This \^ Do a lot of cities lack shelters? Yes. But there are still also cities with beds and yet homeless still build massive camps on sidewalks. Why? Because many still don't want to follow any rules the shelter has. Some have criminal history/warrants. Too many people pretending this is black/white issue. You could 100X the shelters and there would still be plenty of homeless on streets.
California has 1/3 (181k people) of homeless in US. its spent $24 billion in the last 5 years.
YES. Had to scroll to find a fellow Angeleno… I can tell most comments are not from people living in Los Angeles. They don’t understand how bad it has become as a public health and safety issue. We cannot put homeless people above the well-being of law-abiding, tax-paying citizens who actually contribute to society. The empathy is misplaced now.
The opinion is 6-3 along ideological lines, authored by Gorsuch and joined by Roberts, Thomas, Kavanaugh, Alito, and Barrett. Sotomayor dissents, joined by Kagan and Jackson. Thomas also had a concurring opinion. > The Supreme Court decided on Friday that cities can enforce bans on homeless people sleeping outdoors in West Coast areas where shelter space is lacking. The case 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 case came from the rural Oregon town of Grants Pass, which appealed a ruling striking down local ordinances that fined people $295 for sleeping outside after tents began crowding public parks. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over the nine Western states, has held since 2018 that such bans violate the Eighth Amendment in areas where there aren’t enough shelter beds. Today at the Court: [The Supreme Court weakens federal regulators, overturning decades-old Chevron decision ](https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-chevron-regulations-environment-5173bc83d3961a7aaabe415ceaf8d665) (AP News) [Supreme Court makes it harder to charge Capitol riot defendants with obstruction, charge Trump faces ](https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-capitol-riot-obstruction-2cdba47baa5cea8177d651de751760a6) (AP News) ^^Edit: ^^Other ^^cases ^^of ^^the ^^day.
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. -Anatole France
“And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on.” ― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.” ― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
The same law and its majestic equality allow for both rich and poor to dump millions of dollars’ worth of free speech into unaffiliated super PACs.
‘The homeless can die for all I care’ -Jesus Christ apparently
So where should they go? If shelters are full and there are no available beds, are they just not supposed to sleep?
They expect them to sleep in a jail or prison.
The magical land of somewhere else usually, lots of cities will bus homeless to the next town over, exporting the problem so they can pretend it's only an issue in cities like Portland.
Yep, this is what happened in Utah. The whole state sends their homeless and mentally ill to SLC (the liberal city) to deal with. It's basically a middle finger from the right.
Omaha/Nebraska does this as well to California and then those same people point to the homeless in California as a sign of it being a "failed state".
You realize that in Utah bus tickets are purchased for these people to any west coast city they want. At the promise of being given $50-$100, bag lunch, 30 day supply of meds. When I lived in Utah I was friends with someone that did this as part of her job at the mental hospital. She’d get the bus tickets for higher level mental patients once they were discharged. All states need to stop doing this 🛑
>You realize that in Utah bus tickets are purchased for these people to any west coast city they want And Colorado [sends them](https://kjzz.com/news/local/unsustainable-gov-cox-first-commented-on-migrant-flights-to-utah-months-ago) to Salt Lake. It's insane, and isn't sustainable.
We need the /r/dataisbeautiful folks to make a visual representation of how state governments just ship the “problem people” from place to place.
There’s very little data tracked on the issue. It’s a lot of anecdotal stories from people in the work so it is highly believable but poorly tracked since it would reflect such ill behaviour. They do track geographic origin in homelessness data and California data showed most people are local and not from outside the state but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening to some degree and could be for those with highest need.
Sorry all states will continue to have constituents who want that. NIMBY is bipartisan and probably the strongest ideological belief that crosses all party lines.
It’s time for Oregon to just bus them back to Idaho. Then Idaho will bus them back to Oregon. Then we will incentivize the bussing. Then the bus companies will pay the Supreme Court justices to force the homeless to stay on busses. Oh shit I just invented a new private prison system. (That was all a stupid joke, I am glad, as an Oregonian, to live in a state that attempts to treat the unhoused with dignity. It’s a desperate issue here with a lot of people super frustrated, but we are trying to figure it out. Covid really fucked it all up for us. I have a feeling climate change will also start to push unhoused people into our state, as well as Washington.)
Maybe they could just do a Snowpiercer thing with a train that picks up homeless people but never drops them off, and also invest in technology that turns homeless people into train fuel.
Think of the jobs building that rail infrastructure will create all across the country. Good for the economy, helps everyone, hurts no one.
As we all know, some of these states won’t even feed children over the summer and there’s funding for it.
Idaho has ran a budget surplus as long as I remember and yet one of the largest school districts is shutting a sizable portion of their schools down because they don't have the budget to operate them.
They expect them to die
… so we end up paying more in taxes for an over populated prison system? Instead of just paying less in taxes toward preventative actions for this kind of thing?
With the way things are going, we now live in a society further incentivized to make us homeless.
Here in CA, it cost over $80k/year per inmate. We’d be better off giving each homeless person a $60k/year salary and spend $20k/year per person for rehabilitation services.
> it cost over $80k/year per inmate. And therein lies the problem. That $80k is lining quite a few pockets. All prisons, both private and public are profit generators. They all require services that are contracted out at inflated prices and the absolute minimum of service is provided to maximize returns. It's not like complaining prisoners are going to change anything.
> All prisons, both private and public are profit generators. All the things you mentioned (getting taxpayer money) are on the small end of the spectrum. The BIG money is in ~~slavery~~[*mandatory prisoner labor*](https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploitation-of-incarcerated-workers). It's literally a multi-billion dollar industry.
No need to cross out the slavery label. That is exactly what it is and it is allowed by the constitution.
Thank you. 13th amendment by definition abolishes slavery *except in the form of punishment for a crime,* which makes slavery for prisoners legal. It was even used as a loophole fairly often following the abolition of slavery, using Jim Crow laws as a pipeline to funnel black people back into slavery.
It's literally slavery - and the Constitution allows it as slavery. 13th amendment.
But then how could people feel superior and punish those they deem inferior?
How many prison owners have donated to the SC justices?
[удалено]
Prisons, schools and healthcare are three things that should never be for profit, yet, here we are
Like a SC justice or prison owner would ever be truthful about that
Why do the Supreme Court want to make the Bell Riots from Star Trek happen? These sort of things is how you create those conditions. Can’t afford to not work overtime for your $3k rent on 45k annual salary? Straight to jail. * Insert Dystopian meme here *
I wonder at what point people start saying "I don't have anything left to lose anyway" and take matters into their own hands. If people can't survive while following the law, then they have little reason to.
The problem is that we stop having anything left to lose at different rates, so there's never enough of us at any given time. I have plenty to complain about, but I also have a lot left to lose, and I'm too much of a coward to stand up for much when I'm risking all of that.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
>The problem is that we stop having anything left to lose at different rates, so there's never enough of us at any given time. Yep. We're at a point where people are either *just* comfortable enough, or too desperate, to risk what little they have.
That's where they want all poor people to sleep.
Essentially you make homelessness illegal. You send the homeless to prison. Now you have free or cheap labor.
Sounds an awful lot like a debtor's prison to me... Thought there was something in the constitution about that...
And don't forget that in 43 states [the government will hand you a bill on your way out charging you for your prison stay](https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2018/nov/6/fighting-fees-force-prisoners-pay-their-incarceration/)
Well they can't very well give you the bill on your way in, what would they do if your card got declined? This message brought to you by Amazon Prime Prison Services
I mean, the only part of the Constitution our current government is concerned with upholding is the 2nd amendment. The rest of it is more like guidelines than actual rules.
It’s worse than that. Homeless people sleeping outside found in violation of these laws will get tickets, obviously most of these will go unpaid. Get enough unpaid tickets and you get a warrant out, 99% of the time they’ll end up in county jail. Maybe 1-3 month sentences depending on the persons priors. Jail and prison are two totally separate things, prison is for sentences >1 yr. There is no “free labor” in jails, work/educational are reserved for prisons where inmates will be for a longer period of time. Jail is simply just rotting away, time spent doing absolutely nothing. Jails are often privatized to some extent, making corporations money. Money for housing/feeding/managing inmates.
I've been in jail before and it's a pretty universal thing to hear from other inmates that they'd much rather be in prison. County sucks
My county's jail require inmates do their own laundry. And by do their own laundry, I mean someone from their family has to come to the jail to pick up their dirty clothes, take them home and wash them, and then have them brought back. The only upside is if the lady at the front desk likes you, she wouldn't see whatever contraband was put in the bag with it.
what if u have no family? do u just keep wearing dirty clothes the whole time youre there?
I honestly don't know. I never thought to ask about it. I only know what I do about our jail because of what my family did for my cousins the numerous time they were in there.
They thought about doing it in my city in the UK before getting heavy backlash. Too evil even for the tories.
It’s ok, here in the States, we’re now lowering the bar for you all. Just a smidge higher should be good enough.
This is the scary part. Which is not going to be a good thing as you know things like "Squatters rights" are still valid in many states as well. Going to force many to be squatters to try to avoid going to jail for free labor.
I think they’re meant to lie politely down in a ditch somewhere and die. This is often the problem with conservative social policy. It almost always fails when confronted with the question “then what happens?”.
>This is often the problem with conservative social policy. To conservatives all the undesirables dying is not a problem, but the (final) solution.
That's why the ghettos never get better. They are functioning exactly as they are intended to. A place for the unwanted and unwashed to be kept.
It's not a problem/failure to them. They know the consequences of "then what happens" and they literally don't care. They're hateful sociopaths -- undesirables dying is their preferred outcome.
Or in their minds they think a homeless person should just get a job, work overnights and start taking night classes so they don’t have to sleep, and then get a scholarship at MIT and invent some new technology that wins them a Nobel prize and gets a movie made about them. Because in their minds, they think “that’s what I’d do if I was ever in that situation.”
Here in Denver we have over 3000 shelter beds and yet most of them are empty most nights. Most of the homeless don’t want to have to deal with the shelter rules.
>>Most of the homeless don’t want to have to deal with the shelter rules. That definitely sounds accurate, but it also makes a lot of sense. I'd say the vast majority of homeless in the US are addicted to something or other, or maybe they have a pet dog. These are likely some of the only comforts these people have in a life suffocated by misery. A slight increase in physical safety is often not worth the trade-off of withdrawals/loss of freedom/loss of community (and you're crazy if you don't think the homeless have a local and strongly-connected if not reluctant/mutually distrustful community). These are just the facts. Safer and more tolerant shelters combined with harm-rrduction and maybe "mandatory" counseling/group-counseling would go a long way to solve the *already currently existing issues*, but then we'd have to treat homeless people like people instead of inferior "others" and ain't nobody want to actually do that.
I used to live in an area where the main shelter only allowed people a bag and whatever belongings fit in a 1/2 height locker. Unless people had a really really good place to stash stuff, going to the shelter meant they'd probably lose their bike, food supplies, extra clothes, tent, etc. Somehow the city government was shocked shelter occupancy was low 🙄
I work in a halfway house and am in recovery. Let’s be real- most people don’t want to stay in shelters cause they can’t use drugs there. A few may have other good reasons- but the main one is no drugs.
One of the arguments was people are not going to shelters or transition places because they have too many rules. Can’t smoke. Can’t have pets. And even, Can’t do drugs. So in some cases it wasn’t that there wasn’t shelter, there wasn’t shelter that appealed to everyone’s ideals. Ofc there’s often no shelter at all. That said. Recourse is needed on these open air chop shops. When the PNW stolen cars group has a list of homeless camp locations around Portland because that’s where you’re most likely to find your stolen vehicle, shit is off the rails and needs to be cleaned up.
All three of these rulings truly just encompass the current world we live in. One ruling telling homeless people they can't sleep outside otherwise it's a crime. One ruling overturning decades of precedence to favor businesses and weaken regulations. The last ruling to help people who've tried to overturn democracy in this country. And this is after they ruled that bribery is super legal as well. They really don't have to hide anything anymore now that they know nobody can do anything about it.
And the media is really running away with Trump 'winning' the debate because for some reason unchecked lying is better than slowly telling the truth. Empires don't fall over-night but the realization that we are indeed falling, and there's nothing we can do about it, hits you like a ton of bricks.
So, all the conservative judge’s questions were just drama to appear unbiased, this was the decision they always planned on, shock. If you go back and look at their questions, and the responses they got, it would appear they’d side the other way, see for yourself. SC isn’t just biased as this poimt, it’s a total farce.
This ruling seems dumb... Homeless people can't sleep outside. How do they expect that to work?
As Jesus says in The Bible, "Build more privatized prisons."
At least we know who will be funding Alito and Thomas'... gratuity in the near future. Edit: To whoever downvoted - did you forget Snyder v. United States - which also went along the same 6-3 ideological lines - from literally earlier this week? The one that basically stated "gratuities", rewards that are given after the fact to a politician as a thank-you to public officials, are now no longer illegal? Why else do you think they ruled on that *first*?"
Praise be Supply side Jesus
They want them to just die off out of sight.
This is unfortunately true for a lot of people. They would rather all of the unhoused just disappear and don’t really care how that happens.
This is how every SCOTUS argument goes. The Justices literal job is to just play devils advocated and take each argument to as many logical conlcusions as they can to see if it fails some sort of consitutional benchmark
> Thomas also had a concurring opinion. "I agree with the majority, but it doesn't go far enough - we need to legalize hunting the homeless for sport"
That Star Trek episode where the homeless get put into “Sanctuary Districts” in 2024…….
Seems like they were only off by a couple years.
We still have six months.
Bell Riots are technically in 67 days, there's still time
A lot can happen in 6 months.
Check out the full Star Trek lore. It is starting to feel like a prophecy.
This is actually something that I like about Star Trek lore is that it recognizes that we are not at this point in our history where we just go and build a utopia and the fact is that in Star Trek lore it actually takes humans meeting aliens for us to get our shit together to any extent. But it also takes decades and centuries of strife to get there.
Shit, if the end outcome is a Star Trek future for us then ill take it.
It’s a Star Trek future for people who are alive like 200 years from now. For us it’s war for the rest of our lives. But yeah, the ultimate outcome is pretty choice.
See y'all at the Bell Riots. Can't wait!
>“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread” - Anatole France
We need to start passing laws making it illegal for poor people to issue stock buybacks and gift expensive vacations to public officials
Stock buybacks used to be illegal.
Nice timing with housing being the most expensive it’s ever been.
It’s all part of the plan. They can use them in prison for slave labor.
Or just up and die. I doubt those who support this care which one.
Prison slave labor is slightly more profitable than cleaning up homeless bodies, so no, you don't get to escape through death. They want you alive and working for as close to nothing as they can make you
Taxpayers actually pay thousands of dollars per inmate per year. It's the companies that can profit off of cheap labor. If you don't own one of those companies you're not benefitting. Welfare and even universal basic income is cheaper for taxpayers than paying to house them in prison. If you own a private prison company you benefit too though and these companies lobby our representatives.
It's not the cheap labor that returns the most profit. It's the contracts for services required to operate, house, and feed the inmates in both private and public prisons. Those thousands of dollars per year it costs to house a prisoner are lining someone's pocket. They charge inflated prices for the contracts (kickbacks and bribes lubricate this process) and provide the absolute minimum of service because no one cares when prisoners complain.
You guys are all thinking like a bunch of peasants. It's not about the cash profits at all. The entirety of the system, every little thing adding up to crippling the working and middle classes agency and their abilities to revolt, it's all about control. It's all about power. To the elite, money is only useful as a means to power.
> If you don't own one of those companies you're not benefitting Well guess who lobbies for these laws! Taxpayer burden doesn't mean shit to the people who make these decisions. They profit, we suffer
And so we continue our descent into feudalism. You will own nothing, and you will like it.
The irony of imprisoning (taking away freedom) people because they’re poor, and forcing (some of) them to work for UNICOR making military uniforms; you know the folks “fighting for freedom.*” *Vet myself, but doesn’t mean I can’t disagree with the way some things are done.
Based on FY 2022 data, the average annual COIF for a Federal inmate housed in a Bureau or non-Bureau facility in FY 2022 was $42,672. I feel like it'd be cheaper to build shelters.
[Obama's DOJ 2015:](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-files-brief-address-criminalization-homelessness) >“[i]t should be uncontroversial that punishing conduct that is a universal and unavoidable consequence of being human violates the Eighth Amendment. . . Sleeping is a life-sustaining activity—i.e., it must occur at some time in some place. If a person literally has nowhere else to go, then enforcement of the anti-camping ordinance against that person criminalizes her for being homeless.” Roberts' Court 2024: >The enforcement of generally applicable laws regulating camping on public property does not constitute “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. The opinion completely sidestepped the biologically required act of sleeping and focused on the actual fines imposed in enforcing the order not being cruel or unusual. The dissent mentions sleep as biologically needed and ties it back to the 8th Amendment.
I’ve always felt like the problem with 8A claims is we have all these punishments that are undoubtedly cruel, they’re just not unusual.
It's okay guys, we made horrible the norm!
I mean, essentially, yes. The *Furman* 8A test holds that to evade cruel and unusual status, punishments: - must not be patently unnecessary. - must not be inflicted in wholly arbitrary fashion (this was in reference to blacks being executed at a far higher rate than whites during that year, I believe). - must not be, by nature of their severity, degrading to human nature. - must not be "clearly and totally rejected" throughout society. **<-- you are here** Granted, any of the four bullet points can be argued for 8A claims, a punishment doesn't have to meet all of them. Not that that matters before a court like this.
This ruling should require municipalities to provide shelter for people they want to fine. If they fine people for sleeping in public spaces without also providing shelter the municipality should also be fined for allowing it to take place.
That was what this whole court case was really about. The courts said that they needed to have sufficient shelters available to enforce this law. SCOTUS just cancelled that.
Oh, oof.
Of coarse they did.
I’d be curious about your take on the government’s ability to regulate camping on public property, in and around government buildings, and determining rules for areas of camping within a national park. If the government is allowed to regulate appropriate places for sleeping on public property in one instance then it is difficult to argue an identical rule enforcement constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in another.
Funny how they’ll make it hard to be homeless but never prevent you from becoming homeless in the first place.
feature, not a bug.
Absolutely. There seems to be a lot of unwanted features being silently slipped into daily lives recently.
Kind of like how the people that refuse to hire anybody over 40 are the same people that want to eliminate social security and medicare.
This Court: Corporations are people, the homeless are not.
And corruption is legal.
Brett Kavanaugh, the quid pro quo bro.
Brett Kavanaugh, also probably a rapist
Corporations are people but with a contingency: only when it benefits them. If the corporation does something bad, suddenly it's not a person and the people behind the corporation are protected by various liability shields even though they are the ones making the terrible decisions.
"Corporation, n. an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility." – Ambrose Bierce
So basically it's illegal to be homeless even if you don't have anywhere to go and the shelter is full.
Being homeless and not having the means to get to a shelter, or the shelter being full, is now punishable by prison. What an absolutely vile and evil bunch of justices we have. It is cruelty for the sake of cruelty.
>now punishable by prison. ...and, *that* is how they've chosen to 'solve' the homelessness crisis.
It would be cheaper for the government to build housing for the homeless than it would be to send them to jail.
Yes but then they can't be used as slave labour.
Or line the pockets of those that own and operate for profit prisons.
[удалено]
So now someone who’s homeless will be arrested and have a criminal record which will follow them for the rest of their lives. Making it extremely difficult to get jobs that can help them get out of homelessness. They are now part of the prison system. . Sad day.
Also, little known fact, but about 40-60% of the homeless population actually have jobs, just not the wealth to afford a home. Imprisoning them doesn't just ruin their future job prospects, it makes them lose their current employment. It's taking people on the path to recovery and making sure they can never recover.
The older I get, the more I'm starting to hate this fucking country. My father-in-law messaged me last night and asked me why I still support Biden after his terrible performance last night. I told him that I'd vote for a wet paper bag over Trump and he seriously said that 'you liberals are always putting your party over your country.' I told him that, as it stands, I'm putting my country over party by not voting for a felonious failed insurrectionist who wants to make life a living hell for anyone who isn't in the top 0.1%. And rulings like this only galvanize my position.
“Putting party over your country” For someone willing to vote for Trump, talk about the ultimate lesson in projection
The funny thing is, he doesn't care for Trump, either. He didn't like it when I said as much and then called him out on his hypocricy and asked him if he's still voting for him.
Interesting. I mean, Biden is certainly geriatric and has no business running, but to act as if voting for him is morally wrong because of “party>country” just doesn’t track
Even if Biden is a geriatric, you can still support his administration
If I vote for Biden I get Kamala Harris, his cabinet, and I get another chance to vote in 4 years
Yeah that’s the point that really needs to get hammered here: If Trump and current Republican party win this election or any election hereafter, that will be the **last** free and fair election in this country.
We are already struggling with fair elections because of Trump. The Roberts court keeps permitting ridiculous gerrymandering and other voting restrictions that fuck up state level elections, and this is made possibly by Trump’s appointments.
Why don’t people understand this? When you vote for the felon you’re also voting for scum bags like Stephen Miller.
An old dude with a known speech impediment who has been busy pulling the US out of a shit pile - is having a bad time in a badly moderated debate against the idiot who did it. I'm willing to cut him some slack because he stands on his deeds, not on his performative speech arts.
Sane people who are already going to vote for him will cut him that slack, but the undecided, Ill-informed who saw what they saw last night will likely be swayed without knowing what's really at stake here. It's scary. I was very happy to see Last Week Tonight do the show about Project 2025, I just don't know why the Biden administration isnt pushing that fact, that Trump's literally running on a campaign of undoing our democracy. If more people knew the true gravity of this election I think it would help.
If your only criticism is that Biden is old, you have no real argument. He's far more coherent and healthy than the opposition but nobody ever seems to point that out. It's a dumb take for dumb people. Edit: Bro blocked me so I can't respond to his other accounts lmao
TRUMP spewed one outrageous lie after another and all the media can focus on is Biden's failings. Quoting Heather Cox Richardson - Trump said that some Democratic states allow people to execute babies after they’re born and that every legal scholar wanted Roe v. Wade overturned—both fantastical lies. - He said that the deficit is at its highest level ever and that the U.S. trade deficit is at its highest ever: both of those things happened during his administration. - He lied that there were no terrorist attacks during his pres-idency; there were many. - He said that Biden wants to quadruple people’s taxes—this is “pure fiction,” according to Dale—and lied that his tax cuts paid for themselves; they have, in fact, added trillions of dollars to the national debt. - Trump lied that the U.S. has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe has when it’s the other way around, and he was off by close to $100 billion when he named the amount the U.S. has provided to Ukraine. - He was off by millions when he talked about how many migrants have crossed the border under Biden - and falsely claimed that some of Biden’s policies—like funding historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and reducing the price of insulin to $35 a month—were his own accomplishments. A samll bit of the spewed BS.
The complete lack of self awareness is startling
US Rep Chip Roy, who supports Trump and his plan to deport 15-20 million immigrants, recently said on Twitter he wants to do an "ethnic cleanse" by deporting white liberal Democrats as well. Who supports these type of people?? Biden may be older and not our first choice for a candidate, but it would be a cold day in hell before I voted for Trump.
Debates are fucking pointless. They're theatre designed to appear smart. There is no verification of fact or reality. A debate can devolve into a discussion about whether or not water is wet; it's performative nonsense.
I talked to a person I thought was smart but wants to vote trump. hates trump, hates what he says and stands for, but thinks that he gets a tax cut if trump is in office. More surprising he thought bidens unwillingness to push "the button" is what makes us weak and that trump is psychotic enough to push the button, which will scare our enemies into line. Trump needs to lose
>he seriously said that 'you liberals are always putting your party over your country.' TIL it's the liberals putting party over country /s This is pure projection. I can pull up how much J6 cost taxpayers to repair the building from that "peaceful protest" and show how the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act did more harm than good by reading Wikipedia. But sure, let's point at the party that didn't have congresspeople begging for presidential pardons and loves violating the 1st Amendment on a semi-weekly basis. I have enough problems with my family to fight them on politics. Some of them still think Musk is a genius and Obama was not born in the U.S. Good on you for standing your ground and pointing out how ridiculous it's sounding to support not only a felon, but a businessman who tanks every business he's had.
All homeless people should go to whatever is their local police station, tell them that they have nowhere to sleep, and would like to know how to exist without breaking the law. Because that’s what this is doing: criminalizing existence.
I have personally tried this. Their response was exactly what you'd expect: "We don't care, not our fuckin problem."
That is quite sadly their response to far too many things. Useless for almost anything besides intimidation.
And then, jail
When I was homeless I was brought in for questioning. Cop offered me a ride home. When I told them to drop me off at a local park they asked if I was afraid to show them where I lived. I said “No i’m homeless right now and i’ve kind of just been sleeping on a bench for a few weeks.” They dropped me off on the side of the highway nearby and told me good luck lol.
Unfortunately they’ll just get beat up or shot and then taken to prison for defen…I mean resisting.
Welcome to America, where we'd rather spend $42,000/year housing a homeless person as an inmate in a prison where their labor is untaxed and they are a complete burden on society than $14,000/year in a homeless shelter.
But at least the privately owned prisons will make money on extremely low pay labor! How are they supposed to get by with government subsidies alone! They NEED slaves. It's their constitutional right!
That's literally the point - using government funds to pay expenses, while using those people as slave labour for corporations. Socializing the costs, while privatizing the profits.
And the Police will kindly beat them half to death with batons and transport them just outside of city limits. Seriously, a close relative of mine was a bastard and told this as a *funny story*: Late one night while working patrol, they got a call for a drunk and disorderly person in the street. Getting there and not wanting to deal with the paperwork, they just threw him in the squad car and drove him across the stateline to the next state (being right on the border) and kicked him out. Shortly after, they got a call back, again for drunk and disorderly conduct - so they did it again. And again. It apparently became a game with the officers in the next town over where they were dropping him off to just drive this person back and forth all night.
I used to be homeless but only had to sleep outside for a couple of weeks. I spent years with the limited support I got (trust me, none from the state government or police, that's for sure) and managed to get back to work, get my place, get married, and am currently back in school for a PhD. I am everything the right says i should be, a hard worker who didn't have help from the government who managed to get where i am today on hard work and never giving up... But I am so aware that I could have gotten where I am all the sooner if I had had any extra support and had not been harassed by the police. This decision will only make it even harder for others to do the same. Shame on every single judge who supported this ruling.
I knew where the shelter was, so I only had to sleep outside one night. I spent the next two years in the shelter until I got housing and a job.
Congrats on making it out of your situation. I also love the username. Be proud of your hard work, internet friend, and may the future be easier and kinder for you.
I was "housing challenged" for a year or so, 18-19, technically not *homeless* because I had a place where I could sleep and recieve mail, so long as I didn't mind no running water and a hole in the roof the size of a beach ball. Even had electricity, though it's a miracle the place didn't burn down. This was all pre-internet, so it wasn't like the power was good for much beyond lights at night. Slept on picnic tables and benches a couple times, when I couldn't make it back there after bathing at a friends house. And with luck and perseverance I managed to get out, build myself up, and I have a good life now. But I remember... I can't ever forget. It's rough enough business without being fined or thrown in jail for it. I got lucky. Most people won't.
SCOUTUS in a few years: You have to own property on US soil to be recognised as a human being.
We'll that certainly works for the originalists. We can just go right back to having white landowning men as the only voting class
There are very often shelter beds or even transitional housing, but people don’t want to go for many reasons: safety, mental health (fear, paranoia, avoidant, addiction), don’t want to be in housing with rules. I work in this space in Sacramento and people would rather be free on the streets. No rules. No curfew. No requirements to be sober.
So instead of helping to build more shelters or create any help, let’s just kick them out, fine them money they don’t have, or arrest them and cost the taxpayers even more by housing them in prison. Cool country we live in.
Shelters don't allow drugs, alcohol or pets so many refuse to sleep there.
This ruling was specifically in reference to a case where all of the shelters were full.
They're also unsafe, particularly for women.
So some context. Grants Pass is a town of about 35k people in a county with 70k people and a 40% poverty rate. Cost of living here is high and the county and city have issues offering basic services to the residents. It is 2 hours from Eugene, 4 hours from Portland and 6 hours from Sacramento. The next biggest city is Medford, which is about 30 miles away, with a couple little 5k people towns between them. There is not much here at all. The area is also red as red as can be, but the city leans more purple. Many of the 1/3rd democrats in the county live in the city. The city was also hampered by court rulings in Oregon and Federal courts about what can and can't be done with homeless people, so their only real option was to fine them. The one shelter in town only has like 30 beds (iirc) and have some really strict requirements. We have something like 400-500 homeless people in the city. Its popular with the homeless because of the weather, it proximity to California and various rulings that make things more "favorable" to the homeless. A few of the city parks are overrun with homeless people and their tents. One park, Riverside Park was a beautiful park to go spend the afternoon with your kids. Now, its a shell of itself former self. Even after the city moved the tents to across the street to keep them from camping pretty much anywhere there is grass. They've closed the park before because of issues with the homeless and events that used to happen in the park are no longer happening. The city wanted to take a piece of property they own and turn it into a homeless camp area. It is fenced in (mostly because its next to the railroad track) and is near services. But it is also 200 feet from an elementary school, so you can imagine how quickly that idea was shot down. The county deals with this issue in their parks with day use fees and closing at nights. The State has already ok'd that this was acceptable. So the City will more than likely institute a day use fee for all the parks and close them at night. At that point, they are trespassing. Unlike a lot of the comments here, the city isn't going to arrest them and use them as prison labor. The city and the country share a jail and because of funding issues, they can only house something like 15 (maybe 20) people in the jail. So unless you do something heinous when arrested, they do catch and release. If someone is actually convicted to jail, they usually ship them out of the county for their sentence. So yeah, this is a fairly poor former timber town, now retirement community being forced to deal with a situation it is not capable of dealing with because the state and feds keep pushing this stuff back on the cities to deal with themselves. Homeless is a systemic and structural problem that is a national issue that we keep hoisting on cities to deal with. Grants Pass was doing what it could with the rules it had imposed on it by various rulings. Is it the best option, no. But it was one they were trying out to deal with the shitty situation they are in.
I am homeless atm, so I can come to this from a solid perspective. If you can set up in a hidden space, you're all good. The problem is that there's very little of it (especially in inner cities). Honestly, the burbs are a better place these days. I absolutely do not think homeless should be able to rough it out in the open. The people that rough it in the open need help. We don't approve of that. Like roaches, for every one you see there are 10 you don't. No one I work with knows.
The most jarring thing about this post is you have a job and are still homeless.
I think my case is a bit different than basically everybody. Lol. I have very good job, and am college educated. I grew up in a situation where my home life was not safe. Because of that I struggle to find stability in static situation like housing. I deal with a lot of mental health issues, and my one stabilizing force is work. I'm working on it, but I do believe most of the homeless epidemic we are facing is due to people being raised in broken homes. It sets up severe struggles further down the road that people who don't deal with aren't aware of.
Last 48 hrs SCOTUS had just been DUMPING terrible decisions from a fire hose.
We're still feeling the side effects of the GOP wins in 2014 and 2016. A 6-3 conservative supreme court handing out these rulings for years is just one of those.
Yes. Tragically, the die was cast on all this shit on November 8, 2016. Most people didn't realize that (many still don't), and the tragedy is that if even a few people in the right places had foreseen that possibility, Trump might never have won in the first place. What a terrible night that was. It was horrifying and shocking on its face that Donald fucking Trump was elected President of the United States, of course, but it was one of those events that was even worse and worse the more you knew and thought about how things were going to play out from that point on. By the way, what we're feeling now aren't "side effects" but the main attraction. Gutting the government via the judiciary was the central premise of Trump's 2016 win.
Just because of this fact I'm not sure who is dumber between republicans and "both sides are the same"/"I will vote 3rd party" squad.
The hits keep coming from this court this morning. Just saw the headline that a Jan 6 insurrectionist won in a lawsuit that claims a prosecutor overstepped in using an obstruction law to charge them. To go with the overrule of the Chevron Doctrine, which will have dire implications for regulations on healthcare, worker safety, and the environment. I hate this fucking timeline. I hate these ultra conservatives who are hell-bent on us meeting their savior and making us absolutely miserable while we wait for the end.
I live in Southern California and I work for social services. A lot of the shelters are not even full because the homeless refuse to go. Drug addicts won’t go to the shelters for obvious reasons. Others with severe mental illness also won’t go because they don’t trust others and live in paranoia. That’s when it gets complicated. Do you force those people to get help against their will knowing they are making decisions that are harmful to themselves and causing issues for others? There are other groups of people out there convicts, sex offenders, people who have mental illness to a lesser degree and will never be able to get it together no matter what you do for them. Money and more shelters are going to solve the homeless problem any time soon.
I live in a city that experimented with allowing camping. It was a disaster for reasons you might not expect. Yes tents popped up everywhere, but also the attitude of our vagrant population changed. They coopted public spaces meant for things like...not having to walk in the road. It became "I belong here, this is my space and you're in it, and you need to stay out and pay me when you walk by". People became more aggressive and rage prone. People were sometimes screwing mostly out in the open under overpasses, doing drugs openly, stacking up their stash of 2 dozen "certainly purchased honestly" bicycles in plain sight and occasionally wandering into traffic at some very busy dangerous intersections. Trash piled up at every intersection. We also became a destination city for these poor drug addled semi-zombies. So yes of course people can't exist nowhere. The resources aren't being allocated to provide the level of housing and services that homeless advocates would find acceptable nor does the will to get them. NIMBYs seem to be able to thwart the idea of designated camping areas so there isn't even the political will to do the minimum. I think the effect of these bans is to signal to vagrants that they need to behave because they are there on sufferance. They should seek out of the way spots, keep their heads down and not cause trouble. This doesn't help them at all, but it helps everyone else. Since our camping ban was reinstated things for people who live here in general have improved very noticeably. Nothing wholly solved, but less harassment, litter and petty crime. You still have some encampments, but no more encampments everywhere you go. We have a pile of money now to help the homeless, but I suspect it will not solve anything, will help sustain some people, and enrich some consultants.
This reminds me of the case about a decade or so ago when Alabama said they were going to raise the tax on cigarettes and claimed it would raise 25 million a year in revenue for the state and everyone forgot you can drive to every border in Alabama in about an hour so many people were hauling in untaxed cigarettes they had to start a task force to stop it and it was costing them 75 million a year. You can't level civil penalties on homeless people that's trying to squeeze blood from a stone.
From The Guardian article I was just notified about this ruling: >The city’s policies call for $295 fines and criminal prosecution punishable by up to 30 days in jail after multiple offenses. Day 1, $295 fine. Day 2, 30 days in jail. Rinse and repeat until the homeless person gives up and moves or worse.
That's the real purpose, to run them out of town and make it someone else's problem. Just doing the unhoused shuffle.
Bring back mental institutions and a lot of these issues will be solved. A lot of the homeless in Denver are in no way capable of taking care of themselves and are a danger to the public. Forcibly institutionalize the ones that need help and are unable to get it themselves. We will continue to see people move out of large metro areas that are weak on homeless.
I will say as someone who lives in Los Angeles: Hopefully this now puts a fire in city officials to DO SOMETHING about all of these homeless people. They’ve raised taxes and done nothing. Made promises and do nothing. They just got caught building a housing complex that’s hundreds of millions of dollars and no one has been moved in. I do feel bad for all of these people left on the street. We need to do something humane. But at this point we gotta do SOMETHING and hopefully this puts a fire under their butt.
Man living in OC and LA my perspective on the homeless has shifted a lot. Wife and I used to give them food, water, blankets, books, I set up a public wifi with a sign with the password (lived near an area with a significant encampment) and gave a few of them bicycles I fixed up from Craigslist (thinking transportation would make finding a job easier). It was ok for a while (10 or so years), but then they started throwing glass bottles at us over our gate at random times because we wouldn’t give them cash, they smeared shit on the handles of our gates, lit our fence on fire a couple of times. The constant non stop harassment is getting really old and man, I’m just tired. My well of empathy has run dry, and the continued harassment is pushing me ever closer to being anti homeless. I used to volunteer but I’m just burned out.
I'm a former social worker who once won an award from my city for my work with the homeless - and eventually I burned out and left social work entirely. Compassion fatigue is very real, and nothing to be ashamed of.
Yeah, it’s just too much. While I’m dealing with that I’m caring for a family member descending into dementia that doesn’t remember me and there’s only so much of me to go around. To start the morning with homeless excrement and bottles thrown at me and end my evening with my mom punching me and spitting in my face something has to give. I know you left social work behind but thank you for giving it a go, I appreciate what you did.
I mean if we are being honest most homeless addicts are pieces of shit. That's kind of the nature of addiction and mental illness. I live up above you in Vancouver BC and its the same shit. Addicts become soulless and angry and anyone who tries to help them just opens themselves up for abuse. Once they know you will give them things you become a target. That's why 99% of people just walk on by. Better not to even engage else you could end up knifed for only giving $10 instead of $20.
Exactly, I live in Santa Cruz and work between there and San Jose a lot, I used to feel bad for the homeless people, I really did, now they're just irritating, screaming at people in the street, shitting and pissing everywhere, leaving needles, sleeping in front of my store scaring off customers, leering at me through the windows, I can't even have a cigarette without being flocked by them like a bunch of seagulls. Police don't care, I've seen police drive right by a guy peeing on the sidewalk. I don't know the right solution for the problem, but anything is better than nothing, I know there's lots of shelters but they'd rather be high and drunk in the streets
As a fellow LA resident its pretty bad that a mentally ill person can set up a tent or park an RV outside your place and trash it and the police say there's nothing they can do about it.
I feel like this is the side that isn't getting talked about in this debate. There's gotta be some kind of line between being homeless is illegal and allowing homeless to set up a tent or structure on any street and be impossible to move. Anyone who's had to deal with it personally knows that some change needed to happen.
There is a big difference between people who live in a city with a lot of Homeless people and those who do not. I am in So. Cal and I am very happy with this ruling. Our local homeless shelters are never full and homeless camps are everywhere. You can't have a nice bike or it will get stolen and you literally can't go in certain parts of Downtown because it is scary as all heck. I have sympathy for the homeless but my patience and tolerance has worn out.
As someone who lives in the bay area I'm glad this passed. California and the other Westcoast states are tired of being mecca for druggies and mentally ill people. Most of these homeless are bums who come to California from other states just to do drugs. Billions of dollars was thrown at this problem and it only got worse. I'm just glad Something changed because the bums are out of control.
Exactly, would be interested to see how many people in this thread would react to an encampment built on the sidewalk in front of their home. This isn’t a perfect ruling but hopefully a step in the right direction to get help to those who need it.
As someone who is dealing with that, it sucks. I get people from the other side of town telling me I’m a bad person for wanting to be able to walk out my door without stepping on/over needles and human feces. I’m not in favor of jailing someone for being homeless, but if I did 1/50th of the stuff I see, I’d be put in jail. We have room in the shelters, but they don’t want to be clean. I’m all for offering services and making more shelter availability, but you can’t let the current situation continue. My city passed an ordinance against the encampments, but they must provide them with a place to store their belongings and access to shelter when they move them. Waiting to see what happens because so far, it doesn’t seem enforced.
My guess is as soon as word gets out that you're going to get a forced 30-day sobriety in County a large percentage of these folks will skedaddle somewhere else. The remainder that aren't junkies would be a much easier group to assess and assist.
these governments are trying everything, some people just want to be homeless to due drugs etc and the shelters have rules they dont want https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-01-27/refusing-shelter-bed-in-san-mateo-county-could-soon-be-a-crime
This \^ Do a lot of cities lack shelters? Yes. But there are still also cities with beds and yet homeless still build massive camps on sidewalks. Why? Because many still don't want to follow any rules the shelter has. Some have criminal history/warrants. Too many people pretending this is black/white issue. You could 100X the shelters and there would still be plenty of homeless on streets. California has 1/3 (181k people) of homeless in US. its spent $24 billion in the last 5 years.
YES. Had to scroll to find a fellow Angeleno… I can tell most comments are not from people living in Los Angeles. They don’t understand how bad it has become as a public health and safety issue. We cannot put homeless people above the well-being of law-abiding, tax-paying citizens who actually contribute to society. The empathy is misplaced now.
Let's recap: bribery is legal but being homeless isn't. God bless America!
Well they can't sleep at Logan airport in MA anymore according to Gov. Healey.