Is It Cruel to Ban Public Camping?
The 9th Circuit says it is, at least under some circumstances.
WaPo (“Supreme Court to review restrictions on homeless encampments“):
The Supreme Court said Friday it will consider whether state and local officials can punish homeless individuals for camping and sleeping in public spaces when shelter beds are unavailable.
The justices will review a lower court decision that declared it unconstitutional to enforce anti-camping laws against homeless individuals when they have nowhere else to sleep.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which covers Western states, including California, Oregon and Washington, first held in 2018 that the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment prohibits cities from criminalizing public camping when shelter is unavailable.
The city of Grants Pass, Ore., asked the justices to overturn a similar recent decision involving civil fines and warned that the ruling would paralyze cities across the West from addressing safety and public health risks created by tents and makeshift structures. The 9th Circuit’s decision, the officials said, is standing in the way of a comprehensive response to the growth of public encampments.
“The consequences of inaction are dire for those living both in and near encampments: crime, fires, the reemergence of medieval diseases, environmental harm and record levels of drug overdoses and deaths on public streets,” lawyers for the city told the high court.
The city’s position has some surprising support from California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and Democratic leaders of cities, including San Francisco and Portland, Ore., that are on the front lines of the homelessness crisis driven in part by the high cost of housing.
In response, lawyers for the homeless individuals said Grants Pass is essentially punishing homeless residents for existing within city limits and urged the justices to uphold the 9th Circuit ruling. Nothing in the decision, they said, prevents cities from dismantling homeless encampments.
Ed Johnson, director of litigation at the Oregon Law Center, said the Constitution does not allow cities to punish people for having an involuntary status, including being involuntarily homeless.
[…]
In 2013, Grants Pass began enforcing ordinances that make it unlawful to sleep on public sidewalks and streets, and prohibit camping in public places, including in parks. The city enforces its rules through civil citations. If a person has been cited twice, officers can bar that person from a city park for 30 days.
There are no homeless shelters in the city and two privately owned housing programs only serve a small fraction of the homeless population, according to court filings.
While it’s arguably cruel to tell people with nowhere else to go that they can’t sleep on public sidewalks are camp in public parks, the idea that it’s “cruel and unusual punishment” under the 8th Amendment struck me as weird, since we typically apply the clause to the nature of the punishment itself.
SCOTUSBlog’s Amy Howe adds some context:
The question is one that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, based in San Francisco, has grappled with repeatedly in recent years. In Martin v. City of Boise, the court of appeals held that punishing homeless people for public camping would violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment if they did not have access to shelter elsewhere. The court of appeals reasoned that, just as the city could not punish someone for their status – being homeless – it also could not punish them for conduct “that is an unavoidable consequence of being homeless.”
Scanning the linked opinion, I see this pertinent discussion:
The Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause “circumscribes the criminal process in three ways.” Ingraham, 430 U.S. at 667. First, it limits the type of punishment the government may impose; second, it proscribes punishment “grossly disproportionate” to the severity of the crime; and third, it places substantive limits on what the government may criminalize. Id. It is the third limitation that is pertinent here.
“Even one day in prison would be cruel and unusual punishment for the ‘crime’ of having a common cold.” Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660, 667 (1962). Cases construing substantive limits as to what the government may criminalize are rare, however, and for good reason — the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause’s third limitation is “one to be applied sparingly.” Ingraham, 430 U.S. at 667.
Robinson, the seminal case in this branch of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, held a California statute that “ma[de]the ‘status’ of narcotic addiction a criminal offense” invalid under the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause. 370 U.S. at 666. The California law at issue in Robinson was “not one which punished [d]a person for the use of narcotics, for their purchase, sale or possession, or for antisocial or disorderly behavior resulting from their administration”; it punished addiction itself. Id.
So, in fact, the ruling here is on sound, if dated, footing. Indeed, considering that the very act of taking most non-prescription narcotics, the forerunner to becoming addicted to them, was itself illegal, the Robinson precedent is especially interesting here. After all, it’s not a crime to be homeless.
But, interestingly, the Martin opinion then undermines the argument in the next paragraphs:
In Powell v. Texas, 392 U.S. 514 (1968), however, the court elaborated on the principle first articulated in Robinson. Powell concerned the constitutionality of a Texas law making public drunkenness a criminal offense. Justice Marshall, writing for a plurality of the Court, distinguished the Texas statute from the issue in Robinson on the ground that the Texas statute made criminal not alcoholism but conduct—appearing public while intoxicated. “[A]ppellant was convicted, not for being a chronic alcoholic, but for being in public while drunk on a particular occasion. The State of Texas thus has not sought to punish a mere status, as California did in Robinson; nor has it attempted to regulate appellant’s behavior in the privacy of his own home.” Id. at 532 (plurality opinion)
Interestlingly, the Martin opinion turns to Justice Byron White’s solo Powell concurrence arguing that, for many chronic alcoholics, homelessness may be an unavoidable consequence, and thus essentially a status. He just didn’t think that was the case in this particular instance. The four dissenters agreed with Powell on the first point but not the second.
The four dissenting Justices adopted a position consistent with that taken by Justice White: that under Robinson, “criminal penalties may not be inflicted upon a person forbeing in a condition he is powerless to change,” and that the defendant, “once intoxicated, .. . could not prevent himself from appearing in public places.” Id. at 567 (Fortas, J.,dissenting). Thus, five Justices gleaned from Robinson the principle that “that the Eighth Amendment prohibits the state from punishing an involuntary act or condition if it is the unavoidable consequence of one’s status or being.”
It’s rather odd to build one’s case on a dissenting opinion. But, in this instance, we actually have a majority agreeing on this particular principle, even though the actual holding in the case went in the other direction.
Now, I disagree wholeheartedly with Powell dissenters. To the extent one’s conduct is harmful, the degree to which you can’t control your predilection to such conduct strikes me as irrelevant. That a rapist has mental health problems that make controlling their anger and impulses extremely challenging surely doesn’t make them free to rape. That an alcoholic is compelled to drink doesn’t give them a license to drive intoxicated.
But, of course, sleeping in public is a markedly different sort of offense than rape or drunk driving. It seems to me that, to the extent the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause is implicated here, it’s simply a balancing test between the impact of homeless encampments on the community and the seeming cruelty of punishing a homeless person for sleeping outdoors when he has nowhere indoors to go.
Naturally, the WSJ Editorial Board (“Is There a Constitutional Right to Vagrancy?“) is having none of it. Alas, they hang their case on a falsehood:
A panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2022 blocked the Oregon town of Grants Pass from enforcing “anti-camping” laws on public property. The judges said the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment prohibits cities from arresting or imposing penalties on homeless people for squatting on public property if there aren’t enough shelter beds for every vagrant.
Progressives have used the ruling to sue to stop cities across the West from enforcing similar laws. Under the appellate court’s precedent, a police officer in, say, San Francisco can’t cite a homeless person who has set up a tent inside a public playground even if he has been offered temporary housing.
Both of these assertions are wrong. Most obviously, as their own summary in the preceding paragraph notes, the ruling specifically applies only in cases where shelter is unavailable. But, also, both Martin and Grants Pass make it clear that municipalities can impose reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions. I’m rather certain the court would allow prohibitions of camping on school grounds or a playground in order to keep kids safe. It’s just that the city can’t simultaneously provide inadequate shelter for its homeless population and then punish the for sleeping anywhere outside.
They also cite the dissenting judge:
In a fiery dissent, Judge Patrick Bumatay explained that nothing in “the text, history and tradition” of the Eighth Amendment “comes close to prohibiting enforcement of commonplace anti-vagrancy laws.” The court’s “sweeping injunction has no basis in the Constitution or our precedent,” he added. “San Francisco should not be treated as an experiment for judicial tinkering.”
“Our decision is cruel because it leaves the citizens of San Francisco powerless to enforce their own health and safety laws without the permission of a federal judge,” Judge Bumatay wrote. “And it’s unusual because no other court in the country has interpreted the Constitution in this way.” This may be one reason the High Court agreed to hear the Grants Pass appeal.
The Supreme Court actually started striking down vagrancy laws way back in 1972. But those decisions were based on the vagueness of the laws and an inherent right to travel freely, not the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause.
While some of my views have shifted leftward over the years, I’m still fundamentally a law and order guy. Citizens should have a right to walk the streets without stepping over people camping on the sidewalks and to not have their public parks turned into drug-infested communes. Apparently, even the likes of Gavin Newsom agree; if nothing else, their constituents seem to.
But that expectation has to be coupled with some obligation to provide basic services for these people. I don’t really know what exactly that entails. Many, if not the overwhelming number of them, are mentally ill and/or addicts. We decided decades ago that locking them up wasn’t the answer. And, obviously, providing them food and shelter indefinitely is expensive. But issuing them citations with fines they can’t pay isn’t the answer, either.
Seems to me that with all the Political Christians (as opposed to the regular kind) we have in this country, some of them might want to adopt the homeless in their communities and help them get back on their feet. They could set up group homes right beside their churches and visit every day. If they value the sanctity of life, then it seems to me preserving life that already exists is a good way to show the Jesus-love. There are lots of regular Christians doing it every day.
I think the focus on the cruelty is beside the point, the practice is just a foolish waste of resources.
All the police do is shoo them from this corner to that, then again to another, in an endless game of cat and mouse.
But homelessness is a problem which very few are willing to tackle honestly because any solution is wickedly expensive and requiring a lot of moving parts in concert and anyway, the voters don’t really want one, or at least aren’t willing to reward those who solve it.
@Not the IT Dept.:
Group homes sound great but we have them available but why don’t homeless people use them? Because many of them have drug or alcohol problems. The homes would interfere with this, so the homeless stay away from them.
I don’t particularly care for your characterization of Christians. My devout Roman Catholic Filipina wife, who attends mass every day, started and has run the sandwich ministry at our church for about 15 years. The sandwich ministry supplies food and beverage to anyone who comes to the church office, 3 days a week. Two pastors have supported this ministry and many parishoners.
From 2009 to 2014, the generosity of people at our parrish kept me and the wife sheltered and fed while I battled cancer. I can’t remember how many times our electric bill was paid or the times we were given Publix gift cards so we could eat and get my medicines.
Your ordinary RC parrish doesn’t have the means to shelter homeless. Ministries like the one run by wife is the best they can do.
If the courts rule against the city here, and given that they have ruled in favor of Texas and Florida busing immigrants, a partial solution would be to find out where the drug addicted and mentally ill homeless are actually from, give them a tent and drive them or bus them to a park in that location. I’m not being facetious here. Suburbs are built to paracitize cities and rural areas, and their lack of public transportation and sidewalks, their zoning laws and heavy presence of police constantly exhorted to use their “cop sense” to identify people “who don’t belong here” and harass them or worse, ensures that anyone in the suburbs who falls into despair is ejected into the nearby city or into the rural area. Why should the city be responsible for every drug addict or person with mental illness in a 100 mile radius, and the rural areas get all the meth heads?
Both the rich and the poor are banned from sleeping under bridges.
@Bill Jempty: He(?) specifically referred to “Political Christians (as opposed to the regular kind).” He’s not talking about your wife, he’s talking about the politicians who swear up and down how Christian they are while never doing a damn thing to help the people who need it the most. You know, as Jesus preached.
@OzarkHillbilly:
My wife is a registered Republican who has voted for Trump.
@Bill Jempty: That says a lot more than you think it does, but voting does not make one political.
@Chip Daniels:
This sounds good in theory, but in reality the tent camps quickly become open air drug and prostitution markets, and assault and sexual violence are rampant. Where do you think these addicts are getting money for their fixes? Bank accounts? Commuter jobs?
The loners you are envisioning don’t stay in such places. Come visit me, and I’ll introduce you to some of them, who don’t typically stay on street corners. If I think of a five minute walk from my house, there is a mentally ill woman who sleeps in the doorway of a church, another who sleeps in an alcove at the (very nice) Lutheran owned senior housing center, and an older man who I don’t know much about who sleeps in the doorway adjoining church. What they all have in common is that they stay away from the addicts, because they are dangerous people to be around, for a dozen different reasons. They, by necessity, have a very realistic view of what the junkie homeless are about.
@Bill Jempty:
As @OzarkHillbilly: points out, the remark was in reference to political Christians.
If even half of professed Christians were the sort of Christian you wife is, we’d be living in paradise. And I say this as an atheist. But the reality is that very few professed Christians behave as if they were followers of Christ. Being a real Christian is hard; using religion as an excuse to be a flaming asshole is easy. You’d think the actual Christians would be the ones to push back against the political Christians, but generally, nope. They just passively allow their religion to be represented by scum. Pity.
@Bill Jempty:
I believe he specifically referred to “Political Christians” not just “Christians.” We so-called Christians who are politically involved can and should be much more vocal in supporting policies that alleviate poverty. Instead, we have a swath of Christians who vote for in opposition to public healthcare and in support of greed and cutthroat corporatism.
Evangelicals and Trump-voting Christians have so much to say about politics — where were they during the child tax cuts debate? During the paid family leave debate?
As to characterization, let’s not mischaracterize the homeless either. Most have a constellation of problems — physical disabilities, severe mental health issues often driven by severe trauma, and/or substance use disorders. It’s often unclear which is the chicken and which is the egg — the homelessness or the problems.
The best data suggests that as little as 25% and as much 50% have drug or alcohol problems; we don’t know, but it’s not a majority. The top cause of homelessness is lack of affordable housing.
There are not enough group home or shelter beds for all of America’s homeless, not even close. That we do know, it’s just numbers. So that’s the main reason they are not used.
Nor is there enough public investment in mental healthcare, to help rehabilitation efforts. Not even close.
(I am both a Protestant, and got most of my psychologist internship hours working at L.A. County’s biggest homeless program.)
@Bill Jempty: I don’t ask the politics of those I volunteer with but I’m pretty sure it varies widely and often differs substantially from my own. As much as we like to pigeonhole people I haven’t ever noticed a significant correlation with someone’s political views and the likelihood of finding them volunteering.
I second your conclusion;
@MarkedMan:
Every now and then someone gets frustrated and declares “To hell with it, lets just go all Judge Dredd and round them all up and arrest them!”
To which I respond “I wish a muthaf@cker would!”
Because jailing homeless people is the single most expensive option which is why the idea gets floated then collapses of its own weight.
Homelessness tracks closely with high rents. Places with low rents like Mississippi and West Virginia have just as many drunks and meth addicts as Los Angeles, but they are able to find places to flop.
If we are to get serious about homelessness, we will need to get serious about building massive amounts of new housing, and be willing to spend a lot of money to do it.
@MarkedMan:
Are you being facetious about not being facetious?
Re the person experiencing homelessness and/or the person with mental illness and/or the person who is addicted to drugs and/or the person whose life is being ravaged by meth…
Do these people get a say in the matter? Do you think they will be better off to be relocated to where they are “actually from”?
I’m not trying to signal my moral purity. Like you and your wife, I actually have skin in the game on this matter. Nor do I disagree with your broader point about cities, suburbs, and rural areas.
I’m just reacting to your comment as written and wondering if you might say more about the implications of your non-facetious policy.
@DK: I could pick nits but I think you’ve nailed the essential issue. One nit worth p I king though, the addicted homeless are often incapable of adhering to even minimal housing rules, “don’t sell drugs, don’t engage in prostitution, don’t assault your co-residents, don’t leave piles of rotting food in the middle of the floor until the whole place is run over with rats.
@Mimai:
Say? Sure. But the idea that when someone is mentally ill it obligates us to endure any behavior anywhere is a non-starter. What if they say they want to set up a tent on your front lawn? And bring twenty or so friends with them? Or the park down the street?
For crying out loud, we know what shantytowns are like all over the world. The worst and most violent gangs have risen from the drug trade and human trafficking that inevitably arises in such places.
It’s very difficult to solve a problem when the people best motivated to solve the problem, refuse to face the realities of that problem. Addicts don’t give much of a fuck about a warm bed in a shelter, addicts prioritize drugs far, far above any consideration of quality of life. The high is their quality of life. It’s not ‘the’ homeless problem, singular, it’s the problems of homelessness plural: expensive housing, zoning restrictions, NIMBYism, yes, all that, but above all, addiction, followed closely by mental illness, with a relatively small number of the idealized homeless.
I keep a small stash of cash in the side pockets of my cars for homeless begging at stop lights. But when I see a mouth full of meth-rotted teeth, I’m not sure I’m doing anyone any favors by handing them cash for their next fix. “Here, have a fiver, maybe that’ll buy the dose that finally kills you.”
I’m tempted by the idea of legalizing all drugs and subsidizing the hardcore addicts. Establish trailer parks or tiny home blocks specifically set aside for registered addicts. With free and legal drugs you can get on with the business of killing yourself without the need to prey on others. Or, maybe you find the wherewithal to pull your life together.
Our church has run a soup kitchen for many years through a combination of volunteer workers, contributions from church members and some financial support from outside private donors and a government source. We recently lost the govt source, cost cutting by a new right wing govt leadership, and losing a couple of the big private donors. Ours is a small church so we cant run the kitchen without that help so we are shutting it down. Of note, there are a number of large evangelical churches in the area. None of them run a soup kitchen. They have some outreach programs into the poor communities but mostly aimed at evangelism though they do hand out stuff at Christmas and hand out canned foods. The Catholic diocese runs a shelter (Wife and I cooked for them for several years until we got too old) which also gets govt monies.
So from my POV, and maybe there are places where it’s not true, it really is the politicized christians who are not especially interested in providing physical aid to the poor. Preach and lead them to salvation? Yes. Provide food and shelter? No, they are bums and addicts and worse, probably Democrats. Much like abortion where they only support life until the cord is cut. (While I may disagree with the Catholics on abortion they have generally been pretty good about providing aid for the needy and I have a lot of respect for those efforts even if they do undercut it sometimes with silly stuff like their weird beliefs about contraceptives.)
Steve
@Steven L. Taylor:
Couple of observations.
I don’t know about the diocese, but most RC parishes aren’t sitting on hoardes of money. The diocese and St Joan of Arc in Boca Raton and St Edward’s in Palm Beach might. My wife’s original pastor/boss had supposedly socked away several tens of thousands in savings* for the church but his successor put the church in debt. Nor do they have property for buildings to house anyone but the priests.
Talking about property, our church has a parking lot behind where the original church was. It lays mostly unused. For a while, our pastor was allowing Ritz Carlton employees to park there. The hotel, in Manalapan and about 2-3 miles from the church, would bus employees back and forth and paid the church for use of the lot. Until the city of Lantana put a kibosh on it. The lot doesn’t get used now except on Christmas when crowds are much bigger than normal. The parking lot is also next to a non RC school, Helping out with the overflows there would be nice but that’s verbotten too.
*- The savings are needed for repair after a hurricane comes through here and we’ve had plenty of those. Even without those storms, roofs start leaking, airconditioners go bust, and other shit happens that cost big bucks. Those things have happened numerous time in my wife’s almost 31 years at the church.
Back in the nineteen-eighties, Phillips Brooks House of Harvard University opened a homeless shelter: beds, showers, food, etc. The homeless accepted the food, but refused to sleep there on the grounds that someone might, in their absence, take over their subway gratings. Then there would be a bloody (literally) fight resulting in serious injury or death.
I don’t know how one solves this.
@Michael Reynolds:
Around New Year’s 2014/15, while my wife was on a trip to the Philippines paid for by her sister, somebody (I forget his name today) who sometimes did yard work for us knocked on my door. In front of my house, his car was parked and his wife and child were in it. He was wondering if I had any work for him. I didn’t. Seeing he and his family were desperate*, I gave them most if not all of what cash I had around. 30 to 40 dollars and told him to go to our church where the St Vincent DePaul society might be able to help them out.
Another time, some couple asked me for money just before or after I went to the foot doctor. I may have given them $10. My podiatrist blew a head gasket when learning what I did.
As for people who peddle at intersections, I have almost never given them anything.
*- I wasn’t sure, but they may have been living out of their car.
@DK:
“Evangelicals and Trump-voting Christians have so much to say about politics — where were they during the child tax cuts debate? During the paid family leave debate?”
Also, during Medicaid expansion? Subsidized school lunches during the summer?
@Moosebreath:
The discussion about homelessness inevitably goes like this:
We must DO SOMETHING!
Here is a list of things we can do;
No, those are all just forms of welfare and we would be subsidizing poor life choices;
OK, then lets leave the status quo;
No, we must DO SOMETHING!
Repeat.
What is often overlooked is the cost of the status quo. Like if someone suggests for example, building public housing, there are inevitably shocked cries of how expensive it is;
But never any comparison to the cost of not building it.
For example. In areas with high homelessness, the property owners suffer decline in their property value. For even a medium sized property, this amounts to millions of dollars.
Millions of dollars, just sucked straight out of their pockets, no different than if you were to hack their bank accounts and siphon it off.
Yet the cost of some aggressive government action would require a tax of only a fraction of that loss.
It entails guaranteed housing. Officials have a responsibility to maintain public order but can’t crimimalize homelessness with no place to put them.
But guaranteed housing is socialism. So.
Reagan America’s shuttering of mental health hospitals while slashing taxes for the rich was a folly. Our dystopian Gilded Age inequality — and its Dickensonian homelessness — is a predictable and avoidable downstream result of Reaganomics. The benefits of economic growth are grossly concentrated among the wealthy — while Republicans and their corporate Dem pals use the public debt excuse to block safety net expansion.
As shown by umpteen guaranteed income pilot programs, and by the example of “socialist-ish” European models, the US wastes more poverty’s outcomes — on the crime-industrial complex, healthcare bureaucracy, etc — than it would providing a basic level of food and shelter.
E.g., a just-completed British Columbia pilot that gave certain qualified homeless (read: non-addicted, not schizo) $7000-$7,500 monthly and found it saved Canadians ~$1000 monthly per person: shelter beds cost ~$9000 each per month to maintain in rent, staffing, services etc.
It’s basic math. Some nations have acted accordingly, promising those who can’t or won’t get it together a tiny, one-room flat and/or a tiny monthly check — along with the robust public transportation and healthcare provided to all — but with a warning: ‘Here! now just don’t cause our society any problems.’ Result? Less homelessness, crime, etc.
But Americans are too stupid, collectively, to make this trade-off. We reject this kind of math because “iT’s uNfAir” and “iT’s sOciALism” and “iT eNcOuRageS LaZinEsS!!” blah blah blah. The result is lower quality of life than peer nations.
So if we want to mitigate these problems, we need to recognize housing and heathcare as rights, claw back the Trump/Bush/Reagan tax cuts, and invest in tiny apartments for the unhoused — and in training and hiring mental health professionals to attend.
Strategic, smart investment in housing, healthcare, and transportation will grow the economy, reduce crime, and prove far less expensive over time than what we currently waste on the effects of poverty, inequality, disease, blight, and mental illness. I am not optimistic Americans will soon stop being stupid.
A couple things I’ve noted in my work with the unhoused or people with housing instability in North Alabama: when it comes to people that want to work or are possibly living out of their cars, shelters aren’t the safest places for families. Women can bring their children but husbands have to stay at a different often more violence prone shelter which breaks up families. For single people, most shelters don’t accept pets which is a nonstarter. Many unhoused have dogs for both companionship and protection. A lot of the homeless in Huntsville are veterans because Redstone is their last billet before leaving the service. The missions here especially for the Vietnam veterans, who are older and already have a hard time getting employed will have some substance abuse disorders. So they’ll stay in the missions until the rules get to them. They’ll take random jobs for cash to get by but I know more than a few people that prefer tents to the mission. Mainly because the missions are very Baptist oriented and substance abuse is preached as a moral failing or they were never religious to begin with. There is no easy answer to homelessness or it would’ve been solved by now. An increase in housing supply to push down rents, coupled with how the current administration has been quietly revamping section 8 laws will go a long way. There will always be mentally ill and people with debilitating substance abuse disorder but they are not the majority of the unhoused. Criminalization isn’t the answer public accommodation can’t handle the level we have now. It’s tough be kind even to the “addicts.”
@MarkedMan:
I agree. Has anyone argued that position?
I would find that very unpleasant indeed. If it felt safe enough, I would ask them to leave. Regardless, if they didn’t leave (or if they returned), I would contact the local authorities.
In fact, I have lived through a milder version of this situation. Several years ago, in a different city, I would frequently step out of my apartment door to find someone sleeping right outside (it was actually inside the building).
It was startling, which I habituated to, but it was always unpleasant. I took steps to make it (the situation, not the person) go away. I was not successful. I eventually moved — for other reasons.
I agree, shantytowns that are run by violent gangs are bad. So is human trafficking. Indeed, as a general matter, I find forcibly moving people to be bad.
@MarkedMan:
Which is why I keep emphasizing it’s not just about housing, it’s about healthcare. You cannot throw people who’ve been living on the streets for years into housing with no support.
L.A. County discovered this the hard way, so much of my work was home visits with people who had graduated out of the shelter system and been placed in subsidized housing.
I did not have any problems with compliance. I have a strong personality and can be physically intimidating when I needed to be (6’2″, 220lbs, former athlete). And I cared, and I relished fighting sleazy landlords and lazy goverment bureaucrats on their behalf. So I was often given the supposed hard cases — alcoholics, schizophrenics, borderline personality disorder — and my clients did fine when they were with me.
The problem is it’s difficult to make a decent living doing this work. So it’s difficult to attract and retain smart, strong, dedicated people willing to put up with all the bullshit. A not-insignificant number of my co-workers were married to doctors, lawyers, and finance bros. They were there to help, not to make money.
I had to leave to enter private practice, so as not to become homeless myself. I do have guilt about working with wealthy people who are higher up on Maslow’s hierarchy. So when I finally tell a Beverly Hills housewife after months of therapy, “Gurl, I’m sorry, this is not a catastrophe, you can handle this,” it’s because of the unhoused people I knew.
If we’re serious about fixing these problems we need to invest. There needs to be three times as many of these mental healthcare workers, with salaries there times higher.
@DK:
So “Player Piano” – Kurt Vonnegut novel.
@Michael Reynolds:
In my experience, naïve optimism is one of the things that motivates people to get involved in the first place. On net, this is a good thing.
A major challenge is keeping them involved when the ugliness hits. Expectancy violations of this sort sting.
As for those who do stick around to try and chip away at the problem, it is rare to find folks refusing to face the reality of it.*
Advocates certainly do use flowery language at times, especially in public-facing addresses. Why do they do this? It’s rarely because they are naïve? Rather, they are trying to motivate.
And in many cases like this, positive messages motivate more than doom and gloom. Hmmm… I think I’ve heard that point made somewhere before.
*Though I suppose it depends on how one defines “facing reality.”
@Bill Jempty:
Given my past work and advocacy, my friends are sometimes shocked when I advise them not to give to individual panhandlers, but to donate to programming and services instead.
I explain that while L.A. County does not have enough shelter beds or housing, we do have the nation’s most extensive constellation of homelessness services, staffed by professionals and experienced volunteers.
These professionals often have a difficult time persuading the homeless to connect to available support. One reason is because some can get enough money and food from panhandling.
So individual gifts to panhandlers may work against better, more robust long term solutions. As difficult as it is for those with both a kind heart and disposable income, sometimes you have to grit your teeth and walk by.
This is not universal advice. The calculus is different for those in rural America, or jurisdictions that have made the misguided political decision not to support shelters and services for the unhoused.
Fun fact: vagrancy laws were used as a way to arrest freed slaves, sentence them to hard labor and then rent them out to plantation owners.
Twice a year I drive to western Washington to visit my parents in a small town just south of Olympia. Until my last visit driving through Olympia greeted me with the sight of huge homeless camps set up in the narrow grass fields along the freeway. On my most recent trip however, I noticed that they were gone, replaced by large (and heavy) rocks that had been strewn across the grass to prevent people from putting down tents. This simply moved the problem elsewhere instead of solving it. But honestly, the camps were a huge eyesore and I’m sure the nearby businesses didn’t like their presence.
I want to be compassionate but surely, people shouldn’t be able to just camp out wherever the hell they please putting all sort of negative externalities on the community.
@Chip Daniels:
Yes on the first, but I’m not so sure on the second.
Homelessness creates addicts (and the mentally ill). It’s hard as hell on a person and wears them down so they are either looking for an escape or just break from the trauma.
And get emergency funds into the hands of those in danger of becoming homeless.
We don’t have a strong social safety net, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that people are falling into homelessness.
@Mimai:
Homelessness is one of those issues that hits me at a personal level. I’ve lived on the streets and slept in bushes and under overpasses. I wasn’t in any of the usual categories, I was a fugitive not an addict or mentally ill. (Well…) But the thing of being divorced from the world, invisible to normal people, scared, cold or hot or soaked to the skin, looking for loose change in pay phones and laundromats, trading in bottles for the nickel to buy a day-old donut, spending a whole night just walking aimlessly, that’s all personal experience. I’ve ‘bathed’ in bus station restrooms. I was in that life, but not really of that life, I was there through my own stupidity, and I’ve never been addictive, so I was a sort of tourist in that life. And I escaped pretty quickly.
But I’ve gone from that end of things, to being the guilty liberal who keeps loose cash in the door of his Mercedes for people whose life I understand perhaps more intimately than the next guy at the stop light looking away from the homeless dude.
My eldest daughter carries a special tool with her which can be used to remove the anti-homeless measures from park benches. I’m not crazy about that particular practice as I’m rather hoping my kids don’t get arrested, but I’m pleased that this very privileged kid (kid, she’s 26) has that compassion. But I am frustrated that the issue so often gets reduced to a, ‘all we have to do is X’ formulation. It just never seems to get better. In LA the homeless were everywhere. Here in Vegas they mostly live in the storm drains. Seriously. The imagery is pretty horrifying. The Eloi up in the sunlight, the Morlocks down in the sewers. So I pull up to the stoplight and get the ghastly rotted-teeth grin of some painfully thin woman with a bruised face and I give her money that’s not going to fix anything.
The problem with the homeless is that they’re not just one-size-fits-all. You’ve got people who are there because they can’t afford housing and would do quite well if they had just a bit more money; the addicts whose families are refusing to house them because of their incessant stealing and other addict behavior, the mentally ill who for one reason or another can’t live with people and aren’t getting treatment (or who go off and on treatment in cycles), those fleeing abusive situations, and then the few people who live on the streets due to philosophy and their own free will. And then all the categories that overlap. People with personality disorders who are addicts because at least the heroin/booze/cocaine/meth makes them feel better.
The other question is—how much should we allow people to screw up their own lives without forced intervention? Should we have forced institutionalization and treatment of mentally ill people? Should we legalize supply for addicts, let them shoot up in government-supplied locations, and let them overdose?
On the one hand, I feel sorry for these people. On the other hand, I’d rather help people who want to fix their lives, not those who I have to convince that they have agency and responsibility as well. Self-pity is as addictive as heroin, costs nothing, and will destroy one’s life as much as any drug.
I actually came across one of these “idyllic” homeless tent encampments similar to what I suspect is envisioned by people who have no actual experience. It was a couple of years ago in Seattle, on the road leading to where some friends of ours were rehabbing an incredibly tiny rundown house they owned into a merely small and absolutely beautiful house. It is on the far outskirts, but on the water. Crucial to the story, 30 or so years ago when they brought the house the area had a scattering of businesses that needed some space, but didn’t generate enough income to allow them to be in town proper. The houses that were originally there were probably just shacks built by fisherman and so forth, but had gradually been turned over and improved to varying degrees. Once off the main road, the connecting roads are little more than glorified dirt or gravel paths. They are within walking distances of stores and such, but it’s a long walk and there aren’t sidewalks for most of it. In any case, at least twenty years ago a tent encampment had developed and my friends know a few of the residents enough to talk to, and one at least has been there 18 years (or was two years ago when I was there). Hard to say what brought them there but long term but not completely debilitating drug use (heroin?) was in the mix, as was a desire to just be left the hell alone (obviously, my friends don’t talk to any in that contingent). I would guess there were 20-25 individuals, all men. Almost all had at least raised their tents up on pallets and some had upgraded to roofs over the tent and windbreaks.
Here’s the thing. The ones that talk to my friends want to be seen as members of the community. They talked about how they kept an eye on things. How they wouldn’t tolerate anyone in the encampment or in the area who was a “crazy junkie” or who acted out, or whose mental issues made them violent. And they wouldn’t tolerate anyone who stole from people or businesses in the neighborhood, because they knew that if they lost their support or at least indifference that cops would start showing up and harassing them and eventually driving them out. My friends were left with the impression that if a warning didn’t get an undesirable out, physical violence would swiftly follow.
So, yes, these situations can exist. But not in the middle of a city, where people are constantly showing up to buy drugs or get their dick sucked in (maybe) an alley, and anyone can wander in any time of the day or night.
@DK: Is it okay by you if I do both?
@Michael Reynolds:
You are living a varied life!
You wrote this:
And it resonates with me. X is so often “[more/better] mental health care.”
It’s true, more and better are necessary. And I really wish people would adjust their expectations of what mental health care can do.
It’s become fetishized. Erected as this panacea — for homelessness and in general (“everyone needs and should go to therapy”).
And the cynical part of me wonders if this allows people an easy way to let themselves off the hook. “I’m passionate about ending homelessness… more better mental health care is the key solution… so I really wish those mental health experts would hurry up and get to it.”
@MarkedMan:
What you describe is similar to Puʻuhonua O Waiʻanae. It’s a unique place in a unique setting with a unique culture (I’m quite familiar because I have family on the island). Thus, it is not so easily replicable in whole. But many of the parts are indeed widely applicable.
@Mimai: there’s also the problem that even if we do have solutions (therapy/medication), it’s not going to help someone who’s mentally ill/has a personality disorder until they a) admit that something is wrong and b) are willing to go through the hard work of treatment. (Not that in a lot of cases we know what we’re doing. It’s brain surgery with a meat ax.)
I have a close adult relative with severe mental health issues, so I’ve been a visitor in lockdown hospitals & psych wards, spent countless hours in the waiting room of the local mental health clinic and so on.
The glaring thing I see is how shamefully underfunded the mental health system is here in one of the wealthiest areas in the country/world. Facilities are tired & inadequate, caseworkers come and go, and the sharp ones are on to better-paying jobs quickly.
If our society wants to do something about homelessness, we need to – at a minimum – double funding for mental health care. That would be a start.
I graduated from high school in 1973 and spent the summer before college working in maintenance at a state hospital. The gated campus was beautiful, the buildings old red brick. There were wards for the criminally insane, sent there instead of prison. It was one of the safer wards, in fact. Those patients were wily, not crazy, for the most part.
The majority of wards housed people with varying degrees of mental illness and disability. There was very little drama, as those who had violent tendencies were drugged up twice a day with Thorazine. Some wards held grown men who were severely developmentally delayed, were always gowned, and basically played in their pee all day. My job was to clean it up. I cried everyday the first week or so.
There were also patients that were happy and had relationships. The women were probably all sterilized because everyone looked the other way when couples snuck off for some alone time. Finding love in those circumstances was sweet and pure. I remember lots of laughter and a staff who genuinely cared about their charges.
There was good there and not so good. The place l worked was a good one, overall. I was sad and mad when Reagan shut these facilities down with no plan to replace them, putting these people out into a world that didn’t want them.
@Bill Jempty: Yeah and I can show you stadium after stadium filled with tens of thousands of so called Christians who are nothing like your wife and are the people the poster is talking about.
Finding a congregation that is actually Christian in a red state has been rather difficult as all of them seem bent on hatred…
Oh that says a lot and none of it good…
Calling yourself a Christian and voting for Trump….
Is she going to vote for him again?
EDIT :I grew up in a very rural very red very religious area. Most of those so called Christians are terrible people. They’ll lie and cheat and steal then pontificate about how much better they are than you because they found Jesus. Oh it’s fine I stole money from my work and cheated on my husband because I confessed my sins to jesus and I’m golden!!
@Michael Reynolds: Your kid’s behaviour is a direct result of your own and you should be proud of that. Good job man. You made it through all the harsh bullshit of life with your compassion/humanity mostly intact.
You really do seem like the type I could argue with over a topic and then have a buzz with afterwards. Assuming someone hasn’t massively pissed you off already 😛
@Matt: So much vile and hate. You say Trump is full of those things. Aren’t you just the same because you apparently hate Christians? Your own words- Finding a congregation that is actually Christian in a red state has been rather difficult as all of them seem bent on hatred…
If those words aren’t a sign of hatred in the person who wrote them, I don’t know what is.
Matt, almost half the country voted for Trump. Not all of them are bad people.
@The Q:
Possibly true, though it relies on facts not in evidence. However, demonstrably, none of those people are adherents of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
@Mimai:
it’s been a long, strange trip, as the Grateful Dead sang.
@Matt:
I have two very different kids. One I infected with the politics bug, the other I passed along a work ethic. But I like to think my big gift to both kids (aside from the financial support) was the knowledge that however they fuck up, Dad fucked up worse in his time.
Homelessness is not a Crime.
@The Q: Facts not in evidence.
154.6 million people voted. The population of the USA is 332 million. Not even half of the population voted…
Now if you want to say 1/4 of the population of the USA are not bad people then feel free. I’ll just point out the crazification factor that exists at about 25% of the population. Hell about 70% of GOP voters believe 2020 was stolen.. They are denying reality out of blind partisanship but I’m sure they are just nice people otherwise..
@Bill Jempty: Either your reading comprehension is slipping or you really don’t care to actually read what I posted. I specifically said not your wife but I guess that doesn’t feed into your victimhood complex.
It’s not my fault you don’t like the reality of what I am experiencing in a red state in a rural area. Maybe you should stop supporting the assholes who enable and encourage this behaviour in the GOP?
No it must be me that’s the problem because I have the outrageous demand that Christians actually follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and their own holy book…
@Bill Jempty: Oh I definitely have hatred in my heart as a result of growing up surrounded by so called Christians being hateful and hypocritical. Almost two decades of being forced to pray in school despite it being illegal. Almost two decades of being raised that Demonrats, blacks, and other minorities are bad/evil (gays being outright evil incarnate). Almost two decades of watching supposed Christians break the law break their vows and then going “but I found Jesus” and everything is fine.
Then another decade or so dealing with the holy rollers and their endless complaints about everything while taking up the dining room for hours while talking about how everyone else including other Christian denominations are bad people. Then after making a mess and hogging half our dining area for hours they leave no tip.
Yeah so it took me years to purge most of the hatred that was drilled into me by Christians of “the other” from my existence. I still have moments though where I’m unintentionally racist. Unfortunately some of that hatred has just straight up been replaced by disgust and hatred of the Christian right. Fortunately the last city I lived in had some really good Christian churches I could attend. That’s the only reason I have any hope of finding a decent denomination here.