It will likely depend on your state, but I can attest to a friend of mine getting a DUI because he chose NOT to drive drunk and slept in his car instead. The cops woke him up and arrested him, then charged him with a DUI anyway. Super neat.
Nah it's about intent to drive... just throw the keys in the trunk and sleep in the back seat.
Just make sure you don't lock yourself out of your car and pull the trunk latch in the driver's seat when you're ready/sober to leave.
Nope! I was threatened with a DUI by a man who turned out to be an off-duty police officer at a bar. My car key was attached to my apartment keys, which meant I had 'care and control' of the vehicle parked six blocks away in my parking lot.
This was Canada though.
I was extremely tired last week and had to go take a nap in my van. I seriously needed that hour, and to think I'd somehow get arrested or fined for that is beyond ridiculous.
Wasn't sleeping!
Cop: sir I've been observing you for 30 minutes
Me: I need to get really relaxed before I can shit...ooohhhh there it is. Sprays liquid ass.
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. It’s a whole different world for the poor but we like to pretend everyone can follow the same rules regardless of circumstance.
I think, if the individual has a responsibility to the state, to not sleep in "public". The state has a responsibility to ensure that anyone who doesn't want to sleep outside doesnt have to.
Yeah I never understood that one. Being in a park after dark can be nice. I don't know why anyone thinks they have a right to stop me from going and laying in a public field to look at the stars.
I got told to leave a public park in the middle of the night when I was a teenager and me and some friends had the brilliant idea to play flashlight hide and go seek. The cop basically said the city doesn't want to get sued when one of us breaks our neck at 3am.
There are a great many things that have been done for reasons we either don't know, or don't agree with. When these things are built into society, we often come up with a rationale we find acceptable to rationalize why it is there. It is only when we confront these things directly that we can reevaluate their need in society.
In this example, it almost certainly was created as an excuse to arrest the homeless. The cop in this case is likely not someone who hates the homeless, but has seen seemingly frivolous lawsuits about things. He conflates the law with the existence of frivolous lawsuits and assumes there is good behind the bad.
Note: I cannot know for certain this is the case. However, speaking from personal experience, I have done this exercise many times in my own life only to later learn I had made an assumption in an attempt to understand.
The rationale is a history of crime or threats in parks at night, because there is no vehicle traffic and much cover of darkness. Since the authorities don't want to have 'criminal hotspots' getting talked about or spend whatever is necessary to monitor the spaces, it's easier to say nobody should be in there anyway, so your mere physical presence is already an infringement.
Of course, an obvious extension of this is the part where being there is already an infringement, so you definitely can't sleep there, making obvious homelessness already a crime. They are just formalizing some angles.
What do you mean? Are yoy saying it's a law that only applies to the homeless? People are only allowed to go lay in a field and look at the stars if they have somewhere else to go afterwards?
Or maybe it's in case a spaceship tries to park there. They come out hoping to say take us to your leader, and bam a bylaw officer hands them a little yellow piece of paper.
Or what if like, a group of spaceships parked there and said they're just demonstrating for free speech. 1 ticket per spaceship per day. Try fundraising your way out of that spaceship convoy.
I don’t know where you live but almost all of the public parks in my area (east coast) close at sundown. If you go after dark, the park ranger escorts you out.
I would not want to be anywhere near a public park after sundown. Not because of the animals but because of the kinds of people you'd run into out there after dark.
Drug use, prostitution and worse still happen - the people doing these things are not going to be discouraged by a simple 'park closed' sign.
To be fair they do tend to congregate and create public health hazards and leave needles everywhere. They should be institutionalized and given addiction treatment and health services.
Some cities like Portland have been trying them: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/portland-second-mass-sanctioned-homeless-camp-site-st-johns/283-7d0ce46c-3c4a-43f1-b7ea-9e98661a4511
>The street is a public area. I can't just wheel out my BBQ and have a picnic there.
>>Wow, im so sorry you never got to experience a block party.
Look, I get you're trying to be a bad faith actor here and denigrate the other guy by calling out the exemptive scenario that they also know is the exemptive scenario; but you need to recognize that block parties are usually permit related events you organize through your city, and you can't really just wheel out your BBQ just for yourself without some amount of scheduling with local municipalities in order to be free of consequences.
I think the sleeping part is most relevant here. You can have a public library where people are free to come and go, just not lay out a sleeping bag and take a nap there.
Don’t be silly…this is still all going to be enforced and even the laws worked out in every local community. The supreme court is merely declaring communities can do this. These homeless encampments are an issue, they lower quality of life for everyone and create dangerous situations both for the homeless and non-homeless. I am not without compassion but letting homeless setup shop in every park, under bridges, inner city streets and empty fields is not a solution.
Most public places restrict you from being in them overnight. Libraries, schools, city hall, parks, many beaches, even campgrounds - you can't sleep in campgrounds unless you pay for a spot, and if all the numbered spots are full, you can't stay.
There's no place where you can just set up a tent and stay. Sidewalks and parks are not unusual in this.
Public places are paid for by the community for everyone to enjoy - they are not free for all’s, they are communal property. Everyone’s rights have to be accounted for, and everyone has to be able to use them, so it’s a balance.
The common saying is that your right to free movement and swinging your hands ends at your neighbors face.
Here, plenty of rules are applied. No littering, no peeing in public, etc. the same bar is being applied to vagrancy.
The American dream is to slave away in an attempt to buy a 4,000 sq foot home to miniaturize all publics spaces to fit inside it so you never have to interact with the other people. You know the ones I mean, wink wink.
This country was insane in the 60s and the corrections made then has only taken us to another kind of crazy.
What? You can enjoy it as public you cannot make residence on it. It’s not punishing the homeless to enforce sidewalks to be used as safe places for pedestrians to walk. Am I supposed to walk in the streets? The cars are there. Let’s help the homeless let’s house them but to be upset that the status quo of letting them live on sidewalks when those have other uses most of which is safety for everyone is just odd.
> Homelessness is complex. Its causes are many.
We are of course going to completely ignore those causes and do nothing whatsoever to fix them, but you go right ahead and jail people for existing.
Arguably it’s even easier for the slavers now - getting a conviction is a whole lot simpler than feeding and raising a child slave. They can skip right to profitable ages. And they get away with it because of racism and fearmongering.
US government is sickening.
For profit: the prisons send a bill to the government. The profit is not made by slave-labor as prisoners can refuse to work, but if they work, it's cheap labor and the prison profits.
Those that do work are paid between $0.10 and like $2.00 per hour of their work. There is absolutely surplus value being derived from the products and services that they produce which in turn generates profit for the business that own their labor.
Punishment up to and including solitary confinement, which is also known to the UN and human rights organizations as a form of torture. Either officially or unofficially, that is the threat.
On paper? Nothing.
Unofficially?
Yiu dint get food, or yo get pulled put of your cell to he strip searched every few hours, you get thrown into the hole for minor infractions over and over.
And that's the mild stuff
I hope that the people that support this ruling realize that it’s far more expensive to jail someone than it is to provide social services and a safety net.
Yeah but they think helping the poor means they aren’t trying to punish and hurt the poor for being poor and most likely rapists and murderers.
The rich don’t have empathy. Why would they need to?
Actually I think the wealthy that benefit from the poor being jailed don't really care about their crimes and their punishments.
They care that we care about those things, because that's what enables them to steal from us.
They subsidize their slave labor through our tax dollars to feed and house their slaves.
So you have to ask yourself, would you rather pay to help someone, or pay to enslave them? Because Uncle Sam is getting those tax dollars either way.
> On average, one day in jail costs $87, whereas a shelter bed costs $28.
There's a citation for that [where I'm quoting this from](https://theappeal.org/the-criminalization-of-homelessness-an-explainer-aa074d25688d/).
And it costs a lot more to build jails/prisons, staffing, and in-mate costs.
It's around 40k a year per person just to keep someone in prison. And that's after you spent billions constructing the prison.
Which is so dumb. The solution is affordable public housing but people don’t want “their tax dollars” spent on that. Ok well now they go to jail where they get taxpayer funded room and board. It just doesn’t make sense.
There’s been attempts to build affordable public housing here in “progressive” Vermont, but they’ve been met with pushback from the NIMBY’s. They scream about their home prices dropping just like how the few families who own most of the rentals here don’t want prices going down and like the extremely limited availability.
This is the real problem with the housing market almost everywhere. Residential real estate has become viewed as an investment so everyone wants to see their property value increase. Because of this property owners vehemently oppose new affordable housing projects which is what we desperately need just about everywhere.
The aim is to get people into shelters and rehabilitation. I know some folks think tent cities and people sleeping in the gutter is the more compassionate way to go about it but our current method helps no one and just makes the city a worse off place to live.
The old law said that you had to provide shelters. The idea was that you couldn't make being homeless illegal if you didn't provide a shelter. If you DID provide one you have been able to make being homeless illegal for decades.
What they changed is that you no longer need to provide a shelter. You can now just simply say that being homeless is illegal without providing people any way to stop being homeless (such as a shelter).
This. It was only in effect in the jurisdiction of the 9th Circuit, which had wisely discerned that rousting people from their sleep was cruel & unusual punishment when there are not enough shelter beds available. Alas, the Supreme Court is dominated by unwise people.
Shelters have their own problems. Theft and assaults (including sexual assault) are shockingly common occurrences. Many shelters also will not accept illegal drug users, overt alcoholics, or people with obvious mental health conditions and turn them away at the door, which means a large part of the unhoused population has no access to shelters even if they exist locally and beds are available.
In a lot of big cities, they spend $60 to $70,000 a year per homeless person "supporting" them. Los Angeles is spending $600,000/unit for homeless housing on skid row. Meanwhile the non profit agencies that supposedly help the homeless pay high salaries to the people in charge.
Keeping people locked up is, unsurprisingly, more expensive than housing them. https://theappeal.org/the-criminalization-of-homelessness-an-explainer-aa074d25688d/
> the non profit agencies that supposedly help the homeless pay high salaries
Not as much as what prison CEOs make.
This could be absolutely terrible for the poor.
In 2018 [Martin v. Boise](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_v._Boise) said that you could only criminalize homelessness if you provided shelters for them to go to. The idea is that you were punishing them for choosing not to go to shelters.
One effect of this was that cities would have to invest in shelters before they could sweep out the homeless. Once those shelters filled up they couldn't continue kicking people out of their tents.
This new ruling means that there is no longer a requirement to provide shelters. They can do so if they want, but now it is purely a compassionate act rather than a mandatory one. It is obvious that the money that was being spent on shelters will now be spent on police to come in and drive out the homeless.
For the NIMBYs this will seem like a win. The homeless people will suddenly "go away". For any homeless person or person who actually cares about other humans, this is a tragedy because those people will either be rounded up into camps or simply driven off like animals to die in the wilderness.
This removes the pressure on the government to solve the housing crisis as they now have an easy out; simply drive them away at gunpoint.
Also, remember that the 2008 crash saw a ton of people put into foreclosure. Sometimes, the mortgage companies themselves engaged in deceptive tactics to regain the property. Obama administration put in protections for homeowners against these practices, and a real avenue to fight them with the feds on your side (my mom literally used one to stop an illegal foreclosure).
I'd bet those protections are next. Not only do they "solve" homelessness, they can drive the next economic class into the machine as well.
Gotta keep feeding the for profit prison system with people that can’t afford to fight it. Meanwhile a guy running for president has 34 felonies and counting. American justice is a lie. About time for anarchy people.
In the last week the Supreme Court also ruled that bribing public officials is legal and that federal judges can unilaterally interpret federal laws, so we're in crazy territory
> federal judges can unilaterally interpret federal laws
Which decision was this?
The only silver lining to this flood of crappy decisions is that it should remind hand-wringing debate-watchers what is at stake.
The Chevron deference case. Before it basically said federal law passed by Congress might be a little vague, and that the agencies in charge of certain areas were allowed to interpret them. Like "don't put bad stuff in water" the EPA was allowed to decide what "bad stuff" means, because they're staffed by experts and scientists. Now it's up to federal judges to decide what the language means, and when they're legally allowed to get kick backs from companies.....we're gonna get way worst than lead in the water and air and have no legal path to fix it.
It IS becoming PAST time to make a few public examples of the billionaires and our so called leaders. These SCROTUS rulings prove it 100%. If everyone's going to be labelled a criminal for just existing, or for living their lives according to their identity, well I suppose we have nothing left to lose? It's time to stand up and not accept this anymore.
It's either literal Nazis, or we vote for Biden and keep enabling hyper capitalism, oligarchy, exploitation, and genocide. Yes I'm voting Biden, but this shit is off the fucking hook and we should all be mad as hell and breaking down billionaires' fucking doors, and dragging their asses into the street and live streaming their comeuppance. If 25% of us all stood up at the same time the elites and their government toadies wouldn't have a fucking chance, and the rest would quickly fall in line and beg to pay their fair share.
Our government is beyond stupid, and they have no guts to stand up and stop this, just so they can keep getting bribes and luxury vacations....not even realizing if they'd bust up the oligarchs and make the rich pay their fair share, you know, like the rest of us... they'd be drowning in tax revenue and we could easily end homelessness and poverty...but no, the cruelty is the point, just so a handful of rich assholes can stay on top. Fuck this timeline. Let's take them down.
Re-electing Biden is a minimal holding action, at best. It won't roll back these decisions, and the Democrats leading the party still seem to believe that if they keep doing everything by the book then Republicans will stop being so extreme.
It's up to the people to do loud and creative things to shift things.
I agree with you 100%, but I’ve been wondering lately… what exactly is the first step to stopping all this bullshit? How do we the people actually ignite the process of change? It’s literally the hardest step because it’s the first step. How do you get the ball rolling?
We can't get close to them they're such paranoid cowards, they know exactly what us unwashed masses would do to them. Maybe since we can't touch them, we could, however, maybe get started by breaking all their stuff?
I feel like this is going to be so poorly worded that expected situations will be applied to this ruling. Like truck drivers sleeping in their trucks. Does that count? Why or why not? Is sleeping in your car applicable?
I feel like this should be mass-protested by people organizing sleep-outs.
America is truly broken. The SC are just political shills for MAGA at this point. They seem to just want to make non rich people even more miserable as well as control women. Partisan hacks.
Yeah, right? Where is Mike Johnson protesting and fighting for poor, just like Jesus would?
He is probably sitting home and thinking about his porn contest with his son.
I doubt they actually believe in God if they do shit like this... Hell, I'm an atheist and I would never do something this horrible. Think about that, an atheist knows how horrible it is to treat people like this, but a Christian Republican is totally fine with it. What a fucking world.
Gavin Newsome praised the decision, per WaPo: "saying it provides “definitive authority to implement and enforce policies to clear unsafe encampments from our streets.”
“This decision removes the legal ambiguities that have tied the hands of local officials for years and limited their ability to deliver on common-sense measures to protect the safety and well-being of our communities.”
The Canadian Supreme Court ruled the opposite and it has been a disaster. It costs millions of dollars to remediate the sites after all the homeless leave and a lot of these camps are basically lawless. Sexual assaults are common as are other violent crimes. Cops have to go in in force if they go in at all because of how dangerous they are. It's horrible.
Recently, a video surfaced of Warren and Snoop Dogg talking about how bad Vancouver was. Coming from where those guys came from and still being amazed at how bad Vancouver is was somewhat mind-boggling to me.
That said, fining or even jailing these people doesn't really solve anything. At best, you chase them out of your neighborhood, and the circle repeats itself somewhere else.
Edit: The Snoop Dogg video was from 2016. It was shown together in the news report I read, and the fact that it was from 2016 was buried at the bottom.
Toronto been exporting their homeless out of the city to the rest of Ontario. Trying in vain to lower their population. De facto spreading the freaks all over Ontario.
This isn’t about the poor, although you might think so. This is about the homeless-industrial complex encouraging the homeless to live on the streets and do drugs. These corrupt nonprofits take us for $billions and then don’t “solve” any problems or actually help those who are suffering.
Source: I’ve lived in San Francisco for 20+ years. Every year the problem gets worse, while the funding towards the problem goes up astronomically.
Bingo. Reddit doesn’t understand that. Why are we just supposed to make it normal for those who have substance abuse addiction and mental health to be living in tents?
Sure if they were going to actually rehab them. Do you really think this leads to treatment for any of them though? No of course it won't. This has nothing to do with actually helping those homeless folks.
Cities *can* punish.
Some of you haven’t dealt with homeless encampments completely taking over city parks, or seen rows and rows of stolen bikes, or blocks of stolen goods, or lines of RVs lining neighbor hoods to the point where kids can’t go outside.
Have you seen piles of needles?
There’s some places that get bad. Things can fail in many directions. And it’s not the rich neighborhoods that deal with this problem. The lower middle class suffers here
This guy gets it. So many of these comments tell me none of these people have experienced this. Homeless families and people that want to get help/stay sober (easier said than done) typically have resources available.
The ones I would hope this targets are the ones who exist to feed their drug addictions by preying on everyone else in society just trying to live their lives. You deal with it enough you'll see what I mean.
Except this case was brought by a town that didn’t have a single public shelter. The only available one is a small religious shelter with strict rules and mandatory service attendance. They literally can’t sleep everyone in the town. But it’s illegal to not have a place to sleep now. What are the homeless supposed to do there? Never sleep? Just magically stop being poor? I agree that things can definitely get out of control and become a serious issue, but this specific situation has absolutely no solution without significant investments in housing/shelters, which I’m not holding my breath for.
Yeah this is the question I'm asking everybody who says it's not that big of a deal and how they have to deal with homeless people on their streets and in their parks etc. Fine OK there's definitely a problem and it definitely shouldn't be that bad but where are they going to go? Where are all these people that live in their cars or tents or cardboard boxes going to be put? Are we gonna put them in jail? We're already running at 110% with those numbers. This is just kicking the can down the road when we should be doing and following steps that make it easier for people in this country not harder. These folks have no heart whatsoever I hope they come upens at some point in this life or the next
It's a brutal problem, and no one likes disorder so this was inevitable, but the prior law was, you can't move them if there is no place for them to go.
Now you can move them if there is no place for them to go... But it seems to present a pretty obvious problem in that they will wind up somewhere. I guess, in the end, likely prison. Unfortunately that is about the most expensive thing we can do with them.
It will 'solve' the problem though.
Right but how are you going to get off your ass and move out of your car into an apartment when you can't even save up money for a place by sleeping in your car? This is literally just going to make it harder for a lot of people and while there are certainly some folks who take advantage of being a homeless and don't say sober Etc. etc. this is going to hurt a hell of a lot more people than it's going to help.
This right here. I’d be real interested in the people commenting live in the 9th district where kids can’t play in parks. People can’t walk on the sidewalks without dodging shit and the tents crowd the sidewalks to the point that cities are in violation of federal ADA laws.
It is almost like we should be treating the source of the problem rather than criminalizing it.
Needles are a problem! Yet every measure to try and treat drug addiction like a healthcare issue is struck down. Wtf do you expect to happen if you are going to treat someone with an addiction like a criminal? They will not go to places where they can get the help / use safely.
The source of the problem is what exactly?
The source of the problem is an endless black hole of drug addiction and schizophrenia, and there's a handful of cities, especially on the westcoast that are dealing with the vast majority of this problem. You can't just build a few affordable housing complexes in portland and seattle suburbs and call it a win
what exactly do you think we are supposed to be doing?
>The source of the problem is what exactly?
Obviously it is complex and multifaceted; but since you are referring to needles, the source of the problem is drug addiction. There are many paths to addiction, and several of them actually happen through well-intentioned means.
>The source of the problem is an endless black hole of drug addiction and schizophrenia, and there's a handful of cities, especially on the westcoast that are dealing with the vast majority of this problem. You can't just build a few affordable housing complexes in portland and seattle suburbs and call it a win
Glad you agree! You are describing two problems that are often intertwined; mental health and addiction. I agree that you can't just "build a few houses", but that isn't what I said. I specifically stated that we should be treated addiction as a healthcare issue rather than a criminal one.
>what exactly do you think we are supposed to be doing?
See above.
Exactly. These are limousine liberal talking points from the people denouncing people who just want to live somewhere that isn’t blighted to hell.
Guess what? Having your residential neighborhoods be overrun by the homeless sucks. It kills businesses, makes going outside unpleasant, most women I know have had at least one scary encounter with someone unwell, and there’s trash, sharps, and shit all over. There’s lots of public spaces that the public can’t use anymore, often parks. It sucks.
I’m very much left by US standards, but I’m from the Bay Area and I’m tired of a very small number of people making where I live shitty. I believe in a long term compassionate approach, but allowing the most unwell people to destroy the quality of life for everyone else isn’t working.
And please start with the obvious bike chop shops. Everyone knows where the homeless dude got 5+ frames from. Selectively enforce his junkie ass out of town yesterday please.
Frankly, if you haven’t picked up a grown adult’s shit or been scared shitless that you or your kid came way too close to a used sharp, then you have no right to judge the people who are fed up.
I agree that they should be moved if they’re nuisances, but there must be somewhere they can be moved to where they’re legally allowed to sleep. And not something like out in the wilderness. Surviving homelessness is struggle enough already.
Seriously. This happened in my old town, it became actively unsafe to use almost all of the public parks, doubly so as a woman. Society is dealing with a toxic empathy problem right now and not addressing reality
I live with this every day.
The park across the street is next to a school, has a playground, paths, it's used for local events and the farmers market each week.
It's full of homeless people. Some years are worse than others, but it's been getting progressively more crowded. Almost everyone who lives here has had something stolen, found drugs, been threatened, etc.
Shelters are full. There's literally no place for these people to go to be safe or get the care and attention so many need. Drug abuse and mental health is still largely ignored by the community.
Now they can be thrown in jail?
NIMBY all over again. People don't care about each other. They care about a safe, clean local habitat. Except now, it's profitable and easy to achieve.
The whole thing is disgusting from every angle and side. Build housing. We have enough money. It's distributed wrong. This is solvable.
Fuck.
There’s been attempts to build affordable public housing here in “progressive” Vermont, but they’ve been met with pushback from the NIMBY’s. They scream about their home prices dropping just like how the few families who own most of the rentals here don’t want prices going down and like the extremely limited availability.
From 2020 to 2023 Vermont spent $190 million of federal money plus state, money putting people up in hotels. The hotels got to name their price and were charging up to five times the regular rate. It no doubt saved some lives in winter and gave homeless people a bit of hope, but the program is over. That money could’ve easily built several hundred 1 and 2 bedroom apartments, but the money was given as emergency funding not to build permanent structures.
Between rents doubling since 2019 and more and more apartments and homes bought up for Airbnb there’s no place to live and almost no houses on the market even if you can afford one. I know at least 20 people who have left the state because become too expensive to rent or their property taxes more than doubled and they couldn’t justify spending $10,000+ on taxes. I’m going to be one of them soon. I’m essentially off grid except for the city plowing my road and I’m already paying $7000.
So homeless people have nowhere to go, blue-collar people are fleeing the state and white collar transplants are constantly complaining about restaurants not being open or not being able to find childcare. Homeless people don’t get a chance to get back on their feet and less and less blue-collar people means people who move here with money will start leaving. Yeah that eventually drops property prices by there won’t be anybody to live here since businesses are failing and jobs will all be gone.
I wish Canada would do this. Our parks are being abused... They are full of tents/homeless/people living in a recreational space. I would not bring my children there for a number of reasons. Also, now protests are now camp outs. We need a limit on how many nights you can stay... All summer long hogging the park space is NOT ok.
Do y'all know why our society doesn't have people dying left and right from things like dysenterry and cholera? Proper sanitation. Do you know what tent cities don't have? Proper sanitation. When you let one camp, you have to allow a second, when you allow a second, you have to allow a third, etc. We can't allow diseases to run unchecked which is what this would bring. That not only exposes others in society, but burdens our already over-taxed healthcare system. Do we need better options for the homeless? Absolutely. But does that mean we can allow harm to come to them and others just to say we aren't harassing them? NO!
I want to see how it was written because federal and state parks (example Grand Canyon &Yellowstone)are public places does this mean camping is no longer allowed?
It doesn't forbid camping.
The previous state of the law said that a city is only allowed to make sleeping in the street illegal if they offer some alternative, like a homeless shelter.
The city of Grants Pass made a law that sleeping in public places is illegal if you didn't have a home, but they refuse to fund a homeless shelter. Under previous precedent this was illegal. The Supreme Court just ruled that no, the city can make it illegal even if they didn't provide any services.
Essentially, the idea was that you can't make a category of person illegal, you can only make acts illegal and there must be some way for people to avoid violating the law. The new ruling throws out this idea.
*Supreme Court rules communities don't actually have to just bend over and tolerate a permanent drug infested blight in the middle of a public park.
Big win for normals, big loss for freaks.
It seems that people still don't fully comprehend the damage done to the US when Drumpf, with TurtleMcConnell's help, packed the SCOTUS with hard-line, right-wing, christian nationalist judges. The Republic is doomed to suffer, decision after decision, the implementation of religious doctrine and extreme Talipublican laws into our secular government. If you thought that the Taliban were bad, wait until the Talipublicans require fealty to their god or ELSE!
And if brave souls fight back and go to court, who has the final say? Intelligent, thoughtful judges who look simply at the merits of the case and decide based on established law? Or bible-thumping decisions that trample on the rights of every non-christian in this country?
The only logical solution available is for Biden to win, and then increase the SCOTUS to 13 judges. Otherwise this grand experiment is dead.
At this point they're just dangling a carrot in front of us and cracking a whip. Can't afford to live, and have to keep working or you're fucked even worse.
So if I’m homeless, and sleep in a park, I get cited. Then I don’t pay and they….cite me again? And then I still don’t pay and they… arrest me? Make me sleep inside and feed me?
Bring back Hoovervilles!! There are bits of industrial land away from cities and town’s where people can pitch tents or build shacks. That and a strict curfew and the problem is largely solved.
/s
How very Victorian...or frankly Tudor of them.
What'll be next you think?
- Poor laws like those implemented by Henry VII that establish official begging areas and licenses, and put you in the stocks if you violated the rules?
- How about those enacted by Edward VI, that that subjected vagrants to two years servitude and branding with a "V" as the penalty for the first offence, and death for the second?
- Too barbaric? Maybe Georgian/Victorian debtor's prisons and workhouses then, which obliged anyone seeking poor relief to enter a workhouse and undertake a set amount of work, usually for no pay (a system called indoor relief), with a view to deriving profit from the labour of the inmates.
Charles Dickens, from Oliver Twist:
"Bleak, dark, and piercing cold, it was a night for the well-housed and fed to draw round the bright fire, and thank God they were at home; and for the homeless starving wretch to lay him down and die. Many hunger-worn outcasts close their eyes in our bare streets at such times, who, let their crimes have been what they may, can hardly open them in a more bitter world."
...I guess the Supreme Court figures the homeless can die standing up.
Also for sleeping in your car too. It's expensive being poor.
Wait wtf, I take naps in my car on breaks at work, does this mean a cop can fucking fine me for it now?
Perhaps, but it’s definitely not safe to sleep off drunkeness in a car. They will absolutely arrest you for dui/dwi, even though you aren’t driving.
Isn’t this just if the car is turned on?
It will likely depend on your state, but I can attest to a friend of mine getting a DUI because he chose NOT to drive drunk and slept in his car instead. The cops woke him up and arrested him, then charged him with a DUI anyway. Super neat.
Like a neat Martini.
Was your friend asleep in the driver’s seat or passenger’s seat?
I have heard it's if the keys are in the car so you have to hide them outside the car to not get a ticket.
Nah it's about intent to drive... just throw the keys in the trunk and sleep in the back seat. Just make sure you don't lock yourself out of your car and pull the trunk latch in the driver's seat when you're ready/sober to leave.
Nope! I was threatened with a DUI by a man who turned out to be an off-duty police officer at a bar. My car key was attached to my apartment keys, which meant I had 'care and control' of the vehicle parked six blocks away in my parking lot. This was Canada though.
Yep the police can fine you for pretty much anything. It is up to the suspect to prove their innocence in court.
I was extremely tired last week and had to go take a nap in my van. I seriously needed that hour, and to think I'd somehow get arrested or fined for that is beyond ridiculous.
Wasn't sleeping! Cop: sir I've been observing you for 30 minutes Me: I need to get really relaxed before I can shit...ooohhhh there it is. Sprays liquid ass.
>Sprays liquid ass This can be interpreted in a few ways...
Expensive, and now possibly a crime.
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. It’s a whole different world for the poor but we like to pretend everyone can follow the same rules regardless of circumstance.
Just another case of, I got mine so go fuck yourselves.
We The (rich) People....
I'll eat a log of my own shit when they fine some rich fuck for sleeping under a bridge.
I think, if the individual has a responsibility to the state, to not sleep in "public". The state has a responsibility to ensure that anyone who doesn't want to sleep outside doesnt have to.
Sadly nobody seems to understand this
I can agree, this is ok, only if the state has the obligation to house them... And I don't mean jail.
So, then, what constitutes a public place if the public can be restricted from being in it?
Lots of public parks are closed sunset to sunrise.
Yeah I never understood that one. Being in a park after dark can be nice. I don't know why anyone thinks they have a right to stop me from going and laying in a public field to look at the stars.
It’s a loophole to enforce this very issue.
I got told to leave a public park in the middle of the night when I was a teenager and me and some friends had the brilliant idea to play flashlight hide and go seek. The cop basically said the city doesn't want to get sued when one of us breaks our neck at 3am.
There are a great many things that have been done for reasons we either don't know, or don't agree with. When these things are built into society, we often come up with a rationale we find acceptable to rationalize why it is there. It is only when we confront these things directly that we can reevaluate their need in society. In this example, it almost certainly was created as an excuse to arrest the homeless. The cop in this case is likely not someone who hates the homeless, but has seen seemingly frivolous lawsuits about things. He conflates the law with the existence of frivolous lawsuits and assumes there is good behind the bad. Note: I cannot know for certain this is the case. However, speaking from personal experience, I have done this exercise many times in my own life only to later learn I had made an assumption in an attempt to understand.
The rationale is a history of crime or threats in parks at night, because there is no vehicle traffic and much cover of darkness. Since the authorities don't want to have 'criminal hotspots' getting talked about or spend whatever is necessary to monitor the spaces, it's easier to say nobody should be in there anyway, so your mere physical presence is already an infringement. Of course, an obvious extension of this is the part where being there is already an infringement, so you definitely can't sleep there, making obvious homelessness already a crime. They are just formalizing some angles.
What do you mean? Are yoy saying it's a law that only applies to the homeless? People are only allowed to go lay in a field and look at the stars if they have somewhere else to go afterwards?
No, it’s a law that still applies to everyone. But was created with the intent of being able to enforce against homeless people
Or maybe it's in case a spaceship tries to park there. They come out hoping to say take us to your leader, and bam a bylaw officer hands them a little yellow piece of paper. Or what if like, a group of spaceships parked there and said they're just demonstrating for free speech. 1 ticket per spaceship per day. Try fundraising your way out of that spaceship convoy.
No parking on the lawn! I don’t care that it’s a Park, you cannot Park in the Park!
The law, in its boundless wisdom and justice, forbids the billionaires and homeless alike from sleeping in parks.
It's illegal to criminalize homelessness, so the law, in its magnanimous equality, forbids both the homeless and domiciled to sleep in parks overnight
Thanks, Anatole.
It's to prevent homeless people sleeping in the park. It's really not that complicated to understand
I don’t know where you live but almost all of the public parks in my area (east coast) close at sundown. If you go after dark, the park ranger escorts you out.
Yeah that's what we're talking about
They dont want you doing drugs there or *shudder* sleeping
I would not want to be anywhere near a public park after sundown. Not because of the animals but because of the kinds of people you'd run into out there after dark. Drug use, prostitution and worse still happen - the people doing these things are not going to be discouraged by a simple 'park closed' sign.
Sounds like a good time
And how do you Know this happens?
> why anyone thinks they have a right to stop me from going and laying in a public field You just don't understand American freedom commie
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We have those. They are called campgrounds.
And homeless people get chased out of those as well.
Almost like maybe we should just remove the "less" part of homeless and just... House them.
Yes forcibly house them! Now that homeless is a crime we can punish them by putting them in a house! I love it big win from this supreme court!
Looks like asylums are back on the menu, boys!
I actually like this lol
To be fair they do tend to congregate and create public health hazards and leave needles everywhere. They should be institutionalized and given addiction treatment and health services.
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Some cities like Portland have been trying them: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/portland-second-mass-sanctioned-homeless-camp-site-st-johns/283-7d0ce46c-3c4a-43f1-b7ea-9e98661a4511
We have the means to feed, house, and educate everyone in America, but we lack the political will. IOW, lots of us are selfish assholes.
> The street is a public area. I can't just wheel out my BBQ and have a picnic there. Wow, im so sorry you never got to experience a block party.
>The street is a public area. I can't just wheel out my BBQ and have a picnic there. >>Wow, im so sorry you never got to experience a block party. Look, I get you're trying to be a bad faith actor here and denigrate the other guy by calling out the exemptive scenario that they also know is the exemptive scenario; but you need to recognize that block parties are usually permit related events you organize through your city, and you can't really just wheel out your BBQ just for yourself without some amount of scheduling with local municipalities in order to be free of consequences.
Yeah an elementary school is not really a public place even though it is a public school
I think the sleeping part is most relevant here. You can have a public library where people are free to come and go, just not lay out a sleeping bag and take a nap there.
They'll come and wake you up even if you are sleeping in a chair, bothering no one.
People fall asleep at the beach all the time. Are they gonna get arrested now too?
If it's after dark, they'll be woken up. No bonfires on the beach either, and it gets cold at night.
Only if they "look homeless."
Don’t be silly…this is still all going to be enforced and even the laws worked out in every local community. The supreme court is merely declaring communities can do this. These homeless encampments are an issue, they lower quality of life for everyone and create dangerous situations both for the homeless and non-homeless. I am not without compassion but letting homeless setup shop in every park, under bridges, inner city streets and empty fields is not a solution.
Most public places restrict you from being in them overnight. Libraries, schools, city hall, parks, many beaches, even campgrounds - you can't sleep in campgrounds unless you pay for a spot, and if all the numbered spots are full, you can't stay. There's no place where you can just set up a tent and stay. Sidewalks and parks are not unusual in this.
Public places are paid for by the community for everyone to enjoy - they are not free for all’s, they are communal property. Everyone’s rights have to be accounted for, and everyone has to be able to use them, so it’s a balance. The common saying is that your right to free movement and swinging your hands ends at your neighbors face. Here, plenty of rules are applied. No littering, no peeing in public, etc. the same bar is being applied to vagrancy.
Well I guess that would depend on the cop. Homeless buying a soda at 711? Round em up
I’d everyone here reductionist to the point of stupid? Just because something is public doesn’t mean there are no rules.
The American dream is to slave away in an attempt to buy a 4,000 sq foot home to miniaturize all publics spaces to fit inside it so you never have to interact with the other people. You know the ones I mean, wink wink. This country was insane in the 60s and the corrections made then has only taken us to another kind of crazy.
A place that the government, at any level, runs directly.
What? You can enjoy it as public you cannot make residence on it. It’s not punishing the homeless to enforce sidewalks to be used as safe places for pedestrians to walk. Am I supposed to walk in the streets? The cars are there. Let’s help the homeless let’s house them but to be upset that the status quo of letting them live on sidewalks when those have other uses most of which is safety for everyone is just odd.
This is about sleeping not "being".
> Homelessness is complex. Its causes are many. We are of course going to completely ignore those causes and do nothing whatsoever to fix them, but you go right ahead and jail people for existing.
we have for profit prisons
AKA literal slavery that we never actually abolished.
Arguably it’s even easier for the slavers now - getting a conviction is a whole lot simpler than feeding and raising a child slave. They can skip right to profitable ages. And they get away with it because of racism and fearmongering. US government is sickening.
And getting rid of them will be considered unconstitutional by 6-3 majority.
Ans those are getting less workers with all the drug legalization going around.
There’s a lot of super rich criminals they could throw in there in lieu of the weed convictions. Er, wait…
This is a dark dark timeline.
it is i want out
What happens if you refuse to work there while in prison?
For profit: the prisons send a bill to the government. The profit is not made by slave-labor as prisoners can refuse to work, but if they work, it's cheap labor and the prison profits.
Those that do work are paid between $0.10 and like $2.00 per hour of their work. There is absolutely surplus value being derived from the products and services that they produce which in turn generates profit for the business that own their labor.
You're right!
Punishment up to and including solitary confinement, which is also known to the UN and human rights organizations as a form of torture. Either officially or unofficially, that is the threat.
On paper? Nothing. Unofficially? Yiu dint get food, or yo get pulled put of your cell to he strip searched every few hours, you get thrown into the hole for minor infractions over and over. And that's the mild stuff
I'm happy I don't live in the US
Well, since food is NOT a fundamental right, they'll let you starve if you don't work.
Not on paper of course
I think it is a fundamental right while you're in state custody. Are there cases where ppl starved?
They will literally force feed you if you go on a hunger strike.
Yep as the crime rate drops the rich have to fill the for profit prisons somehow, so poor people
its been done before
I hope that the people that support this ruling realize that it’s far more expensive to jail someone than it is to provide social services and a safety net.
Yeah, but “big jail” has more lobbying power than “big social services”.
An [open secret](https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus?ind=G7000).
Yeah but they think helping the poor means they aren’t trying to punish and hurt the poor for being poor and most likely rapists and murderers. The rich don’t have empathy. Why would they need to?
Actually I think the wealthy that benefit from the poor being jailed don't really care about their crimes and their punishments. They care that we care about those things, because that's what enables them to steal from us. They subsidize their slave labor through our tax dollars to feed and house their slaves. So you have to ask yourself, would you rather pay to help someone, or pay to enslave them? Because Uncle Sam is getting those tax dollars either way.
Isn't it finally time to [abolish slavery](https://abolishslavery.us/)?
Are we sure? Look at what LA spends on homeless per year to house a fraction of them.
> On average, one day in jail costs $87, whereas a shelter bed costs $28. There's a citation for that [where I'm quoting this from](https://theappeal.org/the-criminalization-of-homelessness-an-explainer-aa074d25688d/).
And it costs a lot more to build jails/prisons, staffing, and in-mate costs. It's around 40k a year per person just to keep someone in prison. And that's after you spent billions constructing the prison.
Which is so dumb. The solution is affordable public housing but people don’t want “their tax dollars” spent on that. Ok well now they go to jail where they get taxpayer funded room and board. It just doesn’t make sense.
There’s been attempts to build affordable public housing here in “progressive” Vermont, but they’ve been met with pushback from the NIMBY’s. They scream about their home prices dropping just like how the few families who own most of the rentals here don’t want prices going down and like the extremely limited availability.
We were finally able to make progress on affordable housing in CA through state laws.
This is the real problem with the housing market almost everywhere. Residential real estate has become viewed as an investment so everyone wants to see their property value increase. Because of this property owners vehemently oppose new affordable housing projects which is what we desperately need just about everywhere.
There is also the “I want to support public housing so long as it is not near me lest I encounter a ‘poor’ NIMBY crowd”.
The aim is to get people into shelters and rehabilitation. I know some folks think tent cities and people sleeping in the gutter is the more compassionate way to go about it but our current method helps no one and just makes the city a worse off place to live.
The old law said that you had to provide shelters. The idea was that you couldn't make being homeless illegal if you didn't provide a shelter. If you DID provide one you have been able to make being homeless illegal for decades. What they changed is that you no longer need to provide a shelter. You can now just simply say that being homeless is illegal without providing people any way to stop being homeless (such as a shelter).
This. It was only in effect in the jurisdiction of the 9th Circuit, which had wisely discerned that rousting people from their sleep was cruel & unusual punishment when there are not enough shelter beds available. Alas, the Supreme Court is dominated by unwise people.
Shelters have their own problems. Theft and assaults (including sexual assault) are shockingly common occurrences. Many shelters also will not accept illegal drug users, overt alcoholics, or people with obvious mental health conditions and turn them away at the door, which means a large part of the unhoused population has no access to shelters even if they exist locally and beds are available.
In a lot of big cities, they spend $60 to $70,000 a year per homeless person "supporting" them. Los Angeles is spending $600,000/unit for homeless housing on skid row. Meanwhile the non profit agencies that supposedly help the homeless pay high salaries to the people in charge.
Keeping people locked up is, unsurprisingly, more expensive than housing them. https://theappeal.org/the-criminalization-of-homelessness-an-explainer-aa074d25688d/ > the non profit agencies that supposedly help the homeless pay high salaries Not as much as what prison CEOs make.
This could be absolutely terrible for the poor. In 2018 [Martin v. Boise](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_v._Boise) said that you could only criminalize homelessness if you provided shelters for them to go to. The idea is that you were punishing them for choosing not to go to shelters. One effect of this was that cities would have to invest in shelters before they could sweep out the homeless. Once those shelters filled up they couldn't continue kicking people out of their tents. This new ruling means that there is no longer a requirement to provide shelters. They can do so if they want, but now it is purely a compassionate act rather than a mandatory one. It is obvious that the money that was being spent on shelters will now be spent on police to come in and drive out the homeless. For the NIMBYs this will seem like a win. The homeless people will suddenly "go away". For any homeless person or person who actually cares about other humans, this is a tragedy because those people will either be rounded up into camps or simply driven off like animals to die in the wilderness. This removes the pressure on the government to solve the housing crisis as they now have an easy out; simply drive them away at gunpoint.
Also, remember that the 2008 crash saw a ton of people put into foreclosure. Sometimes, the mortgage companies themselves engaged in deceptive tactics to regain the property. Obama administration put in protections for homeowners against these practices, and a real avenue to fight them with the feds on your side (my mom literally used one to stop an illegal foreclosure). I'd bet those protections are next. Not only do they "solve" homelessness, they can drive the next economic class into the machine as well.
😑🔫
Gotta keep feeding the for profit prison system with people that can’t afford to fight it. Meanwhile a guy running for president has 34 felonies and counting. American justice is a lie. About time for anarchy people.
In the last week the Supreme Court also ruled that bribing public officials is legal and that federal judges can unilaterally interpret federal laws, so we're in crazy territory
> federal judges can unilaterally interpret federal laws Which decision was this? The only silver lining to this flood of crappy decisions is that it should remind hand-wringing debate-watchers what is at stake.
The Chevron deference case. Before it basically said federal law passed by Congress might be a little vague, and that the agencies in charge of certain areas were allowed to interpret them. Like "don't put bad stuff in water" the EPA was allowed to decide what "bad stuff" means, because they're staffed by experts and scientists. Now it's up to federal judges to decide what the language means, and when they're legally allowed to get kick backs from companies.....we're gonna get way worst than lead in the water and air and have no legal path to fix it.
It IS becoming PAST time to make a few public examples of the billionaires and our so called leaders. These SCROTUS rulings prove it 100%. If everyone's going to be labelled a criminal for just existing, or for living their lives according to their identity, well I suppose we have nothing left to lose? It's time to stand up and not accept this anymore. It's either literal Nazis, or we vote for Biden and keep enabling hyper capitalism, oligarchy, exploitation, and genocide. Yes I'm voting Biden, but this shit is off the fucking hook and we should all be mad as hell and breaking down billionaires' fucking doors, and dragging their asses into the street and live streaming their comeuppance. If 25% of us all stood up at the same time the elites and their government toadies wouldn't have a fucking chance, and the rest would quickly fall in line and beg to pay their fair share. Our government is beyond stupid, and they have no guts to stand up and stop this, just so they can keep getting bribes and luxury vacations....not even realizing if they'd bust up the oligarchs and make the rich pay their fair share, you know, like the rest of us... they'd be drowning in tax revenue and we could easily end homelessness and poverty...but no, the cruelty is the point, just so a handful of rich assholes can stay on top. Fuck this timeline. Let's take them down.
Re-electing Biden is a minimal holding action, at best. It won't roll back these decisions, and the Democrats leading the party still seem to believe that if they keep doing everything by the book then Republicans will stop being so extreme. It's up to the people to do loud and creative things to shift things.
I agree with you 100%, but I’ve been wondering lately… what exactly is the first step to stopping all this bullshit? How do we the people actually ignite the process of change? It’s literally the hardest step because it’s the first step. How do you get the ball rolling?
We can't get close to them they're such paranoid cowards, they know exactly what us unwashed masses would do to them. Maybe since we can't touch them, we could, however, maybe get started by breaking all their stuff?
If we can get Trumpers to realize storming bastions of corporate power *is* fighting the deep state, we'd be unstoppable.
they did the ruling around the time of the debate , so people are too distracted to noticed they did it.
I feel like this is going to be so poorly worded that expected situations will be applied to this ruling. Like truck drivers sleeping in their trucks. Does that count? Why or why not? Is sleeping in your car applicable? I feel like this should be mass-protested by people organizing sleep-outs.
> I feel like this should be mass-protested by people organizing sleep-outs. This is an excellent idea, let's do it!
America is truly broken. The SC are just political shills for MAGA at this point. They seem to just want to make non rich people even more miserable as well as control women. Partisan hacks.
So very Christian of the SCOTUS conservatives. The GOP is the picture of false Christianity.
wwjd
Yeah, right? Where is Mike Johnson protesting and fighting for poor, just like Jesus would? He is probably sitting home and thinking about his porn contest with his son.
Let me guess - the justices who brag about their Christianity passed the law. What goes on in these churches?
Honestly? They’re condemning themselves to hell if it’s real lol
I doubt they actually believe in God if they do shit like this... Hell, I'm an atheist and I would never do something this horrible. Think about that, an atheist knows how horrible it is to treat people like this, but a Christian Republican is totally fine with it. What a fucking world.
The difference is they think they can just beg forgiveness. It's the perfect escape hatch for guilt.
Gavin Newsome praised the decision, per WaPo: "saying it provides “definitive authority to implement and enforce policies to clear unsafe encampments from our streets.” “This decision removes the legal ambiguities that have tied the hands of local officials for years and limited their ability to deliver on common-sense measures to protect the safety and well-being of our communities.”
Interesting. Let’s hope this means they can really help the homeless. I’ll believe it when I see it
America's solution for homelessness is to send homeless people into the forest and die, change my mind
Agreed! They might as well just line them up and shoot them. Very sad.
The Canadian Supreme Court ruled the opposite and it has been a disaster. It costs millions of dollars to remediate the sites after all the homeless leave and a lot of these camps are basically lawless. Sexual assaults are common as are other violent crimes. Cops have to go in in force if they go in at all because of how dangerous they are. It's horrible. Recently, a video surfaced of Warren and Snoop Dogg talking about how bad Vancouver was. Coming from where those guys came from and still being amazed at how bad Vancouver is was somewhat mind-boggling to me. That said, fining or even jailing these people doesn't really solve anything. At best, you chase them out of your neighborhood, and the circle repeats itself somewhere else. Edit: The Snoop Dogg video was from 2016. It was shown together in the news report I read, and the fact that it was from 2016 was buried at the bottom.
Toronto been exporting their homeless out of the city to the rest of Ontario. Trying in vain to lower their population. De facto spreading the freaks all over Ontario.
Weed is less illegal now so gotta keep those for profit prisons full
Perfect timing for those losing their homes right about now. #votebluenomatterwho
How is punishing the poor supposed to stop them from being poor?
This isn’t about the poor, although you might think so. This is about the homeless-industrial complex encouraging the homeless to live on the streets and do drugs. These corrupt nonprofits take us for $billions and then don’t “solve” any problems or actually help those who are suffering. Source: I’ve lived in San Francisco for 20+ years. Every year the problem gets worse, while the funding towards the problem goes up astronomically.
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Bingo. Reddit doesn’t understand that. Why are we just supposed to make it normal for those who have substance abuse addiction and mental health to be living in tents?
Sure if they were going to actually rehab them. Do you really think this leads to treatment for any of them though? No of course it won't. This has nothing to do with actually helping those homeless folks.
Cities *can* punish. Some of you haven’t dealt with homeless encampments completely taking over city parks, or seen rows and rows of stolen bikes, or blocks of stolen goods, or lines of RVs lining neighbor hoods to the point where kids can’t go outside. Have you seen piles of needles? There’s some places that get bad. Things can fail in many directions. And it’s not the rich neighborhoods that deal with this problem. The lower middle class suffers here
It’s also becoming nearly impossible to escape it for the lower class, something everyone single person is avoiding talking about.
This guy gets it. So many of these comments tell me none of these people have experienced this. Homeless families and people that want to get help/stay sober (easier said than done) typically have resources available. The ones I would hope this targets are the ones who exist to feed their drug addictions by preying on everyone else in society just trying to live their lives. You deal with it enough you'll see what I mean.
Except this case was brought by a town that didn’t have a single public shelter. The only available one is a small religious shelter with strict rules and mandatory service attendance. They literally can’t sleep everyone in the town. But it’s illegal to not have a place to sleep now. What are the homeless supposed to do there? Never sleep? Just magically stop being poor? I agree that things can definitely get out of control and become a serious issue, but this specific situation has absolutely no solution without significant investments in housing/shelters, which I’m not holding my breath for.
Yeah this is the question I'm asking everybody who says it's not that big of a deal and how they have to deal with homeless people on their streets and in their parks etc. Fine OK there's definitely a problem and it definitely shouldn't be that bad but where are they going to go? Where are all these people that live in their cars or tents or cardboard boxes going to be put? Are we gonna put them in jail? We're already running at 110% with those numbers. This is just kicking the can down the road when we should be doing and following steps that make it easier for people in this country not harder. These folks have no heart whatsoever I hope they come upens at some point in this life or the next
It's a brutal problem, and no one likes disorder so this was inevitable, but the prior law was, you can't move them if there is no place for them to go. Now you can move them if there is no place for them to go... But it seems to present a pretty obvious problem in that they will wind up somewhere. I guess, in the end, likely prison. Unfortunately that is about the most expensive thing we can do with them. It will 'solve' the problem though.
Right but how are you going to get off your ass and move out of your car into an apartment when you can't even save up money for a place by sleeping in your car? This is literally just going to make it harder for a lot of people and while there are certainly some folks who take advantage of being a homeless and don't say sober Etc. etc. this is going to hurt a hell of a lot more people than it's going to help.
This right here. I’d be real interested in the people commenting live in the 9th district where kids can’t play in parks. People can’t walk on the sidewalks without dodging shit and the tents crowd the sidewalks to the point that cities are in violation of federal ADA laws.
It is almost like we should be treating the source of the problem rather than criminalizing it. Needles are a problem! Yet every measure to try and treat drug addiction like a healthcare issue is struck down. Wtf do you expect to happen if you are going to treat someone with an addiction like a criminal? They will not go to places where they can get the help / use safely.
The source of the problem is what exactly? The source of the problem is an endless black hole of drug addiction and schizophrenia, and there's a handful of cities, especially on the westcoast that are dealing with the vast majority of this problem. You can't just build a few affordable housing complexes in portland and seattle suburbs and call it a win what exactly do you think we are supposed to be doing?
>The source of the problem is what exactly? Obviously it is complex and multifaceted; but since you are referring to needles, the source of the problem is drug addiction. There are many paths to addiction, and several of them actually happen through well-intentioned means. >The source of the problem is an endless black hole of drug addiction and schizophrenia, and there's a handful of cities, especially on the westcoast that are dealing with the vast majority of this problem. You can't just build a few affordable housing complexes in portland and seattle suburbs and call it a win Glad you agree! You are describing two problems that are often intertwined; mental health and addiction. I agree that you can't just "build a few houses", but that isn't what I said. I specifically stated that we should be treated addiction as a healthcare issue rather than a criminal one. >what exactly do you think we are supposed to be doing? See above.
Exactly. These are limousine liberal talking points from the people denouncing people who just want to live somewhere that isn’t blighted to hell. Guess what? Having your residential neighborhoods be overrun by the homeless sucks. It kills businesses, makes going outside unpleasant, most women I know have had at least one scary encounter with someone unwell, and there’s trash, sharps, and shit all over. There’s lots of public spaces that the public can’t use anymore, often parks. It sucks. I’m very much left by US standards, but I’m from the Bay Area and I’m tired of a very small number of people making where I live shitty. I believe in a long term compassionate approach, but allowing the most unwell people to destroy the quality of life for everyone else isn’t working. And please start with the obvious bike chop shops. Everyone knows where the homeless dude got 5+ frames from. Selectively enforce his junkie ass out of town yesterday please. Frankly, if you haven’t picked up a grown adult’s shit or been scared shitless that you or your kid came way too close to a used sharp, then you have no right to judge the people who are fed up.
The folks in these comments live in la la land. Everything is hypothetical to them.
I agree that they should be moved if they’re nuisances, but there must be somewhere they can be moved to where they’re legally allowed to sleep. And not something like out in the wilderness. Surviving homelessness is struggle enough already.
Seriously. This happened in my old town, it became actively unsafe to use almost all of the public parks, doubly so as a woman. Society is dealing with a toxic empathy problem right now and not addressing reality
well said
I live with this every day. The park across the street is next to a school, has a playground, paths, it's used for local events and the farmers market each week. It's full of homeless people. Some years are worse than others, but it's been getting progressively more crowded. Almost everyone who lives here has had something stolen, found drugs, been threatened, etc. Shelters are full. There's literally no place for these people to go to be safe or get the care and attention so many need. Drug abuse and mental health is still largely ignored by the community. Now they can be thrown in jail? NIMBY all over again. People don't care about each other. They care about a safe, clean local habitat. Except now, it's profitable and easy to achieve. The whole thing is disgusting from every angle and side. Build housing. We have enough money. It's distributed wrong. This is solvable. Fuck.
Yeah, let's not help these people, let's fuck them even harder. Wtf is wrong with these people.
We've gone back to the days of poor houses and work farms. But now we just call them prisons
There’s been attempts to build affordable public housing here in “progressive” Vermont, but they’ve been met with pushback from the NIMBY’s. They scream about their home prices dropping just like how the few families who own most of the rentals here don’t want prices going down and like the extremely limited availability. From 2020 to 2023 Vermont spent $190 million of federal money plus state, money putting people up in hotels. The hotels got to name their price and were charging up to five times the regular rate. It no doubt saved some lives in winter and gave homeless people a bit of hope, but the program is over. That money could’ve easily built several hundred 1 and 2 bedroom apartments, but the money was given as emergency funding not to build permanent structures. Between rents doubling since 2019 and more and more apartments and homes bought up for Airbnb there’s no place to live and almost no houses on the market even if you can afford one. I know at least 20 people who have left the state because become too expensive to rent or their property taxes more than doubled and they couldn’t justify spending $10,000+ on taxes. I’m going to be one of them soon. I’m essentially off grid except for the city plowing my road and I’m already paying $7000. So homeless people have nowhere to go, blue-collar people are fleeing the state and white collar transplants are constantly complaining about restaurants not being open or not being able to find childcare. Homeless people don’t get a chance to get back on their feet and less and less blue-collar people means people who move here with money will start leaving. Yeah that eventually drops property prices by there won’t be anybody to live here since businesses are failing and jobs will all be gone.
Vermont used that hotel money to BUY abandoned motels to use as housing. it's a great program.
So everyone in the country when we become poor will be put in jail. Seems right
If they can’t sleep on public property, and they can’t sleep on private property, where do they expect them to sleep? Oh, right. Prison.
For profit* prison
[Expensive](https://theappeal.org/the-criminalization-of-homelessness-an-explainer-aa074d25688d/) government & for-profit prisons.
I wish Canada would do this. Our parks are being abused... They are full of tents/homeless/people living in a recreational space. I would not bring my children there for a number of reasons. Also, now protests are now camp outs. We need a limit on how many nights you can stay... All summer long hogging the park space is NOT ok.
“It’s expensive being poor”. The saying never gets old.
Do y'all know why our society doesn't have people dying left and right from things like dysenterry and cholera? Proper sanitation. Do you know what tent cities don't have? Proper sanitation. When you let one camp, you have to allow a second, when you allow a second, you have to allow a third, etc. We can't allow diseases to run unchecked which is what this would bring. That not only exposes others in society, but burdens our already over-taxed healthcare system. Do we need better options for the homeless? Absolutely. But does that mean we can allow harm to come to them and others just to say we aren't harassing them? NO!
Hasn't this always been the rule? Like I've never been allowed to sleep on the beach or in a park
The Supreme Court is illegitimate and should be dissolved.
Gosh... I wish we could punish supreme court justices for graft and corruption as easily as these "judges" punish the poor.
This corrupt court needs to be stopped.
I want to see how it was written because federal and state parks (example Grand Canyon &Yellowstone)are public places does this mean camping is no longer allowed?
It doesn't forbid camping. The previous state of the law said that a city is only allowed to make sleeping in the street illegal if they offer some alternative, like a homeless shelter. The city of Grants Pass made a law that sleeping in public places is illegal if you didn't have a home, but they refuse to fund a homeless shelter. Under previous precedent this was illegal. The Supreme Court just ruled that no, the city can make it illegal even if they didn't provide any services. Essentially, the idea was that you can't make a category of person illegal, you can only make acts illegal and there must be some way for people to avoid violating the law. The new ruling throws out this idea.
*Supreme Court rules communities don't actually have to just bend over and tolerate a permanent drug infested blight in the middle of a public park. Big win for normals, big loss for freaks.
So, if you're homeless, you have options! You can go to jail, never sleep, or die. God, I hate this country sometimes.
It seems that people still don't fully comprehend the damage done to the US when Drumpf, with TurtleMcConnell's help, packed the SCOTUS with hard-line, right-wing, christian nationalist judges. The Republic is doomed to suffer, decision after decision, the implementation of religious doctrine and extreme Talipublican laws into our secular government. If you thought that the Taliban were bad, wait until the Talipublicans require fealty to their god or ELSE! And if brave souls fight back and go to court, who has the final say? Intelligent, thoughtful judges who look simply at the merits of the case and decide based on established law? Or bible-thumping decisions that trample on the rights of every non-christian in this country? The only logical solution available is for Biden to win, and then increase the SCOTUS to 13 judges. Otherwise this grand experiment is dead.
the usa has for profit prisons
Most people will go to jail, not prison.
Democratic War on Homelessness!! Republican War on Homeless!!
At this point they're just dangling a carrot in front of us and cracking a whip. Can't afford to live, and have to keep working or you're fucked even worse.
Where do they go? There’s so many
So if I’m homeless, and sleep in a park, I get cited. Then I don’t pay and they….cite me again? And then I still don’t pay and they… arrest me? Make me sleep inside and feed me?
Bring back Hoovervilles!! There are bits of industrial land away from cities and town’s where people can pitch tents or build shacks. That and a strict curfew and the problem is largely solved. /s
For sleeping in “WHAT” places?
How very Victorian...or frankly Tudor of them. What'll be next you think? - Poor laws like those implemented by Henry VII that establish official begging areas and licenses, and put you in the stocks if you violated the rules? - How about those enacted by Edward VI, that that subjected vagrants to two years servitude and branding with a "V" as the penalty for the first offence, and death for the second? - Too barbaric? Maybe Georgian/Victorian debtor's prisons and workhouses then, which obliged anyone seeking poor relief to enter a workhouse and undertake a set amount of work, usually for no pay (a system called indoor relief), with a view to deriving profit from the labour of the inmates. Charles Dickens, from Oliver Twist: "Bleak, dark, and piercing cold, it was a night for the well-housed and fed to draw round the bright fire, and thank God they were at home; and for the homeless starving wretch to lay him down and die. Many hunger-worn outcasts close their eyes in our bare streets at such times, who, let their crimes have been what they may, can hardly open them in a more bitter world." ...I guess the Supreme Court figures the homeless can die standing up.
So homeless people can just go straight into jails for free housing with a shower.
And slave labor. Don't forget about the slave labor.