9 ms·

“No Defense of the Indefensible”: L.A. Judge Makes Landmark Homelessness Ruling

57 points by troydavis 5y ago

troydavis 5y ago
Before commenting, please read the entire article, not just the headline or first paragraph. The interesting part is the details of the decision and next steps. Whatever one’s views on how to address homelessness, this decision is interesting. The article links to the full decision as well.
- cjbenedikt 5y ago
  Finally! Impressive ruling.
  - damau 5y ago
    Truly beautiful, glad I read it. The judge really stuck their neck out. Hope it all comes to fruition and a lot of things are learnt from it.
    - insert_coin 5y ago
      The main thing we'll learn? homelessness is not a money problem and 1 billion can't solve it.
      - falcolas 5y ago
        Well, the things purchased with the $1B just might. Money can't solve anything on its own, but you can't solve a problem without it either.
- jka 5y ago
  Hopefully this isn't taken as bad humour: I misread one word in the "way forward" section, seeing the word "benches" where it doesn't exist. That reveals something about my subconscious; in my mind, there are few items of outdoor furniture as simple, rewarding, and pleasant to spend time on (alone or with loved ones) as a flat, comfortable bench. Remarkable times in LA. Thank you for sharing this.
- temp8964 5y ago
  Read through and it seems to be a crazy plan for me. The judge appears to be extremely ideology driven and a believer of the critical race theory to his core. It is also laughable to think a judge has a grand plan to solve a societal issue. So a judge appointed himself to be the supreme planner of the city? The idea that a judge thinks himself can solve the homeless problem with a big plan is by itself pathetic.
  - lupire 5y ago
    Are you claiming the government of Los Angeles has not discriminated on the basis of race?
    - temp8964 5y ago
      Are you claiming all the racial disparities in outcomes are caused by the government discrimination?
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        All the disparities don’t need to be caused by racial discrimination for it to be unlawful discrimination on race.
    - SauciestGNU 5y ago
      I have found with a high degree of correlation that people who refer to critical race theory in contexts like the above do so as a shibboleth, and they almost always deny even the existence of structural racism.
      - temp8964 5y ago
        Right, I do agree structural racism / systemic racism has no meaning, as the great Thomas Sowell pointed out.
  - kgin 5y ago
    Putting aside what the judge may or may not think of himself, the ruling is that actions taken by the Los Angeles government led to this specific situation and because of that, the city is responsible for remedying that situation, at least temporarily, in the near term. The city does not need to be 100% responsible for every contributing factor to have a responsibility here just as a drunk driver is not off the hook because it was also raining when he crashed into someone. Nowhere in the ruling does it claim to solve the broader issue of homelessness or dictate a long-term plan for the city. But it does say that the city can't simply let the situation fester while they noodle for decades on initiatives and broader plans.
user3939382 5y ago
Ideally this would be coming from the legislature, but I'd rather a judge do it if no one else will.
- giantg2 5y ago
  "Ideally this would be coming from the legislature" You mean legally?
  - PeterWhittaker 5y ago
    The US is a common law country: legal judgments are one of the three pillars of common law, along with legs&regs and common practice (things that have always been that have been neither established nor prohibited by either of the other two pillars). IANAL. IANAA, but I have lived all my life in a common law country, FWIW.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      If you say that in court you will be called a Sovereign Citizen and told to shut up (ask me how I know...). Even though we are a common law country, the judicial rulings are supposed to be based on statute, regulations, case law, and customs. It seems this ruling takes it further than that. It seems the only basis is the government caused harm doctrine and the application in this case seems contrary to other cases/issues. The courts are required to take other doctrines into account too. For example, if these policies are enacted by elected representatives, then the court would have to find that the aggrieved people were guaranteed those treatment services, shelter, or to be released somewhere else by right in order to overcome that will of the people doctrine. I think that's a hard sell since the legislature hasn't (to my knowledge) cemented that as rights in these circumstances.
      - PeterWhittaker 5y ago
        I have my popcorn ready to watch the appeals process and policy discussions this should engender. I expect that much of the ruling will be struck down, but cannot help but think that the state-caused-danger has legs. Ultimately, my guess is that a superior court will set the judgement aside while upholding some elements as correct, then direct the city and county to address those specific elements deemed to have merit. The end result would be legislative change in the context of elements deemed valid. Or perhaps I am overly optimistic....
bifrost 5y ago
Interesting how the article completely leaves out the Heroin/Fentanyl/Meth epidemic. SF is another example of what happens when public policy gets it wrong, our false compassion is killing people and city leaders are doing less than nothing about it.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  Opioids are at most a companion to the homeless epidemic. If we're on the subject of compassion, millions who are no longer able to acquire effective pain relief could use some.
  - bifrost 5y ago
    In SF our homelessness is driven by drug abuse and the lack of ability to put addicts and the mentally ill into conservatorship, its well documented. > If we're on the subject of compassion, millions who are no longer able to acquire effective pain relief could use some. Could you clarify what you mean by that?
    - olliej 5y ago
      What on earth? In SF homelessness is caused by the lack of housing. Mental illness is courtesy the Reagan era dismantling of mental health services in CA, and is over-represented for sure. However, the driving factor for homelessness in SF, is the fact that there is no where for people to live. Thats part of why eviction is so stupidly hard in SF. Once you become homeless it is functionally impossible to get out.
      - bifrost 5y ago
        Its not caused by lack of housing, the people on the street are incapable of supporting themselves much less maintaining a dwelling - have you ever been here? Our homeless are mostly drug-seeking tourists who are from elsewhere. The Reagan canard is also just that; The Supreme court ruling sought by the ACLU during the Carter administration is why people are out on the street, the govt can't legally commit people like that anymore. Evictions are hard here for the same reasons that its trivial to get fentanyl in front of the federal building that houses the DEA - failed govt policy.
underseacables 5y ago
Now let’s see if the city appeals. Edit: They have. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/federal-judge-orders-los-angeles-shelter-homeless-people-skid-row-n1265005 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/federal-judge-orders-lo...
- disgrunt 5y ago
  As they should. This is judiciary overreach.
  - celticninja 5y ago
    Yes let's leave these people in horrific environments and situations because we can. I can't believe that when common morality is so absent,that when it is so bad it has to be legally mandated, there are still people who think that leaving them to rot is ok. You are probably not a Christian, but you have a large Christian population and that they allow this to happen just highlights the hypocrisy of the entire idea of the United States. Spend a billion or 12 on a brushfire war to shake your stick and measure your military penis but spend a fraction of that on helping poor people and you balk.
    - dang 5y ago
      Neither religious nor nationalistic flamewar is welcome on HN and you managed to start both in one go. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this here. Edit: We've had to warn you many times in the past. Please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamewar comments. We ban accounts that do those things.
    - disgrunt 5y ago
      Judges aren't kings. In the United States there is a separation of powers for a reason. Skid Row is a failure of the executive and legislative branches in California. California voters have perpetuated this failure by continually re-electing them.
Schnitz 5y ago
Meanwhile Republican states keep sending their homeless to CA...
- disgrunt 5y ago
  Meanwhile Californians keep re-electing Democrats who are perpetuating this humanitarian crisis in Skid Row. Those same Democrats have now appealed this order.
adamsvystun 5y ago
> Carter ordered the City and County to provide offers of shelter within 90 days to all unaccompanied women and children in Skid Row; within 120 days shelter for all families there; and within 180 days shelter for everyone there. Further, he required them to offer housing and treatment services to all individuals within Skid Row who are in need of services from the Department of Mental Health or the Department of Public Health. He also required them to offer support services to all who accept shelter offers. > Judge Carter ordered the city to place $1 billion in escrow; ordered the cessation of all sales or transfers of public lands; Does the judge have the power to order such things?
- crooked-v 5y ago
  Judges have tremendous discretionary power, limited mostly by explicit legislation and by the rulings of higher courts.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    Well... in theory they are limited that way. In practice they can do whatever they want and chock up the discrepancies to "mistakes" in applying the law. Then the loser has to spend thousands on an appeal to get a chance at justice. Also, any investigation into those "mistakes" and any true misconduct are usually so protected that their secrecy outweigh your right to any exculpatory evidence contained in them. Makes you wonder how widespread the mistakes and misconduct are that they want to keep it a secret...
- sologoub 5y ago
  > Generally speaking, courts have ruled that individual residents do not have a right to demand aid from their government. However, there is one important exception: when the government was an active, willing, and knowing participant in creating the conditions that lead to the need for aid. This is known as the “state-created-danger” doctrine. Judge Carter invokes this as the primary justification for his sweeping order: that Los Angeles created layers of structural racism that deprived Black people of opportunity, and it had an explicit policy of concentrating the homeless population in Skid Row and then depriving them of services. Seems like in limited circumstances where the government itself is implicated in harm, than yes.
disgrunt 5y ago
> To enable that, Judge Carter ordered the city to place $1 billion in escrow; ordered the cessation of all sales or transfers of public lands; ... While I agree that Skid Row is a disaster. If I were a Californian, I don't think I'd be comfortable with this degree of legislating from the bench.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > While I agree that Skid Row is a disaster. If I were a Californian, I don't think I'd be comfortable with this degree of legislating from the bench. As a Californian, I’m not comfortable with the degree of active racial and other unlawful discrimination and actively seeking to preserve the harms of that discrimination carried out by the City of Los Angeles with no impediment from the State of California. As an American, I’m not at all unhappy with the federal courts stepping in this way when a state, or a subdivision thereof, violates the rights secured to the people under the Constitution.
cleansingfire 5y ago
Interesting that no mention is made of appeal. Is the city willing to embark on this without challenging it? That's almost too much to hope for, so I hate to assume.
- cleansingfire 5y ago
  So to update, it has been appealed: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/federal-judge-orders-los-angeles-shelter-homeless-people-skid-row-n1265005 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/federal-judge-orders-lo...
ryan93 5y ago
Obviously the US can afford housing the homeless. I just don't understand how a judge can just decide to spend a billion dollars.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Obviously the US can afford housing the homeless. I just don’t understand how a judge can just decide to spend a billion dollars. The judge didn’t decide to spend a billion dollars. The judge ordered the city to put $1 billion dollars the mayor had pledged to the cause of homelessness in escrow. The actions ordered by the court may cost more or less than $1 billion. The courts have broad authority to order government or other parties to take action to remediate (or cease exacerbating) unlawful harms they have caused; and $1 billion isn’t anywhere near the maximum that it has cost the subject of such an order to comply.
Camillo 5y ago
I'll never understand how the American system of government is meant to work. You've got a legislature that typically fails to legislate, an executive that sometimes does the legislature's job, and a judiciary that can randomly step in and write both laws and decrees as long as someone brings the case before them. I hasten to note that many of everyone's favorite decisions came out of this process, so it seems to work. But from a civil law background, it just looks bizarre. Why would anyone design a system like this?
- crooked-v 5y ago
  A key thing to keep in mind is that the US is one of the oldest among modern democracies, and the Constitution and the way the government was structured was entirely novel at the time. Other countries then had the mistakes of the US to learn from when implementing their own democratic systems.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    We also have to note that the current implementation in not the way it was designed.
    - crooked-v 5y ago
      Quite a lot of that also comes down to bad timing: the system was designed for a mostly-agrarian population with a relatively small urban class and inherent logistical limitations on maximum population density, and then the Industrial Revolution came along and upended literally everyone's expectations about how population centers, the economy, wealth distribution, etc would continue to work for the foreseeable future.
      - giantg2 5y ago
        It's seems that just about any system of government has issues with citizen/subject contentment or efficiency once becomes large and diverse. I agree that representation is lacking. I can't get an intelligent response from my reps, if I even get a response at all.
l0b0 5y ago
Original: https://southseattleemerald.com/2021/04/24/weekend-long-reads-a-watershed-ruling-on-homelessness/ https://southseattleemerald.com/2021/04/24/weekend-long-read...
anonuser123456 5y ago
How about we deregulate zoning so housing can become affordable?
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  And remove rent controls. Also they should establish vagrancy laws. Guess how many people wouldn't bother living in CA then? South Park has already covered this topic.
csomar 5y ago
I wonder if Skid's homelessness will disappear now that there is a strong motive (a potentially big bill) to fix the issue.
pseudo0 5y ago
This interpretation of "state created danger" seems remarkably overbroad. By this logic, you could tie just about any danger back to the state with a similar degree of proximity. Take someone hit by a drunk driver, for example. The government repealed Prohibition, regulates and licenses alcohol production and sale, and is fully aware of the risks of drivers abusing alcohol (DUI laws, PSAs, etc). That sure sounds like an active, willing, and knowing participant in creating the conditions of the danger. Can the victim of a DUI therefore successfully sue the government? I'd fully expect this to get quickly overturned on appeal.
- soledades 5y ago
  This is somewhat begging the question, which is, at its core: “is the gov’t directly responsible for the humanitarian crisis at Skid Row.”
  - pseudo0 5y ago
    It was intended as more of a proof by contradiction. If we assume that the judge is correct in assessing this as a state created danger, then this standard would also apply to a wide variety of dangers that the government is also involved with, which have never been classified as such.
    - soledades 5y ago
      The notion that this reasoning would apply to an absurd (for your reductio ad absurdum) variety of cases is just a slight reframing of the point of contention. By way of example, assume, for the sake of contradiction, that your argument is valid. Then, by similar reasoning, I could argue that any argument I disagree with can be taken to unreasonable extremes, and is therefore invalid, etc. etc. :P
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > By this logic, you could tie just about any danger back to the state with a similar degree of proximity. Um, if you actually read the detailed recitation of relevant fact findings in the decision, I don’t think you can trace most dangers back to the state with similar proximity. > Take someone hit by a drunk driver, for example. The government repealed Prohibition, regulates and licenses alcohol production and sale, and is fully aware of the risks of drivers abusing alcohol (DUI laws, PSAs, etc). That sure sounds like an active, willing, and knowing participant in creating the conditions of the danger. That’s not nearly the specificity of the harms to particular persons that is established with the skid row containment policy.
RickJWagner 5y ago
Rural life looks better every day.

57 points by troydavis 5y ago

Before commenting, please read the entire article, not just the headline or first paragraph. The interesting part is the details of the decision and next steps. Whatever one’s views on how to address homelessness, this decision is interesting. The article links to the full decision as well.

cjbenedikt 5y ago
Finally! Impressive ruling.
- damau 5y ago
  Truly beautiful, glad I read it. The judge really stuck their neck out. Hope it all comes to fruition and a lot of things are learnt from it.
  - insert_coin 5y ago
    The main thing we'll learn? homelessness is not a money problem and 1 billion can't solve it.
    - falcolas 5y ago
      Well, the things purchased with the $1B just might. Money can't solve anything on its own, but you can't solve a problem without it either.
jka 5y ago
Hopefully this isn't taken as bad humour: I misread one word in the "way forward" section, seeing the word "benches" where it doesn't exist. That reveals something about my subconscious; in my mind, there are few items of outdoor furniture as simple, rewarding, and pleasant to spend time on (alone or with loved ones) as a flat, comfortable bench. Remarkable times in LA. Thank you for sharing this.
temp8964 5y ago
Read through and it seems to be a crazy plan for me. The judge appears to be extremely ideology driven and a believer of the critical race theory to his core. It is also laughable to think a judge has a grand plan to solve a societal issue. So a judge appointed himself to be the supreme planner of the city? The idea that a judge thinks himself can solve the homeless problem with a big plan is by itself pathetic.
- lupire 5y ago
  Are you claiming the government of Los Angeles has not discriminated on the basis of race?
  - temp8964 5y ago
    Are you claiming all the racial disparities in outcomes are caused by the government discrimination?
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      All the disparities don’t need to be caused by racial discrimination for it to be unlawful discrimination on race.
  - SauciestGNU 5y ago
    I have found with a high degree of correlation that people who refer to critical race theory in contexts like the above do so as a shibboleth, and they almost always deny even the existence of structural racism.
    - temp8964 5y ago
      Right, I do agree structural racism / systemic racism has no meaning, as the great Thomas Sowell pointed out.
- kgin 5y ago
  Putting aside what the judge may or may not think of himself, the ruling is that actions taken by the Los Angeles government led to this specific situation and because of that, the city is responsible for remedying that situation, at least temporarily, in the near term. The city does not need to be 100% responsible for every contributing factor to have a responsibility here just as a drunk driver is not off the hook because it was also raining when he crashed into someone. Nowhere in the ruling does it claim to solve the broader issue of homelessness or dictate a long-term plan for the city. But it does say that the city can't simply let the situation fester while they noodle for decades on initiatives and broader plans.

user3939382 5y ago

Ideally this would be coming from the legislature, but I'd rather a judge do it if no one else will.

giantg2 5y ago
"Ideally this would be coming from the legislature" You mean legally?
- PeterWhittaker 5y ago
  The US is a common law country: legal judgments are one of the three pillars of common law, along with legs&regs and common practice (things that have always been that have been neither established nor prohibited by either of the other two pillars). IANAL. IANAA, but I have lived all my life in a common law country, FWIW.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    If you say that in court you will be called a Sovereign Citizen and told to shut up (ask me how I know...). Even though we are a common law country, the judicial rulings are supposed to be based on statute, regulations, case law, and customs. It seems this ruling takes it further than that. It seems the only basis is the government caused harm doctrine and the application in this case seems contrary to other cases/issues. The courts are required to take other doctrines into account too. For example, if these policies are enacted by elected representatives, then the court would have to find that the aggrieved people were guaranteed those treatment services, shelter, or to be released somewhere else by right in order to overcome that will of the people doctrine. I think that's a hard sell since the legislature hasn't (to my knowledge) cemented that as rights in these circumstances.
    - PeterWhittaker 5y ago
      I have my popcorn ready to watch the appeals process and policy discussions this should engender. I expect that much of the ruling will be struck down, but cannot help but think that the state-caused-danger has legs. Ultimately, my guess is that a superior court will set the judgement aside while upholding some elements as correct, then direct the city and county to address those specific elements deemed to have merit. The end result would be legislative change in the context of elements deemed valid. Or perhaps I am overly optimistic....

bifrost 5y ago

Interesting how the article completely leaves out the Heroin/Fentanyl/Meth epidemic. SF is another example of what happens when public policy gets it wrong, our false compassion is killing people and city leaders are doing less than nothing about it.

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
Opioids are at most a companion to the homeless epidemic. If we're on the subject of compassion, millions who are no longer able to acquire effective pain relief could use some.
- bifrost 5y ago
  In SF our homelessness is driven by drug abuse and the lack of ability to put addicts and the mentally ill into conservatorship, its well documented. > If we're on the subject of compassion, millions who are no longer able to acquire effective pain relief could use some. Could you clarify what you mean by that?
  - olliej 5y ago
    What on earth? In SF homelessness is caused by the lack of housing. Mental illness is courtesy the Reagan era dismantling of mental health services in CA, and is over-represented for sure. However, the driving factor for homelessness in SF, is the fact that there is no where for people to live. Thats part of why eviction is so stupidly hard in SF. Once you become homeless it is functionally impossible to get out.
    - bifrost 5y ago
      Its not caused by lack of housing, the people on the street are incapable of supporting themselves much less maintaining a dwelling - have you ever been here? Our homeless are mostly drug-seeking tourists who are from elsewhere. The Reagan canard is also just that; The Supreme court ruling sought by the ACLU during the Carter administration is why people are out on the street, the govt can't legally commit people like that anymore. Evictions are hard here for the same reasons that its trivial to get fentanyl in front of the federal building that houses the DEA - failed govt policy.

underseacables 5y ago

Now let’s see if the city appeals. Edit: They have. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/federal-judge-orders-los-angeles-shelter-homeless-people-skid-row-n1265005 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/federal-judge-orders-lo...

disgrunt 5y ago
As they should. This is judiciary overreach.
- celticninja 5y ago
  Yes let's leave these people in horrific environments and situations because we can. I can't believe that when common morality is so absent,that when it is so bad it has to be legally mandated, there are still people who think that leaving them to rot is ok. You are probably not a Christian, but you have a large Christian population and that they allow this to happen just highlights the hypocrisy of the entire idea of the United States. Spend a billion or 12 on a brushfire war to shake your stick and measure your military penis but spend a fraction of that on helping poor people and you balk.
  - dang 5y ago
    Neither religious nor nationalistic flamewar is welcome on HN and you managed to start both in one go. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this here. Edit: We've had to warn you many times in the past. Please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamewar comments. We ban accounts that do those things.
  - disgrunt 5y ago
    Judges aren't kings. In the United States there is a separation of powers for a reason. Skid Row is a failure of the executive and legislative branches in California. California voters have perpetuated this failure by continually re-electing them.

Schnitz 5y ago

Meanwhile Republican states keep sending their homeless to CA...

disgrunt 5y ago
Meanwhile Californians keep re-electing Democrats who are perpetuating this humanitarian crisis in Skid Row. Those same Democrats have now appealed this order.

adamsvystun 5y ago

> Carter ordered the City and County to provide offers of shelter within 90 days to all unaccompanied women and children in Skid Row; within 120 days shelter for all families there; and within 180 days shelter for everyone there. Further, he required them to offer housing and treatment services to all individuals within Skid Row who are in need of services from the Department of Mental Health or the Department of Public Health. He also required them to offer support services to all who accept shelter offers. > Judge Carter ordered the city to place $1 billion in escrow; ordered the cessation of all sales or transfers of public lands; Does the judge have the power to order such things?

crooked-v 5y ago
Judges have tremendous discretionary power, limited mostly by explicit legislation and by the rulings of higher courts.
- giantg2 5y ago
  Well... in theory they are limited that way. In practice they can do whatever they want and chock up the discrepancies to "mistakes" in applying the law. Then the loser has to spend thousands on an appeal to get a chance at justice. Also, any investigation into those "mistakes" and any true misconduct are usually so protected that their secrecy outweigh your right to any exculpatory evidence contained in them. Makes you wonder how widespread the mistakes and misconduct are that they want to keep it a secret...
sologoub 5y ago
> Generally speaking, courts have ruled that individual residents do not have a right to demand aid from their government. However, there is one important exception: when the government was an active, willing, and knowing participant in creating the conditions that lead to the need for aid. This is known as the “state-created-danger” doctrine. Judge Carter invokes this as the primary justification for his sweeping order: that Los Angeles created layers of structural racism that deprived Black people of opportunity, and it had an explicit policy of concentrating the homeless population in Skid Row and then depriving them of services. Seems like in limited circumstances where the government itself is implicated in harm, than yes.

disgrunt 5y ago

> To enable that, Judge Carter ordered the city to place $1 billion in escrow; ordered the cessation of all sales or transfers of public lands; ... While I agree that Skid Row is a disaster. If I were a Californian, I don't think I'd be comfortable with this degree of legislating from the bench.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> While I agree that Skid Row is a disaster. If I were a Californian, I don't think I'd be comfortable with this degree of legislating from the bench. As a Californian, I’m not comfortable with the degree of active racial and other unlawful discrimination and actively seeking to preserve the harms of that discrimination carried out by the City of Los Angeles with no impediment from the State of California. As an American, I’m not at all unhappy with the federal courts stepping in this way when a state, or a subdivision thereof, violates the rights secured to the people under the Constitution.

cleansingfire 5y ago

Interesting that no mention is made of appeal. Is the city willing to embark on this without challenging it? That's almost too much to hope for, so I hate to assume.

cleansingfire 5y ago
So to update, it has been appealed: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/federal-judge-orders-los-angeles-shelter-homeless-people-skid-row-n1265005 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/federal-judge-orders-lo...

ryan93 5y ago

Obviously the US can afford housing the homeless. I just don't understand how a judge can just decide to spend a billion dollars.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> Obviously the US can afford housing the homeless. I just don’t understand how a judge can just decide to spend a billion dollars. The judge didn’t decide to spend a billion dollars. The judge ordered the city to put $1 billion dollars the mayor had pledged to the cause of homelessness in escrow. The actions ordered by the court may cost more or less than $1 billion. The courts have broad authority to order government or other parties to take action to remediate (or cease exacerbating) unlawful harms they have caused; and $1 billion isn’t anywhere near the maximum that it has cost the subject of such an order to comply.

Camillo 5y ago

I'll never understand how the American system of government is meant to work. You've got a legislature that typically fails to legislate, an executive that sometimes does the legislature's job, and a judiciary that can randomly step in and write both laws and decrees as long as someone brings the case before them. I hasten to note that many of everyone's favorite decisions came out of this process, so it seems to work. But from a civil law background, it just looks bizarre. Why would anyone design a system like this?

crooked-v 5y ago
A key thing to keep in mind is that the US is one of the oldest among modern democracies, and the Constitution and the way the government was structured was entirely novel at the time. Other countries then had the mistakes of the US to learn from when implementing their own democratic systems.
- giantg2 5y ago
  We also have to note that the current implementation in not the way it was designed.
  - crooked-v 5y ago
    Quite a lot of that also comes down to bad timing: the system was designed for a mostly-agrarian population with a relatively small urban class and inherent logistical limitations on maximum population density, and then the Industrial Revolution came along and upended literally everyone's expectations about how population centers, the economy, wealth distribution, etc would continue to work for the foreseeable future.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      It's seems that just about any system of government has issues with citizen/subject contentment or efficiency once becomes large and diverse. I agree that representation is lacking. I can't get an intelligent response from my reps, if I even get a response at all.

l0b0 5y ago

Original: https://southseattleemerald.com/2021/04/24/weekend-long-reads-a-watershed-ruling-on-homelessness/ https://southseattleemerald.com/2021/04/24/weekend-long-read...

anonuser123456 5y ago

How about we deregulate zoning so housing can become affordable?

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
And remove rent controls. Also they should establish vagrancy laws. Guess how many people wouldn't bother living in CA then? South Park has already covered this topic.

csomar 5y ago

I wonder if Skid's homelessness will disappear now that there is a strong motive (a potentially big bill) to fix the issue.

pseudo0 5y ago

This interpretation of "state created danger" seems remarkably overbroad. By this logic, you could tie just about any danger back to the state with a similar degree of proximity. Take someone hit by a drunk driver, for example. The government repealed Prohibition, regulates and licenses alcohol production and sale, and is fully aware of the risks of drivers abusing alcohol (DUI laws, PSAs, etc). That sure sounds like an active, willing, and knowing participant in creating the conditions of the danger. Can the victim of a DUI therefore successfully sue the government? I'd fully expect this to get quickly overturned on appeal.

soledades 5y ago
This is somewhat begging the question, which is, at its core: “is the gov’t directly responsible for the humanitarian crisis at Skid Row.”
- pseudo0 5y ago
  It was intended as more of a proof by contradiction. If we assume that the judge is correct in assessing this as a state created danger, then this standard would also apply to a wide variety of dangers that the government is also involved with, which have never been classified as such.
  - soledades 5y ago
    The notion that this reasoning would apply to an absurd (for your reductio ad absurdum) variety of cases is just a slight reframing of the point of contention. By way of example, assume, for the sake of contradiction, that your argument is valid. Then, by similar reasoning, I could argue that any argument I disagree with can be taken to unreasonable extremes, and is therefore invalid, etc. etc. :P
dragonwriter 5y ago
> By this logic, you could tie just about any danger back to the state with a similar degree of proximity. Um, if you actually read the detailed recitation of relevant fact findings in the decision, I don’t think you can trace most dangers back to the state with similar proximity. > Take someone hit by a drunk driver, for example. The government repealed Prohibition, regulates and licenses alcohol production and sale, and is fully aware of the risks of drivers abusing alcohol (DUI laws, PSAs, etc). That sure sounds like an active, willing, and knowing participant in creating the conditions of the danger. That’s not nearly the specificity of the harms to particular persons that is established with the skid row containment policy.

RickJWagner 5y ago

Rural life looks better every day.