10 ms·

Cities are asking SCOTUS for more power to clear homeless encampments (2023)

54 points by leotravis10 3y ago

incomingpain 3y ago
Cities/governments have loads of options to fix homelessness which won't violate people's rights. But it's crazy to me that nobody is willing to do any of them. I get political ideologies... just that surely the suffering of these people should supersede your ideology. No no, they'd rather argue that the supreme court is wrong and they do need cruel punishment and violate their rights? Some cities, particularly those in california, oregon, and washington are practically operating internment camps(tent cities) for the homeless. As far as I'm aware there's no concerted effort to kill directly, just indirectly. https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2019-04-23/homeless-dying-in-record-numbers-on-the-streets-of-los-angeles https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/18/us/homeless-deaths-los-angeles.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/18/us/homeless-deaths-los-an... So Gavin Newsom facing his own policy failures and instead of fixing them, he's urging the supreme court to reconsider? that's the best use of his time... seriously? Homeless people are your fellow man. Do you not have any sort of humanity to want to solve this problem? California might have a recall election, but Gerry says nothing will change with that. So they are looking at 2026 at any possible change here. Gavin is at term limit, but will his Democrat successor have the ideology to do what is right? I very much doubt it. Moral compass is pointing away from california.
swayvil 3y ago
>Lawyers representing Grant Pass say no, emphasizing that enforcing local regulations should not be considered cruel and unusual punishments. Now that is a dystopian logic.
leotravis10 3y ago
This piece is from last year, but SCOTUS announced they'll be hearing this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39035164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39035164
primitivesuave 3y ago
Virtually every homeless shelter will refuse to house someone who is drunk, on drugs, or belligerent. This article only makes a passing reference to people who refuse shelter so they can continue their substance abuse, but this is a salient reason for homelessness given by many people on the streets (especially in SF).
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  In discussing this issue with the EMT and paramedic students I teach, absolutely this. "If your life had descended to a point where you had to go to the bathroom in an alley and use scrap paper to wipe, or were eating your lunch that you fetched from a trash can on the street in the rain, there's a good chance you would use opioids to numb the pain of that existence, too." And once you start using some of the most powerfully addictive substances we know, it's not about "flaws of character" or anything else, now you've messed with brain chemistry, in some cases, permanently.
  - wizerdrobe 3y ago
    Is the typical pipeline homeless-to-opioid? I’m asking because as a teenager I lived in motels and homeless with pill-mill turned heroin addict parents and my anecdotal experiences with the broader transient public suggest a downward spiral involving substances first.
    - red-iron-pine 3y ago
      more opioid to homeless. Uncle Bob gets hurt, can't work for a while, and gets put on Percocet, but that's to expensive and has limitations. Eventually he gets on other pills, and then a neighbor mentions he sells pills sometimes, and can get other stuff. Few years later Bob can't take pills, can't afford them, but can snag bags of H. That's stable for a second but eventually it screws his life up more, and he's homeless. A lot of young folks end up there cuz their home life was bad and it was easy to party / forget abuse at home, and just end up stuck.
    - FireBeyond 3y ago
FireBeyond 3y ago
The frustration to me is that cities are asking for this power in many cases with no actual plan in place. It's just "we don't care what happens, just move along". And at the risk of absolute condensation into a soundbite, a large part of homelessness derives in one form or another from those same cities and government's attitude towards mental health, which as someone who sees it every day as a paramedic, is nothing short of a fucking travesty.
- xenospn 3y ago
  The problem is so severe that a single city or even a large city, like Los Angeles, is basically helpless to stop it. This is a federal issue and needs to be handled on the federal level.
  - aksss 3y ago
    I don't even know what that means. It's a like a "move it along" policy to your problems. I hesitate to even ask: what tools do you imagine the feds have to fix homelessness, outside of driving a good economy, and perhaps protectionist measures to build low-skill industries back in the US (and all that entails)?
    - xenospn 3y ago
      From my vantage point, a combined strategy of mental health facilities with accessible healthcare and a social safety net is a good starting point. (Most likely will never happen in the US) I seriously doubt that affordable housing or better employment opportunities are going to do anything, specifically because even people making six figures are struggling to find housing here (LA) so I doubt any amount of subsidized housing is going to solve or even make a dent in the number of homeless people.
    - asdff 3y ago
      It's just a matter of sizing the scale of the problem to the correct budget so it can actually be solved. City of LA has 45,000 homeless people in it. Recent audits put the cost at half a million per unit, all services roped in with that number I believe, for a new shelter bed and staff. That's almost 23 billion dollars provided you have the land for this UCLA sized project cleared already, a whole lot more if you don't. City of LA's entire budget is 13 billion dollars; all it can do is fight the tide with a leaky bucket essentially. Federal government budget, on the other hand, is 6.1 trillion dollars, and they own the world money printer too, along with a huge amount of acreage all over the american west. The homeless crisis could be solved with a pen stroke from DC today.
cogman10 3y ago
The supreme court agreed to hear this case. So you can pretty much expect cities are going to get what they want as they didn't hear the prior ruling for basically the exact same thing. The rule right now is before cities can start clearing out people, they have to have enough beds/locations for the homeless. If there's not enough places for the homeless then public camping is legal. (meaning that if cities wanted to clear out the homeless they can build a place for them to stay.)
- leotravis10 3y ago
  The thought of fining or even jailing the homeless just for being homeless scares me. It's a more like criminalizing the poor and it would be a total waste of taxpayers money.
  - CapstanRoller 3y ago
    In the past, workhouses were used to "solve" this problem.
  - cogman10 3y ago
    I agree. Why should my money go to a private prison to restrict an "unsightly" person when the same money could buy them a lot cheaper housing facilities? It costs a lot of tax payer money to throw people in jail (especially if it's a private prison). A more humane treatment of the homeless is also a benefit to the tax payer.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      So if it were cheaper, what would you say
      - cogman10 3y ago
        That we should choose the humane route, but I wouldn't raise cost as a reason why. If housing the homeless in prisons is cheap, then a program where they can come and go from a prison but otherwise use it as a sanctuary would not be bad. If we are talking about treating the unhoused as criminals then that's where I take issue.
KorematsuFredt 3y ago
Overall giving communities more power to handle this situation seems like a good idea. It is important that we treat less fortunate people with compassion but there has to be some mechanism of where we draw that line. Poor neighborhoods of San Fransisco look worse that some of the Indian slums and are taken over by criminals, theives and rapists not to mention drug dealers.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  > Poor neighborhoods of San Fransisco look worse that some of the Indian slums and are taken over by criminals, theives and rapists not to mention drug dealers. I've been to both, and no, they don't.
thr0way120 3y ago
One thing that has been fascinating about "The Law" as I get older: You can literally rule on most things whatever way you want, and change your mind and thats cool too. Have seen too many "set in stone" decisions change to feel otherwise. One example is the debate over whether Trump can be prosecuted. One side argues: Well, if Biden assassinated Trump with a predator drone, wouldn't you want him to be prosecuted and not protected by executive privilege? If not, Trump should be prosecuted. That is a standard that is completely arbitrary and you can rule either way depending on what you feel like any day of the week. The argument that executives should be protected from doing the shady stuff they usually do in office (Obama assassinating arabs with drones all day long) is a kind of coin flip, both arguments are solid. I am truly convinced even the law is political behind the scenes, and applied at will based on which way popular opinion or political pressure / expedience is blowing at that moment. For example: Commercial Real Estate is collapsing. Cities are finally being destroyed. Guess what happens? Suddenly all employees mandated to go to work (how convenient for commercial real estate sector that every employer is forcing employees back to work ... its almost as though a capitalist / finance conspiracy is happening behind the scenes to try to help out real estate owners). And now another "pro commercial real estate" ruling. By the Supreme Court. Kicking homeless people out of downtowns is great for cities. suddenly a random change of heart linked to a meltdown in the sector. That doesn't seem like a coincidence. What on earth would make the supreme court, which has an unlimited list of things to do, decide to randomly revisit an 8 year old ruling which just so happens to benefit commercial real estate?) I am pretty sure the courts are political and highly influenced by capital and it is done behind the scenes, and they can change their ways at will, like this. It all feels way too synchronized.
- trhway 3y ago
  Aliens or even humans in the far future would be puzzled looking at our time and seeing overabundance of unused buildings and a lot of unhoused people at the same time and the same place.
  - brk 3y ago
    Aliens maybe. Humans have understood, and enforced, "property rights" for quite a while now. Unused buildings are not just automatically ideal for homeless shelters, and even if it were for some reason a perfectly usable vacant apartment complex, there is still the issue of wear and tear/maintenance costs. If it was as easy as just building some apartments and walking away from responsibility after that, this would be a much easier thing to solve.
GartzenDeHaes 3y ago
Washington state seems to be leading the way on this issue by spending $700,000 on boulders for the homeless. /s? https://www.theolympian.com/news/local/article283855368.html https://www.theolympian.com/news/local/article283855368.html
- xenospn 3y ago
  Oh wow. I should go into the Boulder business.
User23 3y ago
There are clearly unwritten rules around this issue. For example San Diego has homeless encampments everywhere and Coronado has none. And while being an island doesn’t hurt, Coronado also vigorously enforces its vagrancy laws, mainly by dumping them back in San Diego. Half the island being federal property probably has something to do with it maybe? Incidentally Coronado is one of the safest, cleanest, most beautiful, and expensive communities in the USA.
standardUser 3y ago
We need publicly funded SROs, group housing and mental health facilities, with trained medical and security staff as needed. It won't be pretty and it will cost a literal fortune, but we've been living with the alternative for decades now and it's not pretty or cheap either. And the most-impacted cities can't be expected to pay for all of this. A solution of this scale can only come from the federal level.
- pfisherman 3y ago
  I think the replacement of SROs by luxury apartments in downtown SF (mid Market neighborhood) was an under appreciated driver of homelessness there. This was housing of last report for many.
  - BryantD 3y ago
    Same in Seattle. And to be completely fair, in many cities the reduction in SRO housing was also caused by unwise but well-meaning regulation.
- robocat 3y ago
  Leftfield solution: Pay drug buyers to narc on sellers (especially via recordings). Catch the sellers of addictive drugs (especially P/meth) and bust the network by making it too risky to sell hard drugs. However would need a way to prevent buyers from becoming victims of retribution. If the homeless problem is predominantly due to drug usage then we need an effective way remove the drugs from society. Might help reduce theft too? Note I am not a fan of persecution for drug usage! Personally, I would prefer to see many drugs (mushrooms, weed, ecstacy) decriminalised and made safe. Currently street drugs are unreliable quality (due to manufacturing adulterants, mixing in fentanyl/crap). I have known some reasonably functional/social users of some class A drugs - so I am not religiously against drugs - but I have also witnessed damage to individuals and society due to drug usage.
  - primitivesuave 3y ago
    I highly recommend watching The Wire as it provides a stunningly accurate depiction of how this strategy failed in Baltimore. As a sibling comment points out, the "war on drugs" was an abject failure, because the people getting imprisoned for their role in the drug economy were usually street-level dealers and foot soldiers. The people who run criminal enterprises tend to insulate themselves from its everyday operations, which is why they could only get Al Capone off the streets by charging him with tax evasion. I wholeheartedly agree with your notions on drug usage and decriminalization of certain substances though! You might be interested in Dr. Timothy Leary, who wrote extensively on "control over your own nervous system" as long as it did not affect others [1] (on page 49). 1. https://repository.arizona.edu/bitstream/handle/10150/565255/AZU_TD_BOX34_E9791_1972_138.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://repository.arizona.edu/bitstream/handle/10150/565255...

54 points by leotravis10 3y ago

Cities/governments have loads of options to fix homelessness which won't violate people's rights. But it's crazy to me that nobody is willing to do any of them. I get political ideologies... just that surely the suffering of these people should supersede your ideology. No no, they'd rather argue that the supreme court is wrong and they do need cruel punishment and violate their rights? Some cities, particularly those in california, oregon, and washington are practically operating internment camps(tent cities) for the homeless. As far as I'm aware there's no concerted effort to kill directly, just indirectly. https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2019-04-23/homeless-dying-in-record-numbers-on-the-streets-of-los-angeles https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/18/us/homeless-deaths-los-angeles.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/18/us/homeless-deaths-los-an... So Gavin Newsom facing his own policy failures and instead of fixing them, he's urging the supreme court to reconsider? that's the best use of his time... seriously? Homeless people are your fellow man. Do you not have any sort of humanity to want to solve this problem? California might have a recall election, but Gerry says nothing will change with that. So they are looking at 2026 at any possible change here. Gavin is at term limit, but will his Democrat successor have the ideology to do what is right? I very much doubt it. Moral compass is pointing away from california.

swayvil 3y ago

>Lawyers representing Grant Pass say no, emphasizing that enforcing local regulations should not be considered cruel and unusual punishments. Now that is a dystopian logic.

leotravis10 3y ago

This piece is from last year, but SCOTUS announced they'll be hearing this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39035164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39035164

primitivesuave 3y ago

Virtually every homeless shelter will refuse to house someone who is drunk, on drugs, or belligerent. This article only makes a passing reference to people who refuse shelter so they can continue their substance abuse, but this is a salient reason for homelessness given by many people on the streets (especially in SF).

FireBeyond 3y ago
In discussing this issue with the EMT and paramedic students I teach, absolutely this. "If your life had descended to a point where you had to go to the bathroom in an alley and use scrap paper to wipe, or were eating your lunch that you fetched from a trash can on the street in the rain, there's a good chance you would use opioids to numb the pain of that existence, too." And once you start using some of the most powerfully addictive substances we know, it's not about "flaws of character" or anything else, now you've messed with brain chemistry, in some cases, permanently.
- wizerdrobe 3y ago
  Is the typical pipeline homeless-to-opioid? I’m asking because as a teenager I lived in motels and homeless with pill-mill turned heroin addict parents and my anecdotal experiences with the broader transient public suggest a downward spiral involving substances first.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    more opioid to homeless. Uncle Bob gets hurt, can't work for a while, and gets put on Percocet, but that's to expensive and has limitations. Eventually he gets on other pills, and then a neighbor mentions he sells pills sometimes, and can get other stuff. Few years later Bob can't take pills, can't afford them, but can snag bags of H. That's stable for a second but eventually it screws his life up more, and he's homeless. A lot of young folks end up there cuz their home life was bad and it was easy to party / forget abuse at home, and just end up stuck.
  - FireBeyond 3y ago

FireBeyond 3y ago

The frustration to me is that cities are asking for this power in many cases with no actual plan in place. It's just "we don't care what happens, just move along". And at the risk of absolute condensation into a soundbite, a large part of homelessness derives in one form or another from those same cities and government's attitude towards mental health, which as someone who sees it every day as a paramedic, is nothing short of a fucking travesty.

xenospn 3y ago
The problem is so severe that a single city or even a large city, like Los Angeles, is basically helpless to stop it. This is a federal issue and needs to be handled on the federal level.
- aksss 3y ago
  I don't even know what that means. It's a like a "move it along" policy to your problems. I hesitate to even ask: what tools do you imagine the feds have to fix homelessness, outside of driving a good economy, and perhaps protectionist measures to build low-skill industries back in the US (and all that entails)?
  - xenospn 3y ago
    From my vantage point, a combined strategy of mental health facilities with accessible healthcare and a social safety net is a good starting point. (Most likely will never happen in the US) I seriously doubt that affordable housing or better employment opportunities are going to do anything, specifically because even people making six figures are struggling to find housing here (LA) so I doubt any amount of subsidized housing is going to solve or even make a dent in the number of homeless people.
  - asdff 3y ago
    It's just a matter of sizing the scale of the problem to the correct budget so it can actually be solved. City of LA has 45,000 homeless people in it. Recent audits put the cost at half a million per unit, all services roped in with that number I believe, for a new shelter bed and staff. That's almost 23 billion dollars provided you have the land for this UCLA sized project cleared already, a whole lot more if you don't. City of LA's entire budget is 13 billion dollars; all it can do is fight the tide with a leaky bucket essentially. Federal government budget, on the other hand, is 6.1 trillion dollars, and they own the world money printer too, along with a huge amount of acreage all over the american west. The homeless crisis could be solved with a pen stroke from DC today.

cogman10 3y ago

The supreme court agreed to hear this case. So you can pretty much expect cities are going to get what they want as they didn't hear the prior ruling for basically the exact same thing. The rule right now is before cities can start clearing out people, they have to have enough beds/locations for the homeless. If there's not enough places for the homeless then public camping is legal. (meaning that if cities wanted to clear out the homeless they can build a place for them to stay.)

leotravis10 3y ago
The thought of fining or even jailing the homeless just for being homeless scares me. It's a more like criminalizing the poor and it would be a total waste of taxpayers money.
- CapstanRoller 3y ago
  In the past, workhouses were used to "solve" this problem.
- cogman10 3y ago
  I agree. Why should my money go to a private prison to restrict an "unsightly" person when the same money could buy them a lot cheaper housing facilities? It costs a lot of tax payer money to throw people in jail (especially if it's a private prison). A more humane treatment of the homeless is also a benefit to the tax payer.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    So if it were cheaper, what would you say
    - cogman10 3y ago
      That we should choose the humane route, but I wouldn't raise cost as a reason why. If housing the homeless in prisons is cheap, then a program where they can come and go from a prison but otherwise use it as a sanctuary would not be bad. If we are talking about treating the unhoused as criminals then that's where I take issue.

KorematsuFredt 3y ago

Overall giving communities more power to handle this situation seems like a good idea. It is important that we treat less fortunate people with compassion but there has to be some mechanism of where we draw that line. Poor neighborhoods of San Fransisco look worse that some of the Indian slums and are taken over by criminals, theives and rapists not to mention drug dealers.

red-iron-pine 3y ago
> Poor neighborhoods of San Fransisco look worse that some of the Indian slums and are taken over by criminals, theives and rapists not to mention drug dealers. I've been to both, and no, they don't.

thr0way120 3y ago

One thing that has been fascinating about "The Law" as I get older: You can literally rule on most things whatever way you want, and change your mind and thats cool too. Have seen too many "set in stone" decisions change to feel otherwise. One example is the debate over whether Trump can be prosecuted. One side argues: Well, if Biden assassinated Trump with a predator drone, wouldn't you want him to be prosecuted and not protected by executive privilege? If not, Trump should be prosecuted. That is a standard that is completely arbitrary and you can rule either way depending on what you feel like any day of the week. The argument that executives should be protected from doing the shady stuff they usually do in office (Obama assassinating arabs with drones all day long) is a kind of coin flip, both arguments are solid. I am truly convinced even the law is political behind the scenes, and applied at will based on which way popular opinion or political pressure / expedience is blowing at that moment. For example: Commercial Real Estate is collapsing. Cities are finally being destroyed. Guess what happens? Suddenly all employees mandated to go to work (how convenient for commercial real estate sector that every employer is forcing employees back to work ... its almost as though a capitalist / finance conspiracy is happening behind the scenes to try to help out real estate owners). And now another "pro commercial real estate" ruling. By the Supreme Court. Kicking homeless people out of downtowns is great for cities. suddenly a random change of heart linked to a meltdown in the sector. That doesn't seem like a coincidence. What on earth would make the supreme court, which has an unlimited list of things to do, decide to randomly revisit an 8 year old ruling which just so happens to benefit commercial real estate?) I am pretty sure the courts are political and highly influenced by capital and it is done behind the scenes, and they can change their ways at will, like this. It all feels way too synchronized.

trhway 3y ago
Aliens or even humans in the far future would be puzzled looking at our time and seeing overabundance of unused buildings and a lot of unhoused people at the same time and the same place.
- brk 3y ago
  Aliens maybe. Humans have understood, and enforced, "property rights" for quite a while now. Unused buildings are not just automatically ideal for homeless shelters, and even if it were for some reason a perfectly usable vacant apartment complex, there is still the issue of wear and tear/maintenance costs. If it was as easy as just building some apartments and walking away from responsibility after that, this would be a much easier thing to solve.

GartzenDeHaes 3y ago

Washington state seems to be leading the way on this issue by spending $700,000 on boulders for the homeless. /s? https://www.theolympian.com/news/local/article283855368.html https://www.theolympian.com/news/local/article283855368.html

xenospn 3y ago
Oh wow. I should go into the Boulder business.

User23 3y ago

There are clearly unwritten rules around this issue. For example San Diego has homeless encampments everywhere and Coronado has none. And while being an island doesn’t hurt, Coronado also vigorously enforces its vagrancy laws, mainly by dumping them back in San Diego. Half the island being federal property probably has something to do with it maybe? Incidentally Coronado is one of the safest, cleanest, most beautiful, and expensive communities in the USA.

standardUser 3y ago

We need publicly funded SROs, group housing and mental health facilities, with trained medical and security staff as needed. It won't be pretty and it will cost a literal fortune, but we've been living with the alternative for decades now and it's not pretty or cheap either. And the most-impacted cities can't be expected to pay for all of this. A solution of this scale can only come from the federal level.

pfisherman 3y ago
I think the replacement of SROs by luxury apartments in downtown SF (mid Market neighborhood) was an under appreciated driver of homelessness there. This was housing of last report for many.
- BryantD 3y ago
  Same in Seattle. And to be completely fair, in many cities the reduction in SRO housing was also caused by unwise but well-meaning regulation.
robocat 3y ago
Leftfield solution: Pay drug buyers to narc on sellers (especially via recordings). Catch the sellers of addictive drugs (especially P/meth) and bust the network by making it too risky to sell hard drugs. However would need a way to prevent buyers from becoming victims of retribution. If the homeless problem is predominantly due to drug usage then we need an effective way remove the drugs from society. Might help reduce theft too? Note I am not a fan of persecution for drug usage! Personally, I would prefer to see many drugs (mushrooms, weed, ecstacy) decriminalised and made safe. Currently street drugs are unreliable quality (due to manufacturing adulterants, mixing in fentanyl/crap). I have known some reasonably functional/social users of some class A drugs - so I am not religiously against drugs - but I have also witnessed damage to individuals and society due to drug usage.
- primitivesuave 3y ago
  I highly recommend watching The Wire as it provides a stunningly accurate depiction of how this strategy failed in Baltimore. As a sibling comment points out, the "war on drugs" was an abject failure, because the people getting imprisoned for their role in the drug economy were usually street-level dealers and foot soldiers. The people who run criminal enterprises tend to insulate themselves from its everyday operations, which is why they could only get Al Capone off the streets by charging him with tax evasion. I wholeheartedly agree with your notions on drug usage and decriminalization of certain substances though! You might be interested in Dr. Timothy Leary, who wrote extensively on "control over your own nervous system" as long as it did not affect others [1] (on page 49). 1. https://repository.arizona.edu/bitstream/handle/10150/565255/AZU_TD_BOX34_E9791_1972_138.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://repository.arizona.edu/bitstream/handle/10150/565255...