alphanerd4Washington State Ban on the Unhoused
“Hey, we really don’t want you out here on the street, so we’re gonna have to do something about it.”
“You’re gonna give us homes?”
“lol no”
“if we can’t have homes and we can’t be in public where are we supposed to go?”
“Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”
join the military or forced work camps in prison
Flying SquidDefinitely prison. We always need more legal slaves, after all.
Gonna risk going a bit against the grain here…
I have a lot of empathy for their situation.
I don’t know what the solution is but it isn’t the status quo. A lot of the west coast cities are having a disproportionate problem with homeless. It’s not clear if people are bussing their homeless or the housing prices or what.
The amount of trash generated by these homeless camps is nuts and ruins virtually every public space. In Portland, it is common to find hypodermic needles littered in the parks. You’ll walk past people on the sidewalk passed out with a needle in their arm or actively doing drugs. Human excrement on the sidewalk. I wish I had some solution but the current situation sucks for everyone.
I’m with you that that is inappropriate in public, and west coast cities are being hit super hard. The dirt little secret is that many interior cities do also run their homeless out.
But the research shows the fastest, most sure fire way to reduce the problem is to just give folks a permanent address that is safe.
Every effort should be made to give these folks a home, even if that home is some sort of rapid mass manufacture box with a door that locks.
I do acknowledge that the states on the west coast shouldn’t be the only ones that need to follow that approach, and there clearly isn’t a solution for that. I.e. a state should be rapidly obligated to house IT’S homeless, not ALL OF AMERICA’S homeless… But that is a very complicated layer
It seems like any state by state solution will fall prey to states that want to displace their homeless population instead of providing attainable housing. If we lived in a reasonable society the Federal government would intervene, but no dice.
Agree.
I strongly believe the federal government needs to step in, with some sort of “new deal” conservation/work corp.
As the unhoused are able, they can work for the work corp. The work corp will obviously be shit pay, but you should get basic federal healthcare, and basic housing provided. If you are unable to work, that’s not a blocker to receiving this basic housing.
Anyway, we could be doing this right now, across the country, providing a safety net for so many people who are near-homeless, while also improving our country through the other projects the work corp could take on. Republicans should be happy as folks are incentivised to try to work, as their basic needs are met and they can operate from stability.
I’m just spitballing here.
A lot of the homeless are elderly or ill or handicapped. Many are homeless because they cannot work.
I addressed that
a state should be rapidly obligated to house IT’S homeless, not ALL OF AMERICA’S homeless
This is unconstitutional under the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment.
So all a homeless person would have to do is travel to any state; claim residence, which wouldn’t be hard since they don’t exactly have a home; and then petition the state for housing. I didn’t have a primary address and did this a few months ago, and was able to get SNAP and Medicaid through the state.
You clearly understand the situation I’m describing. This is a high level situation.
Responding with the pedantry of existing law is in bad faith, as the nature of my comment clearly speaks of future hypotheticals.
The operative word is “should”. any critically capable reader (uh oh!) should be able to detect I’m discussing the practical, hypothetical challenges any given state would face, of they found the sufficient funds and motivation to pursue this topic far beyond their neighbors: they would see an influx of folks looking for these serbices, thus overwhelming their isolated effort.
The complication would be coordinating efforts across the country to provide services as I described, at such a pace and parity that regions, and then states would not become overly burdened by migrating homeless.
Trying to sell this idea to people—this idea that the Constitution will get changed to support this fantasy of yours—as anything other than mad ravings is what’s bad faith in this conversation. Confront the reality of the situation if you are truly interested in making change happen.
Men will not look at things as they really are but as they wish them to be and they are ruined.
— Niccolo Machiavelli
Miss.
What I’m selling is the need for many states, or the federal government to act in coordination, such that one state isn’t the only place homeless folks can go for these services
Give them homes. That’s the solution. It’s actually that simple.
A studio apartment can be over $3,000 in the Bay Area. Meanwhile, there are like five homeless people on every block of the city I lived in with five-digit population. The city would need to find some way to seize land, without calling for a vote, in order to have enough housing for everyone since rent control has been voted against for over a decade.
The main issue is that people would vote to drive the homeless into the sea before they would vote to house them.
Cool. I know some land they can seize.
That isn’t even in the same county I was in, let alone the same city.
All you said was the Bay Area.
THCDentonI thought washington had good support homeless. What gives?
Lots of places swung hard the other way after the pandemic. That said there’s literally no easy this is constitutional and it’s already been ruled on. Some civil rights place will take it on for an easy slam dunk.
I don’t think the Constitution permits sleeping in any public space, but the ACLU is challenging on Eighth Amendment grounds in Grants Pass v. Johnson. So we’ll know soon enough if it’s Constitutional.
It doesn’t specifically ensure a right to sleep no but to enjoy public places is legal, I can camp on public grounds so long as it’s not gated or otherwise excluded or currently utilized. They can say don’t sleep on public benches because it prevents enjoyment from others and isn’t what they’re there for but if you pitch a tent in the woods that’s legal no matter what local governments say.
I don’t think there’s anything in the Constitution about enjoying public spaces either. If you’re allowed to camp on state land in your state it’s because your state law permits it.
If I have the right to protest on public spaces because I have a measurable property right to it then I have the same right of enjoyment for any other protected right included simply existing and the necessities thereof.
Someone already tried that in 1984. When homeless activists camped out on Lafayette Square in front of the White House, the Supreme Court ruled in Clark v. Community for Creative Nonviolence that the act of sleeping itself was “facilitative,” rather than “expressive,” meaning that campgrounds aren’t protected forms of speech at all.
No it was tried as a 1st amendment issue. It needs to be tried as a 4th amendment issue which it actually it.
Ie. Camping isn’t protected under the first amendment act as it isn’t expressive initself which that ruling if you read it makes clear. Essentially by itself it isn’t but it could theoretically be made expressive but that hasn’t be tried.
No it was tried as a 1st amendment issue. It needs to be tried as a 4th amendment issue which it actually it.
The Fourth Amendment has been interpreted to exclude not only homeless individuals’ privacy interests, but also their ability to move around in public spaces. The Fourth Amendment only covers police interactions with civilians where there is a seizure. However, an interaction is not considered a seizure when a reasonable individual would feel free to terminate the encounter (Florida v Bostick (1991)). Without a property interest to anchor a homeless individual to a particular location, a police officer’s directive to move along from a public place does not trigger any Fourth Amendment interest, since complying with the order will end the interaction and not deprive the homeless individual of any property (Stephen E. Henderson, “Move On” Orders as Fourth Amendment Seizures, 2008 BYU L. Rev. 1, 18 (2008)).
Ie. Camping isn’t protected under the first amendment act as it isn’t expressive initself which that ruling if you read it makes clear. Essentially by itself it isn’t but it could theoretically be made expressive but that hasn’t be tried.
You can read it here. The defendants argued exactly that. It is the premise of the entire case.
We need not differ with the view of the Court of Appeals that overnight sleeping in connection with the demonstration is expressive conduct protected to some extent by the First Amendment.
They argue at length about the limits of this expression, and the distinction between facilitative and expressive acts. So it has definitely been tried, and has been thoroughly rebuked.
Move on is different then you cannot simply exist here, I already made mention of move on orders being legal.