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

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.

Justice Miller explained that one of the privileges conferred by this Clause “is that a citizen of the United States can, of his own volition, become a citizen of any State of the Union by a bona fide residence therein, with the same rights as other citizens of that State.”

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