The Oregon case decided Friday is the most significant to come before the high court in decades on the issue and comes as a rising number of people in the U.S. are without a permanent place to live.
“That includes California, which is home to one-third of the country’s homeless population.”
Why do these statements never follow immediately stating that California is also 10% of the ENTIRE country’s population and it’s where all of the livable weather is if you have no option but to sleep outside. Of course a lot of them are in California. We need a new deal.
Eh, it’s not just the weather. It’s cities in general. Look at Philly. Winter sucks there but still tons of homeless.
California, outside be mountains, doesn’t really get winters. It’s an attractive place and people will do train hopping to get there.
It’'s not just the big cities with homeless problems, it’s basically everywhere that’s not RURAL, and even then you still see them
When other places send them here, it’s gonna be a problem
Agreed.
Denver has plenty of homeless too, but come on. It’s nowhere near California-levels.
Weathers only part of it, a large part is cost of living and especially housing costs. People have this idea that people become mentally unwell drug addicts then lose housing then move to California for the better weather/ more compassionate state. In reality a lot of it is the reverse, people live in California, lose they’re housing due to astronomical rents, then they become mentally unwell drug addicts due to the pain and trauma they suffer on the streets.
Last point still stands though, we do need a green new deal to give these people housing and employ them in meaningful jobs to help the green transition.
I see people living homeless outside in New England daily, even in the winter. That discrepancy has to be fed by more than just weather.
What discrepancy?
Are you implying that the presence of any homeless people in New England invalidates the idea that consistently favorable weather leads to a higher ratio of homeless people living in an area?
Probably also matters long term vs short term. When someone first becomes homeless, it usually happens where they were already living regardless of the weather. Over time, people may move to where it is more comfortable to sleep outside.
So, all cities have new homeless people plus some that just never leave. And then warm areas have new homeless people plus the long term homeless people who risked traveling to get to warmer temperatures.
I could have been more clear on that. If 1/3 of homeless live in CA and CA makes up 1/10 the population, then CA has disproportionately high homeless population as compared the other states.
I was get at the point that there isn’t one cause for CA having this disparity, another commenter pointed out housing prices for one example. And that other parts of the country, even ones with harsh seasons, are still livable albeit not as hospitable.
Isn’t the average home price in California more than double the average of New England?
True, but also the consequences of living homeless in New England would force you to either come up with some kind of way to afford shelter or move south. Whereas more homeless people die on the streets in California than you might expect, but the perception is that you can live outdoors safely all year. So there’s less incentive to scrape together enough money for a home.
Add to that, very few people move to New England with a crazy idealistic view of their opportunities to make it big. If they move there at all, it’s because they have a job lined up. Dreamers crash and burn in California every day.
In case you ever need led hardproof that America is not a Christian Nation.
Feels pretty spot on for the Christians in the church I went to as a child
But the Church will help! Our doors are always open! With strings attached, of course.
Sounds like the solution is for the homeless people to protest by refusing to sleep in shelters, forcing the police to arrest them all, overcrowding the jails and clogging the court system until the entire system grinds to a standstill.
So what do I know, I haven’t been homeless in 15 years
Jail = free labour
Shelter = help
Jail = makes $$$
Help = costs $
The math is clear.
Sounds like this will inevitably happen anyway. It’s not like they are bussing homeless people to Colorado are they?
No actually, I am asking are they doing that, because I can see them doing that.
it’s not exactly a new thing, but yes. they’ve been trying to bus people as far as they can get away with.
All the old Marijuana convictions being overturned means the corporate prison system has a shortage of free labor. Seems like jailing the homeless puts them back on top. Big Brain SCOTUS. /s
Forcing people into shelters or jail is super fucked up. If I decide I want to camp out in a tent and remove myself from the capitalist grind I should be able to do it unmolested. These fucking vampires think they own every grain of sand.
Well now this really makes for a trio of facts that paint a horrifying picture:
- Private, for profit prisons exist
- Prison slave labour is legal
- Homelessness can now be made illegal
Guess I should buy some stocks in companies that use prison labour.
- Verizon uses inmates to provide telecommunication services.
- Fidelity Investments uses some held assets to fund the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organization that promotes inmate work.
- Kmart and JCPenney use inmate labor in Tennessee to make denim products.
- Walmart uses prison labor to clean barcodes so products can be resold.
- Some cheese and fish from Whole Foods comes from prison labor.
- Circuit boards from IBM come from Texas prisoners.
- Wendy’s and McDonald’s use prison labor to process beef for their food products.
- Amazon uses BOP labor for cleaning and sorting damaged goods
Also Idaho potatoes are largely prison labor. McD’s and Five Guys buy a lot of them
Idaho only has prisoners, potatoes, and gun-totin’ white supremacists.
What else are they gonna do?
I thought Kmart went out of business?
Wikipedia states:
Kmart, formerly legally registered as Kmart Corporation, now operated by Transformco, is an online retailer in the United States and operates six remaining Kmart big-box department stores — 3 in the US Virgin Islands and one each in Kendale Lakes, Florida (Miami postal address); Bridgehampton, Long Island; and Tamuning, Guam.
But also
On January 22, 2002, Kmart filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection under the leadership of its then-chairman Charles Conaway and president Mark Schwartz.
So they’ve been a subsidiary to several other companies since then.
Ah, so they’re not quite dead yet, they’re just headed for a hedge fund buying them and killing them off.
Add Raytheon to that list.
Anecdotes aside, prison stocks skyrocketed after Trump’s election. Anybody wonder why?
The fact that prisons have stocks…
Back in my day, the stocks were kept in the public square.
Because Hilary campaigned on banning private prisons which caused their stocks to collapse for a year until she lost.
For communities that do this, the goal is to…
A) Drive out the homeless so they go to other, more charitable communities, and become someone else’s problem, and then…
B) Point out the higher rate of homelessness (and higher taxes necessary to deal with it) in those other communities and say, “Look how awful those communities are!”
Or fuel the prison industrial complex sustaining a constant supply of slave labor and state funding for private prisons
This is the one.
It’s not as if these folks can just go off into the woods and build a cabin. There’s no where to go that isn’t owned or protected. You gotta sleep somewhere, it’s not a choice, people need to sleep.
Next is extermination camps
This is really interesting in contrast to where I live in Ontario, Canada. A municipality wanted an injunction to make it crystal clear they could evict a homeless encampment on municipal property. Instead, they got a judgement that doing so would violate those people’s Charter rights. This ruling means basically every municipality in the province now legally has to do something about the homelessness crisis.
Same thing in BC… In the Prince George encapment case, it was ruled that unless there are enough shelter beds that are sufficiently accessible by the affected population, they are allowed to stay in the Lower Patricia encampment.
My opinion has always been governmental spaces, especially those on or near the buildings lawmakers use, should always be an allowed campground for homeless people. They’re the ones most responsible for the problem, they should have to see it every time they go to work.
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.
Overall, the dissent is good. But it makes 1 fundamental mistake of constitutional analysis:
The Constitution cannot be evaded by such formalistic distinctions
As I recall, Gavin Newsom has basically been pushing to look at available shelter space, and clear portions of encampments based on that available space. Problem has been, legally, CA couldn’t clear encampments unless it could demonstrate that it had beds for everyone. As a result, CA has a lot of unclaimed shelter beds. Some counties don’t have enough for everyone, but they do have enough to start moving large portions of people inside.
That said, the conversations around this seem to miss one of the fundamental reasons why people are not excited take a shelter bed. Many shelters have been dirty, hostile, or down right unsafe. People have felt safer in tent communities where they could know and chose their neighbors.
I’m of two minds on this. The all or nothing rule on shelter beds was weird, but shelters need to be safe, help people get care, let people keep belongings, and not kick people out every morning at the crack of dawn.
At least here in CA, the government seemed to be following the supreme court’s previous ruling in good faith. I’d bet that they’ll continue pursuing a similar course of action, just with one less technicality.
In Star Trek, there were Sanctuary Districts to herd all the undesirables to in the 2020s.
In reality, we can’t even be bothered to do that.
That’s just another word for Ghetto
Here in LA, jerks are constantly suggesting “let’s build a huge structure in the desert and move 'em there”. They usually don’t know what Manzanar was.
And our answer is always no. The homeless are going to stay right here in everybody’s faces until we actually solve the problem. We aren’t willing to compromise on pushing them somewhere else.
There is no LA homelessness problem. There is a national homelessness problem and we’re dealing with it here because our Christian country won’t.
So. Unless you have permission to be on someone’s private real estate, to you’re now forbidden to sleep. Nothing dystopian about that.
Nonsense. I’m sure someone with a home and a job will be allowed to take a carnap on the quad of their public university. It’s only illegal to do it when you have to.
You can predict the outcome of this court’s decisions with two questions:
A: Will it cause chaos?B: Is it cruel?
They seem to feel it’s bonus points if the answer to both is yes.
Can we get a class action lawsuit to sue for housing? Isn’t this almost entrapment like if the government doesn’t supply space for people to sleep but the population is still growing and the border isn’t completely sealed(not my solution I want) then shouldn’t the government be forced to build new homes or at least bunkhouses?
I’d think that for a blanket no-homelessness policy to be even reasonably humane, each person would need a right of address, even a 50 sqft. parcel of public land in/by the town of choosing which they can call their domicile.
If nothing else of there can’t be government funded housing then homesteading/camping outside of city limits and an advanced public transport system would be the only other option I can think of
They don’t have to pay their housing but they must make sure they have the ability to make it to a job so they can avoid being homeless
Could just show up to your town’s zoning board meetings and keep hammering them each and every time they turn down a residential permit application
