The scenes were emblematic of the crisis gripping the small, Oregon mountain town of Grants Pass, where a fierce fight over park space has become a battleground for a much larger, national debate on homelessness that has reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
The town’s case, set to be heard April 22, has broad implications for how not only Grants Pass, but communities nationwide address homelessness, including whether they can fine or jail people for camping in public. It has made the town of 40,000 the unlikely face of the nation’s homelessness crisis, and further fueled the debate over how to deal with it.
“I certainly wish this wasn’t what my town was known for,” Mayor Sara Bristol told The Associated Press last month. “It’s not the reason why I became mayor. And yet it has dominated every single thing that I’ve done for the last 3 1/2 years.”
Officials across the political spectrum — from Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in California, which has nearly 30% of the nation’s homeless population, to a group of 22 conservative-led states — have filed briefs in the case, saying lower court rulings have hamstrung their ability to deal with encampments.
I can’t speak for Oregon, but here in California the problem is that we have a LOT of beds that are not being used. And cities and states can’t force people into shelter and care if the area doesn’t have enough beds for everyone that is unhoused.
The ask is to be able to shelter some people with the beds that are available. Right now CA is forced to wait until it could theoretically give every unhoused person a shelter bed at once.
Theft, overcrowding and assault are some reasons I’ve heard many homeless people say in CA as to the reason why they avoid shelters unless it becomes worse outside than inside.
That’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard so I 100% believe the government would be stuck on exactly that.
If the shelters aren’t being used then maybe ask why they aren’t being used instead of trying to force people into them.
Safety, hygiene, and convenience are often reasons why many people opt for a tent over the local shelter.
So it seems like a better idea then would be highly subsidized tiny houses/apartments.
Is that some sort of misguided antidiscrimination law?
Open up the governor’s mansion so they can sleep indoors
Churches
Those too
I didn’t think they’d actually start setting up Sanctuary Districts in 2024, but it looks like that’s their eventual goal…
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots
Too bad we don’t have a Gabriel Bell.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Maybe our version is Gabby Belle.
Clearly, we need more space tourism.
have filed briefs in the case, saying lower court rulings have hamstrung their ability to deal with encampments.
Think it’s more about this, than actually collecting fines from homeless people that have no money.
What the fuck? They’re homeless. Sleeping outside is their only option. Shelters are often dangerous, very restrictive on who they let in and there aren’t anywhere near enough of them in the places they need to be.
Sleeping in public places isn’t a fucking crime. It’s not like they’d choose the park over an apartment if they had one.
Also a lot of them are ran by Christians. Can’t imagine they treat gay people equally
After the way I was treated today, I can imagine much worse than “not equally”.
Not to mention you get kicked out of the shelter in the morning and can’t return until the evening, assuming you’re back in time to get a bed.
Yes, but if it’s criminalized you get to remove the eyesore of struggling poor people with the added benefit of fines and imprisonment.
Also prisoners are slave labor thanks to the 13th amendment so if you can take people off the street and chuck them in jail, you get free labor. Yay capitalism. /s
Slavery is a great way to maximise profits! Who cares about humans? If you just reduce them to numbers in your excel sheets it gets a lot easier to do maths with them!
Humanity just never changes, does it? Are we doomed to be forever despicable?
History whould suggest yes
How effective do they expect fining homeless people to be?
Can’t pay the fine, believe it or not, jail.
Extremely effective. It’s not about housing them…
It’s tricky, because allowing it to happen creates massive public health and environmental disasters:
These aren’t the “oh, poor innocent homeless, down on their luck” portrayed by advocates, they are drug addicts and thieves, leeching off society, and actively making life worse for themselves and everyone else.
Fuck off
Studies show the majority of homeless people have jobs. Furthermore they didn’t have one big reason for going homeless. They just couldn’t afford housing and eventually they are unable to pay. People report sliding into homelessness over the course of years as the cost of housing kept rising without pay rising.
Trying to depict all homeless people as junkies is disingenuous at best.
That was the estimate from the University of Chicago in 2021 which has since been actively been disproven by point in time counts of actual homeless people.
The Chicago stat:
https://endhomelessness.org/blog/employed-and-experiencing-homelessness-what-the-numbers-show/
“53% of people living in homeless shelters and 40% of unsheltered people were employed, either full or part-time, in the year that people were observed homeless between 2011 – 2018.”
The reality is almost the exact opposite:
https://socialinnovation.usc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Homelessness-and-Employment.pdf
“According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s (LAHSA) 2019 Adult Demographic Survey, over 50% of single adults (24 and older) experiencing unsheltered homelessness in Los Angeles County are unemployed (LAHSA, 2019a). Of those unemployed, approximately half reported that they are actively looking for work. The same survey found that 49% of unsheltered adults in family units are unemployed, but a much higher percentage of them (36%) are actively looking for work than single adults. Additionally, 46% of unsheltered adults cited unemployment or a financial reason as a primary reason why they are homeless (LAHSA, 2019a).”
And:
“According to the same survey, about 20% of single adults experiencing unsheltered homelessness in Los Angeles County are working, including full-time, part-time, seasonal, and self-employment compared to about 32% of unsheltered adults in family units (LAHSA, 2019a). Not only are people experiencing homelessness employed at low rates, but evidence shows that those who are employed report very low annual earnings (California Policy Lab, 2020). In Los Angeles County, employed people experiencing homelessness earned an average of just under $10,000 in the year prior to experiencing homelessness (California Policy Lab, 2020).”
How does 51% of homeless people being unemployed in LA County disprove the claim that only 47% of homeless people are unemployed in Chicago? They’re almost the same figure…
While employment helps people stay housed, it does not guarantee housing. As many as 40%-60% of people experiencing homelessness have a job, but housing is unaffordable because wages have not kept up with rising rents. There is no county or state where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a modest apartment. At minimum wage, people have to work 86 hours a week to afford a one-bedroom. Even when people can afford a home, one is not always available. In 1970, the United States had a surplus of 300,000 affordable homes. Today, only 37 affordable homes are available for every 100 extremely low-income renters. As a result, 70% of the lowest-wage households spend more than half their income on rent, placing them at high risk of homelessness when unexpected expenses (such as car repairs and medical bills) arise. Source
So first of all, you’re comparing two different regions. Second 51 percent of people in the document you linked have an income and 36 percent are seeking work. Third, you should really read their myths document. It pretty clearly refutes all of your claims.
So I guess work or kill yourself? That’s great. Just great.
You want things in life? You work for them. Nobody is just going to give them to you.
They aren’t asking for anyone to give things to them (well, besides spare change). They just want to live their lives and not go to jail. Some want to find a job but can’t. Some have a job but not a good enough one to get an apartment. Some want to do drugs and sleep in oblivion. Some have severe mental challenges and couldn’t hold a job if they tried.
Stop zoning everything for luxury apartments or single family homes.
“Just stop being poor, dammit!”
“You should work for what you have! Also, you should donate your time to corporations because they shouldn’t have to pay people a living wage to earn all their profit for them!”
Perhaps if they had housing and sufficient social nets so they didn’t have to steal to eat and places they could get managed drug doses (you can’t just quit, especially without resources) then this wouldn’t be a problem.
It’s not like people choose to be problems and homeless. Almost all Americans are one or two bad turns away from joining them.
May be, but we’ve gotten rid of entire classes of housing that these kind of people would be living in otherwise.
Some, you assume, must be good people though, right?
You should build a wall.
Ideally, what I’d like to see is this… It would probably take 1.5 to 2 billion to pull off:
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You build and staff a state of the art medical facility for mental health and addiction treatment, including the ability to hold people long term if necessary.
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You build and staff a facility for job training and placement, including specialized support for people with criminal records. This would also need to include interview and resume skills. Assistance for email, phone, and Internet, but also clothing assistance, laundry assistance, and the like for interviews.
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You build and staff a facility for housing support. Like work assistance, there needs to be specialized support for people with criminal records. But also a permanent address for mail.
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Once all that infrastructure is in place, you sweep the streets.
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People who need mental health and addiction treatment get institutionalized and treated until they are healthy, then they get released to the job and housing programs.
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People who have no job get the job assistance program.
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People who have a job get the housing assistance program.
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People with warrants or otherwise engaging in crimimal behavior (stolen cars, stolen bikes, other material) get arrested.
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People who are otherwise able bodied, but who are homeless by choice because “I ain’t part of your system, maaaan!” get their asses kicked and pressed into service cleaning up homeless camps.
You started off this post so reasonably…
It is reasonable if you want a permanent solution.
Your last sentence is what is so unreasonable. You are criminalizing being alive without a job, which means humans have no right to live without being in your system.
Pretty much, yeah, you don’t have the right to leech off everyone else. Contribute or GTFO.
Some might say making forced camps for a subset of people might be considered a final solution. But maybe I am just concentrating on the whole sweep the streets of undisrables part.
Camps that help people vs. camps that hurt people is a pretty significant difference. It’s clear they can’t or won’t help themselves.
But I’m open, you have a better solution than letting them live in squalor?
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Fines will teach those people who have no money to get more money.
I was wondering if it would be legal to just run over rich people. You what I mean? Let’s say you are driving to work and Elon musk is walking from the parking lot to the Starbucks. Could you just drive him over? What about a ticket? Can we give rich people a ticket? Sure it’s not like driving over them, but it could work!
“Can blood be squeezed from a stone? A rural Oregon city asks the US Council of Monarchs.”
Plasma can.
Just wait until those individual sleeping pods can harvest electricity…
Yall call this civilization? What a joke.
A fine on existing.
No, no, no. We wouldn’t think of fining people for existing. Just for existing while poor.
Sounds like we’re running out of orphans for the orphan-crushing machine.
Oh no they still work. They just can’t afford to live in a building.
With this lineup, the SC is going to make execution the punishment for not having gainful employment. Only half sarcastic.
You know, after Putin will be finally sent to Hauge(or die) Russia can solve its demographic problem(you know, hundreds of thousands people becoming fertilizer) by simply making flying to Russia free.
Or that is just another stupid idea and we should focus on education, healthcare, pensions, welfare and public transport instead. This should be even easier and have bigger results.
We keep eroding the social support network and complain about the homeless problem.
We keep changing the environment and complain about the new weather.
This all ends… so well.
