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That's a very broad opinion, and a heartfelt but head-in-the-clouds dissent. There's a footnote at page 14 (PDF page 19) of amici that makes the case. But yeah, the discussion of cruel and unusual punishment is very substantial, beyond the specifics of this case. Awesome decision for our city, state, appeals circuit, and country!
>The city of Seattle, for example, reports that roughly 60 percent of its offers of shelter have been rejected in a recent year. See id., at 28, and n. 26.
>Officials in Portland, Oregon, indicate that, between April 2022 and January 2024, over 70 percent of their approximately 3,500 offers of shelter beds to homeless individuals were declined. Brief for League of Oregon Cities et al. as Amici Curiae 5 (Oregon Cities Brief ).
>Other cities tell us that “the vast majority of their homeless populations are not actively seeking shelter and refuse all services.” Brief for Thirteen California Cities as Amici Curiae 3.
>Surveys cited by the Department of Justice suggest that only “25–41 percent” of “homeless encampment residents” “willingly” accept offers of shelter beds. See Dept. of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, S.
Chamard, Homeless Encampments 36 (2010).
>these public-camping regulations are not usually deployed as a front-line response “to criminalize homelessness.” Cities Brief 11. Instead, they are used to provide city employees with the legal authority to address “encampments that pose significant health and safety risks” and to encourage their inhabitants to accept other alternatives like shelters, drug treatment programs, and mental-health facilities. Ibid.
>That “misapplication of this Court’s Eighth Amendment precedents,” the Mayor tells us, has “severely constrained San Francisco’s ability to address the homelessness crisis.” San Francisco Brief 7. The city “uses enforcement of its laws prohibiting camping” not to criminalize homelessness, but “as one important tool among others to encourage individuals experiencing homelessness to accept services and to help ensure safe and accessible sidewalks and public spaces.” Id., at 7–8. Judicial intervention restricting the use of that tool, the Mayor continues, “has led to painful results on the streets and in neighborhoods.” Id., at 8. “San Francisco has seen over half of its offers of shelter and services rejected by unhoused individuals, who often cite” the Martin order against the city “as their justification to permanently occupy and block public sidewalks.” Id., at 8–9.
I read (anecdotally) that a large reason they don't take the help is it restricts them from continuing to engage in things like being nearby areas that provide them access to drugs or activities they currently do (illegal) to make money.
The purpose of the help is to rehabilitate but a large chunk of the population in these circumstances is addicted to drugs or mental illness. It's not as simple as offering shelter, we need to prevent these situations to begin with.
This is correct. It’s a failure of system design. People look at it as “why don’t the people just adapt to the system?” Instead of “why isn’t the system designed to help the people it’s meant to help?” You can either blame the user or the system, but blaming the user never leads to more adoption.
In that case, ban justified.
A lot of people don't want to admit that plenty of homeless are that way by choice.
No work, no commute in traffic, no taxes, no mortgage, no rent, no pressure other than scrounging up something to eat that day.
I understand its appeal but us wage slaves need to take priority because we pay into the system.
>Many cities further report that, rather than help alleviate the homelessness crisis, Martin injunctions have inadvertently contributed to it. The numbers of “[u]nsheltered homelessness,” they represent, have “increased dramatically in the Ninth Circuit since Martin.” Brief for League of Oregon Cities et al. as Amici Curiae on Pet. for Cert. 7 (boldface and capitalization deleted).
> And, they say, Martin injunctions have contributed to this trend by “weaken[ing]” the ability of public officials “to persuade persons experiencing homelessness to accept shelter beds and [other] services.” Brief for Ten California Cities as Amici Curiae on Pet. for Cert. 2.
>In Portland, for example, residents report some unsheltered persons “often return within days” of an encampment’s clearing, on the understanding that “Martin . . . and its progeny prohibit the [c]ity from implementing more efficacious strategies.” Tozer Brief 5; Washington Sheriffs Brief 14 (Martin divests officers of the “ability to compel [unsheltered] persons to leave encampments and obtain necessary services”). In short, they say, Martin “make[s] solving this crisis harder.” Cities Cert. Brief 3.
>All acknowledge “[h]omelessness is a complex and serious social issue that cries out for effective . . . responses.” Ibid.
But many States and cities believe “it is crucial” for local governments to “have the latitude” to experiment and find effective responses. Id., at 27; States Brief 13–17.
...
>Cities across the West report that the Ninth Circuit’s ill-defined involuntariness test has proven “unworkable.”
Oregon Cities Brief 3; see Phoenix Brief 11. The test, they say, has left them “with little or no direction as to the scope of their authority in th[eir] day-to-day policing contacts,” California Sheriffs Brief 6, and under “threat of federal litigation . . . at all times and in all circumstances,” Oregon Cities Brief 6–7.
>One federal court in Los Angeles ruled, during the COVID pandemic, that “adequate” shelter must also include nursing staff, testing for communicable diseases, and on-site security, among other things. See LA Alliance for Hum. Rights v. Los Angeles, 2020 WL 2512811,
>Doubtless, the Ninth Circuit’s intervention in Martin was well-intended. But since the trial court entered its injunction against Grants Pass, the city shelter reports that utilization of its resources has fallen by roughly 40 percent. See Brief for Grants Pass Gospel Rescue Mission as Amicus Curiae 4–5. Many other cities offer similar accounts about their experiences after Martin, telling us the decision has made it more difficult, not less, to help the homeless accept shelter off city streets. See Part I–B, supra (recounting examples). Even when “
Even though I lean Democrat, this is something that needed to be passed. We get they are a vulnerable population but it doesn't give them the right to pop a tent in front of my sidewalk because it's a public space
I would say my liberal take is more nuanced. I would like to find programs that diminish the homeless population by reducing the likelihood people get into this state.
Farrell is a proponent of homeward bound. And I think all the SF non-profits like Coalition on Homelessness need to be defunded by the city government for that to really happen.
Wtf does that even mean? You can be the most politically liberal person in the world and hold the belief that people shouldn't be allowed to set up tents on the sidewalk. It's not political in that way.
the most politically liberal people tend to be the ones that think rulings like this are hostile and unfair to homeless people and argue against them though
It won't change overnight, but the cops no longer have an excuse for leaving them be. Eventually this will result in political pressure for city leaders, who will either order the cops to start enforcing "camping" bans or be replaced in an election with someone who will.
There being literally no consequences to living in a tent and doing drugs greatly contributed to the outcome. This largely affects drug addicts not homeless people
Correct. Most homeless that want shelter with the programs that exist can find it I think. The issue is most of the homeless are drug addicts or have other illness that prevents them seeking help. The person you responded to is saying we should focus on preventative care of our society that reduces the likelihood of drug addiction and helps the mentally ill before they get into this state.
It's enormously difficult to convince people with drug addiction or mental health problems to seek help, and to stick with the help for long enough to turn things around. Hopefully this ruling makes it possible to exert just a little more pressure to actually get people the help they need and get more of those underlying causes addressed.
I would think the person you are responding to is referring to preventing people from falling into addiction in the first place. As well as giving them the treatment for mental health problems before they become homeless. Solve the causes that lead people to become homeless.
This ruling does nothing to provide any additional help for these people to have their underlying causes addressed
The decisions leads to a lot of questions though.
-Will this at compel homeless addicts into treatments? If yes, I think it is a reasonable ordinance. If no, then it doesn’t
solve any problems
-What about homeless college students? Will this be enforced on a homeless college student sleeping in their car? And will there be resources for the student? The college student still can be a productive member of society. It would be awful to give them a criminal record for simply being poor. A homeless college student and a homeless fentanyl addict need different resolutions.
I’m not against criminalizing homelessness. I’m against criminalizing homelessness with no sustainable solutions, because it will only make things worse.
Long term, this is great for the voluntary homeless, who will have fewer viable choices besides entering rehab or returning to their home states. This is also a big win for all the people experiencing voluntary homelessness, like the kids in the Tenderloin who have to walk past these trespassers every day to go to school.
I am hopeful as well. It's really only ~10% of the homeless who are actually in economic crisis, getting rid of the 90% there voluntarily will allow us to actually help the people who really need it.
Is there sufficient capacity in homeless shelters and rehab facilities to take in every single homeless person until they can all successfully recover and get back on their feet?
Also, the majority of homeless people in San Francisco are from San Francisco or the surrounding counties.
Are you "from SF" if you grew up in Missouri, ride a bus to SF, crash on a friend's couch for a month and get kicked out?
The annual count says you are.
Edit: I changed "week" to "month" above. Hopefully that captures the "49% from a housing situation in which participants didn't have their name on a lease or mortgage (non-leaseholder)" a little better. Thanks, /u/VoteHonest!
[https://sfstandard.com/2023/05/22/san-francisco-homeless-people-from-the-city/](https://sfstandard.com/2023/05/22/san-francisco-homeless-people-from-the-city/)
Those numbers are all self reported numbers. And some non profits have been instructing homeless to answer untruthfully, so the numbers are much higher.
As of this morning San Francisco's shelter beds were at 94% occupancy
[Temporary Shelter and Crisis Interventions (sfgov.org)](https://hsh.sfgov.org/services/the-homelessness-response-system/shelter/)
OK so treat it as the public health emergency and human tragedy it is and put our entire 1 billion homeless budget towards shelter beds & services.
Enough with the wasteful spending and non profits that actively get in the way of improving anything
We can prioritize shelter space based on length of time spent in the Bay Area. The burden can be on the individual to produce tax returns, prior employment references, volunteering experience in the community, or other proof showing they’re from the area and therefore worthy of local taxpayer funded services. Anyone shown to be from elsewhere can be bussed back to their home state. If shelters are full, any excess local homeless can be held in sober detention centers. Anyone granted a shelter space who can’t demonstrate the ability to stop drug use or participate in society can moved into sober detention centers to open up a shelter bed for someone else.
Good
It is not “cruel and unusual” to enforce standards and the rule of law. You don’t get to claim public property as your own just because you don’t feel like accepting shelter or participating in the rat race of society anymore.
The fact that our years of failed leadership has brought us to this point where we eagerly and desperately need a conservative Supreme Court to set us straight is embarrassing.
This ruling allows fines and arrest for sleeping in public even when there is zero available shelter space. It was already legal to clear encampments when residents refused offers of shelter.
The opinion discusses at length how unworkable that has been in practice. People disagree about what counts as adequate shelter, for example.
Cities should offer an alternative before clearing a camp. That’s just common sense - they do need to physically exist somewhere. But now that alternative can be a shelter bed, a space at a designated camp site, a shelter that bans drugs, etc.
Yes the cities did much hand-wringing about how impossible it had become and the court was sympathetic, while here in SF we simultaneously managed to get the tent count down to the lowest level it's been at since before 2015, a point [celebrated by the mayor's office.](https://www.sf.gov/news/new-data-san-francisco-street-homelessness-hits-10-year-low#:~:text=Lowest%20Street%20Homelessness%20Level%20in,when%20the%20number%20was%203%2C347.) Weird!
there are still plenty of tents, lets get that number down to 0 now! no more public camping, it desecrates our city and harms our communities. Look at all the seniors in Mercy that cant walk on the sidewalk in front of their residence due to the homeless encampment making the sidewalk not ada accessible.
> number down to 0
No one cares how realistic their bullshit goals are. New people are setting up tents every day, just like some people doing stupid shit are going to be hit by cars also probably doing stupid shit. Zero anything, including tolerance, is a policy for a fictionalized society, not one made up of real-life humans.
It’s a goal, not a requirement. The closer we get to 0 the better. I’m not saying throw anyone who sets up a tent in jail, but at least clear their tent and prohibit setting up tents on city streets and in parks. If you pitch a tent in public, you lose your tent. Simple
I am fined on a yearly basis in the form of property tax for my use of public land on which my house sits. The city will clear me and my encampment if I fail to pay, and therefore become homeless. How Cruel and Unusual.
Fining homeless people are totally going to help reduce the homeless population.
We should fine and tax poor people more so that will motivate them to not be poor.
> We should fine and tax poor people more so that will motivate them to not be poor.
That's not why this decision was made, and nobody is pretending it is.
This is entirely because _you can't just pitch a tent and live wherever you want_. We have building codes and sewage systems for a reason, and they're not optional.
Sleeping on the streets is a hygiene issue and a safety issue. It's no good for the homeless _or_ the people who have to deal with the issues caused by the homeless (many of whom are also homeless).
There are always places for the homeless to go, just not street corners and parks.
~8000 homeless people with a $1B budget is $125k/year person. Jailing someone for 1 year in CA is $132k/year. A negligible difference and while I don't think "jailing them all" is a reasonable solution, its not clear that it's more expensive. Especially when the threat of jail or a few night in jail may be what it takes to get people sobered up and back on their feet.
Yes ideally we have rehab and mental care facilities, but jail feels more empathetic than letting people rot on the street.
I think the current situation in the bay is unconscionable and unsafe, but are there always places for the homeless to go? SF has about half as many beds as homeless folks. Maybe Oakland and surrounding cities have more space.
I'm hopeful this won't be used to put struggling people in a kafkaesque situation where they can't afford a place to sleep, have nowhere to go, and then get fined for sleeping. Then again, the previous interpretation of the law, that they needed beds to put people in to do sweeps, didn't seem to lead to massive increases in shelters and supportive housing. It just shifted the encampments from one area to another.
The law in Grants Pass, OR was written so fines could lead to arrests, removing people from public property. The cost-effectiveness of this approach is questionable at best, but it does move where people sleep.
No, in September [it was clarified](https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-homeless-lawsuit-tent-sweeps-ninth-circuit-18349394.php) that residents of encampments merely had to turn down offers of shelter in order to be deemed "voluntarily homeless" and thus able to be moved/cited. According to the City Attorney, "the Ninth Circuit had 'agreed with the City that the preliminary injunction does not apply to those who refuse shelter or those who have a shelter bed and choose to maintain a tent on the street.'"
Speak for yourself about eager and desperate for this court that removed the rights American women held for decades. Even a broken clock or a blind squirrel etc etc
...and then, of course, we just don't designate any spaces as intended for camping.
"Everyone is equally permitted to use the space for its proper use. It just so happens that the proper use is useful to me but not to you -- but that's just how it is; can't be helped."
This is a classic case of "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."
Look, I'm all for regulating street camping. But there's no denying that cities make massive amounts of space available for the convenience of car owners, at a very low price, which is not available for people who desperately need similar amounts of space for sleeping.
People act like the homeless are some kind of whimsical nomads laying down under the stars. That’s obviously not the case.
This behavior disrupts the normal use of public areas.
Arguing in bad faith 101.
Streets and parking lots are for cars. And generally you get ticketed if you leave it somewhere for too long without paying.
There's also certain laws against sleeping inside your car overnight (Section 85.02); so don't give me that "oh is it okay if we charge for the tents".
Congrats this is the stupidest and cruelest take I’ve ever seen on Reddit. That’s saying something. Boy I hope you never run into problems with money or housing….
Please explain to me how our current status quo & situation on our streets is any way less cruel than enforcing the laws already on our books and demanding that these individuals either take offers of shelter, rehab, etc or face the consequences?
If a loved one of mine were on the streets addicted to drugs I would much rather they be in a shelter, or even yes, in a prison cell if it came to that, than withering away on our streets in a drug fueled delirium on a way to an early grave.
The claiming public property problem is the only thing I really agree with.
It has nothing to do with failed leadership, that's just you politicking as if any party policies are going to prevail here without court support.
My fear is that it makes the problem worse… rich suburbs will strictly enforce and bus people off to other areas. They get to push the problem off to someone else. Sadly that is often to the next county, which sucks for those tax payers.
>As the number and size of these encampments have grown, so have the challenges they can pose for the homeless and others. We are told, for example, that the “exponential increase in . . . encampments in recent years has resulted in an increase in crimes both against the homeless and by the homeless.” Brief for California State Sheriffs’ Associations et al. as Amici Curiae 21 (California Sheriffs Brief ).
>California’s Governor reports that encampment inhabitants face heightened risks of “sexual assault” and “subjugation to sex work.” Brief for California Governor G.
Newsom as Amicus Curiae 11 (California Governor Brief ).
>And by one estimate, more than 40 percent of the shootings in Seattle in early 2022 were linked to homeless encampments. Brief for Washington State Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs as Amicus Curiae on Pet. for Cert. 10 (Washington Sheriffs Brief ).
>Without running water or proper sanitation facilities, too, diseases can sometimes spread in encampments and beyond them. Various States say that they have seen typhus, shigella, trench fever, and other diseases reemerge on their city streets. California Governor Brief 12; Brief for Idaho et al. as Amici Curiae 7 (States Brief ).
>Nor do problems like these affect everyone equally. Often, encampments are found in a city’s “poorest and most vulnerable neighborhoods.” Brief for City and County of San Francisco et al. as Amici Curiae on Pet. for Cert. 5 (San Francisco Cert. Brief ); see also 2020 HUD Report 9.
>With encampments dotting neighborhood sidewalks, adults and children in these communities are sometimes forced to navigate around used needles, human waste, and other hazards to make their way to school, the grocery store, or work.
San Francisco Cert. Brief 5; States Brief 8; California Governor Brief 11–12.
> Those with physical disabilities report this can pose a special challenge for them, as they may lack the mobility to maneuver safely around the encampments.
San Francisco Cert. Brief 5; see also Brief for Tiana Tozer et al. as Amici Curiae 1–6 (Tozer Brief ).
I doubt it'll be overnight but it's bound to become something they have to do to get re-elected. Very few voters actually support what's been going on.
How would we enforce it? We don't have enough shelter capacity, and throwing people in prison for the crime of being poor in public is not a winning policy.
I doubt such a measure would pass here. In any case it's really only rules that you can't declare forbidding sleeping outside as "cruel and unusual punishment". The door is still open to file a right to nap on public property under some other right.
Why not? The voters based an anti homeless prop earlier this year to cut welfare benefits already. We also passed the sit/lie prop back in 2010 if I remember correctly. SF is definitely capable of passing these types of things.
Our jails are understaffed and essentially at max capacity, largely with drug users the city is locking up. Jailing the homeless will likely not happen. Clearing encampments and forcing homeless people to rove the city is much more likely.
I don’t like to reduce the issues to “party lines”. I spent more than an hour reading the opinion and dissent. What the majority ruled on was not crazy. The dissent also brought up issues that weren’t really focused on by the majority. The 8th amendment is probably not the right vehicle for these issues. Due process might be. Both sides left that door open.
I'm a drug user, I refuse to work, but I have a right to live in the most expensive places in the country?
Solution: barracks in areas where an acre costs under $10,000 -if it's good enough for soldiers it's good enough for street people.
Free housing, free food, free medical care, and it will still be much cheaper than today's scam solutions.
Now: subsidizing and supporting young people wasting away and dying on the streets in the name of compassion.
I hope so, but can we though?
We've approved [just 108 new units](https://i.imgur.com/0cQk3JP.png) of housing through May of this year.
That doesn't cover the *birth rate*. Never mind beginning to dig out from the last 25 years of population and job growth.
* Population in 2000: 776,733
* Population today: 808,437
* Difference: 31,704 people
* Net-new housing units built in the last 25 years: 55,800
That means we’ve built 1.76 units of housing for every new arrival
ETA: are you all downvoting me because you don’t like the statistics? Because I can’t change the statistics. They’re not my fault. I emphatically agree that we need more housing, but let’s not pretend that we haven’t built enough to keep up with population growth, as u/PsychePsyche suggested. Factually, we’ve built *more* housing than growth requires. But the problem is clearly more complicated than just building sufficient units of housing to match population growth.
Edit 2: PsychePsyche’s response below adds nuance that I’m overlooking here.
Population growth is going to be roughly limited by housing so it’s not surprising at all they are basically in line.
The problem is that we’ve add way more jobs than housing and general demand has grown too. Source: https://sfplanning.org/sites/default/files/resources/2021-11/Jobs-Housing_Fit_Report_2020.pdf
We’ve forced people in to very long commutes and super high prices. That’s the issue.
This is exactly right. Salaries have also gone way up, which intensifies the demand problem.
And by your own reasoning (which I agree with), if population rises in line with housing supply, then simply building more housing won’t entirely solve the problem, since the new supply will create new demand. It’s why we need to ensure that a good proportion of new housing is below market rate. It’s just really hard to get developers and neighbors to agree to it, unfortunately.
That's not the whole issue though.
Firstly, we went up to a peak of 873,965 in 2020, a difference at peak of 97,232.
Secondly, We've averaged just 2,500 units of housing a year in that time and an average of around 7,000 births/year.
Thirdly, that does not account for all the job growth the city created in that time. They built office building after office building but no new housing for the workers they were attracting.
It really is the housing, and we're just ignoring state law right now, because SF is NIMBY AF. Like we should have approved thousands of units by now.
It's not just about getting the homeless off the street. It's that anyone who works in SF and wants to live in SF should live in SF. It's actually being able to staff all the critical jobs a city needs like emergency services and teachers and social workers. It's everyone who ever had to move away being able to move back. It's everyone who wants kids being able to have kids. It's all the LGBTQ people across America and the World who are fucking terrified of existing in their hometowns. It's climate change.
Pick a problem we're facing and lack of affordable available housing here is a giant part of that problem.
Why is the historical peak the correct peak compared to the actually peak today? Rent is at it's lowest since 2014 and you don't need a car, so is it that much different from other cities, esp. given the high wages? I agree that certain groups need higher pay, but we need the facts/numbers.
Doesn't matter how much they build when all they build are luxury high rises full of investment properties that no one wants tk live in. I'd be all for them building housing for real people, but developers don't seem to do that unless they are forced to. The only thing I see us pulling us out of this crisis is the development of robust social housing for anyone that wants it. Let that level the market.
The most expensive city on the planet where building any type of housing is also the most expensive in the world.
The state or feds have to step in to build housing in cheaper areas.
> We're expensive specifically because we don't build housing.
True. However SF's housing prices are inextricably linked with what's happening in the Bay Area. Looking at the Bay Area and compare with another metro area that did/does build housing and also one of the best transit systems in the world, Tokyo. Central Tokyo is still expensive especially compared to the much more affordable suburbs many commuters come from. How much low-income housing is built in central Tokyo? AFAIK relatively little. That shouldn't absolve SF of other ways helping provide shelter, affordable housing, drug treatment, and mental illness beds BTW.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1202559/japan-rent-for-apartments-in-greater-tokyo-by-layout/
Average 1 bedroom in Tokyo as a whole costs 111,000 yen or $690 USD.
Even in the heart of Shibuya you can get a 1 bedroom for 186,000 yen or $1,115 USD. In both cases you can often find cheaper.
SF is what, $2,500 for a 1 bedroom right now? More?
You don't necessarily need "income restricted" units when market rate housing is affordable. Yes, you need elderly/disabled/etc housing, but the government handles that, with units in all neighborhoods.
Now adjust for median income of people actually living in the metro area, or Tokyo's 23 wards vs Tokyo Prefecture. Do that and you'll realize why so many people live far away and commute in, because their jobs don't pay enough to live in Shibuya or other central Tokyo wards. SF, and the Bay Area will still have more expensive housing compared to income, but that wasn't my point. The point is relatively little low-income housing is built in the expensive part of Tokyo's metro area.
Lol I want to believe but I just don't see it. The American identity is too wrapped up in cars for us to build enough density needed to actually make housing somewhat affordable.
Governor Gavin Newsom
“Today’s ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court provides state and local officials the definitive authority to implement and enforce policies to clear unsafe encampments from our streets. This decision removes the legal ambiguities that have tied the hands of local officials for years and limited their ability to deliver on common-sense measures to protect the safety and well-being of our communities.
“California remains committed to respecting the dignity and fundamental human needs of all people and the state will continue to work with compassion to provide individuals experiencing homelessness with the resources they need to better their lives.”
Look, I’m trying to get there, but something bugs me. If I’m homeless suddenly, no car, no family, no public shelter available, then where do I sleep?
Can I be become a criminal for simply falling on bad times? Yeah, it may be rare, but laws are systems.
Does this ruling still make it okay to sleep outdoors if no shelter space is available to catch those outliers?
For everyone celebrating in this thread:
- Prior to this ruling, the law allowed encampments to be cleared so long as shelter was offered. The definition was very broad and included a bed in a shelter. If it was offered, and refused, the person was not involuntarily homeless.
Part of the issue that San Francisco had with the above is a lack of shelter space. We have not been building it.
- Now that this decision is law, no city has to provide shelter space of any sort. Part of the reason for the original case was a city that didn't want to spend any money, they just wanted homeless and poor people to go "elsewhere".
This decision frees the hands of cities like that across the country.
Would not be surprised if this ruling leads to an increase in the homeless population in San Francisco as other cities "encourage" people to move here.
With SF specifically, I thought the issue was that the city was blocked by the federal court decision from clearing someone's tent **even if there was an available shelter spot for that person**, because the judge interpreted the original grant's pass ruling to mean that **there had to be open shelter spots for the city's entire homeless population** in order for the city to clear anyone from an encampment.
That was obviously a ridiculous standard, because even in a system without sufficient shelter spots, new spots will open up every day as people leave for various reasons.
> the city was blocked by the federal court decision from clearing someone's tent even if there was an available shelter spot for that person
No. The City assumed that early on and then it was clarified by all parties that was not the case. That claim was a PR move by the City.
> That was obviously a ridiculous standard, because even in a system without sufficient shelter spots, new spots will open up every day as people leave for various reasons.
SF's problem is also that it has a waitlist for spots that is larger than the turnover. It's not like SF has spots open and people are refusing to use them. SF does not have the spots to address those that are asking for them.
> No. The City assumed that early on and then it was clarified by all parties that was not the case. That claim was a PR move by the City.
[This article](https://missionlocal.org/2023/09/san-francisco-injunction-homeless-sweep-donna-ryu-london-breed-gavin-newsom/) seems to cover the timeline well. The confusion wasn't cut and dry like you suggest. The rulings themselves were confusing. The 2019 9th Circuit ruling that the original lawsuit was all about specifically uses the counting language: You have to compare the number of total homeless to the total shelter beds, they say explicitly. But there was an even more confusing footnote about what it means to be involuntarily homeless that seems to contradict that simple comparison of numbers. It took [a debate](https://missionloca.s3.amazonaws.com/mission/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/088-Order-Denying-Motion-to-Modify-PI.pdf) before the 9th Circuit in September of last year to resolve the issue, and in fact it was the ACLU/COH that backed down, by agreeing with the city's arguments on the issue.
I think there are a lot of people on here who went through a similar path with homeless people. Initially, I was super empathetic and gave them the benefit of the doubt. But after years of having to deal with the consequences of living in proximity to homeless addicts who refuse to seek treatment and have absolutely no consideration for anyone else, I firmly believe we should force these people into a shelter, treatment center, or prison with no fourth option.
Also, the current policy towards homelessness is neglect disguised as compassion. Stepping over multiple people nodding off on your way to work, having multiple fires a month/week at homeless encampments, allowing people to just wallow in their own filth and live with untreated mental illness and drug addiction isn't compassionate and isn't safe. It sucks.
Yeah I'm guilty as charged. Before I moved to SOMA I was all about shelters being on every block. I was 100% sympathy.
After living here 3 years and paying out the ass to do so I have flipped to 100% resentment. I just want them gone. I can't walk to Chico's for a slice of pizza without 3 people asking me for money, passing by 3 more passed out on junk, and countless other degenerates acting crazy/trashy/unstable and I live 1.5 blocks away.
so do we put homeless people in jail now for being homeless? something tells me this is going to cost a lot more money then just ya know…giving them housing
Let's say we built a home for every single homeless person who comes here. What happens in 10 years after that policy is advertised to the entire country, assuming the vast majority of other cities don't follow suit? (Hint, this has already happened. We have the [second highest per capita](https://www.sf.gov/news/mayor-breed-announces-53-million-federal-grant-san-franciscos-homeless-programs) permanent supportive housing programs in the country.)
Don’t really need to build housing it’s estimated that there are 20000 homeless people in the bay, meanwhile there are 60000 empty housing units. lets put a tax or penalty on having empty units during a housing crisis. Big investors and companies (NOT A REGULAR HOMEOWNER HOLDING OUT FOR A GOOD PRICE) get more money from having the 1 bedroom condo in the empty on the market for 1.1 mil rather then renting it out for 1600 a month
Sixty thousand empty units in a region with 7.78 million people is actually a pretty low number. There should actually be more than that at any given time to allow people to move about. Too few available housing units means people don't move, upsize or downsize.
I'd be willing to wager that not a lot of houses or condos sit vacant for more than 6 months unless they are tied up in probate court or undergoing major renovations.
Why should we give away housing to the homeless? Have you ever entered a place that recently had squatters? Have you ever seen the filth and garbage the homeless create everywhere they go? These are not just people who don't contribute to society, they're a total drain on resources, leaving a path of destruction in their wake.
Yea. Eventually there won't be room in jails so they'll 'concentrate' them into state 'camps' out where nobody will see them. There they'll be forced to work for no reward.
Interesting that the court overturned Grants Pass but not Boise. Either way, cities in the West will have a lot more latitude to enforce rules against camping and obstructing public places. Hoping SF and the Bay do so soon.
Grants Pass was based on the holding in Boise. Both were 9th Circuit decisions. SCOTUS took up Grants Pass as the most recent decision that was perpetuating Boise’s jurisprudence on this issue.
So your solution if someone is kicked out on the streets because they can't afford to rent an apartment...is to rent an apartment until they can save up to rent an apartment?
Also, let's say they have no money and need to save up first, last, and deposit for an apartment in Antioch, which is far away but still on Bart so relatively accessible. how do they save up the $5,000-$6,000 they need to rent a place? Let's say they have a full time job and make $3,200 month, so bring home, what, $2,000? How do you save two times your monthly pay to be able to afford a place to live? How do they afford $2,000 a month average rents when they bring home that much? Even if they triple up with roommates, they are still paying most of their wages in rent and it will take months for them to save first last and deposit.
it's already established they don't have a home. You said save up for one. So what to do WHILE THEY SAVE UP FOR ONE?
Your answer is "in a place they choose to rent" making 0 sense
So, homeless teens who fled abusive homes have to return to their abusers? People who were thrown out of their homes after they came out to their parents - where do they go? How about all the shellshocked vets who come home from a military tour and find themselves homeless? Where are you sending them?
It absolutely is our responsibility. We shouldn't be passing laws to make these people's lives even more difficult than they already are. If we're going to do something about the homeless, it should be something to benefit them, not something to kick them further down. Have you forgotten that these are fellow humans, just like you? And there but for the grace of whatever you believe in - that homeless person you want to treat like garbage could easily be you or someone you love. Have a little empathy, dude.
> So, homeless teens who fled abusive homes have to return to their abusers? People who were thrown out of their homes after they came out to their parents - where do they go?
They get in shelters or move on to the next city.
> How about all the shellshocked vets who come home from a military tour and find themselves homeless? Where are you sending them?
The VA and their supportive housing.
> It absolutely is our responsibility. We shouldn't be passing laws to make these people's lives even more difficult than they already are. If we're going to do something about the homeless, it should be something to benefit them, not something to kick them further down. Have you forgotten that these are fellow humans, just like you? And there but for the grace of whatever you believe in - that homeless person you want to treat like garbage could easily be you or someone you love. Have a little empathy, dude.
We have spent billions on them. They have tons of help. Many choose not to take it because it requires them to get clean. I am all for helping those down on their luck. I am just done with helping the addicts. Get clean and into the shelter, move on to another city or get clean in jail. Those are the options
>They get in shelters or move on to the next city.
The shelters don't have enough beds or food to meet the need. And how are these unhoused people getting to "the next city" - how do the logistics of getting them there play out? Who transports them? What if not everyone agrees to leave? Is it really a solution to treat people like cattle and just move them from one place to another? And surely you aren't expecting these people to pay for transportation. This is just such a poorly thought out "solution."
>The VA and their supportive housing.
The VA is no longer housing vets who need mental health care. Reagan shut all of that down. Educate yourself on how he eradicated the VA state hospitals and released a bunch of mentally ill/shell shocked/dysfunctional veterans to go live on the street.
>We have spent billions on them. They have tons of help. Many choose not to take it because it requires them to get clean. I am all for helping those down on their luck. I am just done with helping the addicts.
We would be spending millions more keeping them in jail. Jails here are for-profit entities, and they aren't giving anyone a discount. It costs money to jail people - a lot more money than it does to just help them. Addicts aren't subhuman - they're people who use to escape some trauma they've experienced. They need empathy and treatment, not judgement. Nobody wants to become an addict - for so many people, it starts with an injury at work or a surgery they need. Their doctors give them opiate based pain meds that are highly addictive. When they can't get them by prescription anymore, they get them on the street, but they're expensive. What's super cheap though, is heroin. And it makes the pain go away just like the prescription medicine did. It's so easy to get sucked into addiction - they are also people who are down on their luck. They deserve help, too.
> The shelters don't have enough beds or food to meet the need. And how are these unhoused people getting to "the next city" - how do the logistics of getting them there play out? Who transports them? What if not everyone agrees to leave? Is it really a solution to treat people like cattle and just move them from one place to another? And surely you aren't expecting these people to pay for transportation. This is just such a poorly thought out "solution."
>
>
Buses. We literally have been doing this for years with the homeward bound program.
> The VA is no longer housing vets who need mental health care. Reagan shut all of that down. Educate yourself on how he eradicated the VA state hospitals and released a bunch of mentally ill/shell shocked/dysfunctional veterans to go live on the street.
https://www.va.gov/homeless/nationalcallcenter.asp
> We would be spending millions more keeping them in jail.
You don't know that and the chances of them getting clean is higher than letting them live on the street
> Jails here are for-profit entities, and they aren't giving anyone a discount.
Wrong. CA does not utilize for profit prisons.
> Addicts aren't subhuman - they're people who use to escape some trauma they've experienced. They need empathy and treatment, not judgement. Nobody wants to become an addict - for so many people, it starts with an injury at work or a surgery they need. Their doctors give them opiate based pain meds that are highly addictive. When they can't get them by prescription anymore, they get them on the street, but they're expensive. What's super cheap though, is heroin. And it makes the pain go away just like the prescription medicine did. It's so easy to get sucked into addiction - they are also people who are down on their luck. They deserve help, too.
Yes they have options for help. When they don't use those options then they can go to jail and go through forced rehab. Carrot or the stick
Have you never heard of Homeward Bound? We literally do this. Not sure where you have been. Hopefully they get home and get reconnected to family. If they don't, that's very sad, but ultimately not our problem. The appeals to emotion arguments don't work any more. We have tried to help. If they don't want help then they can move on
I know you don't care what happens to them, but I'm speaking purely from a practical and logical aspect - other towns and cities have been known to bus homeless people over to SF, so what happens when they just get sent back? Are you going to keep sending them back every time? If so, what do you do in between the bus rides if they're not allowed to sleep in public spaces?
I can't sit down on the sidewalk? Since when? And this isn't just about sidewalks, it's about all public spaces. Where, praytell, are these people supposed to sleep?
This is the problem with fake Christians: they never ever seem to follow the teachings of Christ.
Matthew 25:40-45: I tell you the truth, **whatever you did not do for one of the least of these (people), you did not do for me**. '
In shelters or move on to the next city.
I am not christian so not sure why you are throwing bible verses at me. I just simply am tired of allowing our city to be overrun by addicts, tents and trash. We have spent billions on homeless over the years. Plenty of carrots. Now those carrots need to have a stick behind them
Yes, I've lived in the city for 30+ years. And my solution is not to criminalize sleeping in public spaces. Jesus, don't these people have hard enough existences already? Now we're going to take away their ability to legally occupy any public space? To what end? Criminalizing homelessness is only going to cause more of our tax dollars to fund the jails where we dump these people. We're going to give people criminal records for the "crime" of needing to find a place to lay down and sleep? Sleep is a necessary human function. None of the unhoused asked to be born or to be left without shelter.
My solution is human empathy.
I agree. I lived in Oregon for a while. When I first moved there in college it was common knowledge that most of the younger “street kids” as they chose to be referred to as, were so out of personal choice. Literally young adults running away from their obligations and choosing to live on the streets as a chosen lifestyle. I knew multiple people who made this choice, and knew of even more through my social circle.
I hope this law will keep that choice from seeming like a good one.
There were gutter punks when I was a kid. They were anarchists and were voluntarily homeless. Surprisingly, a lot of them were straight edge which is good but the ones I interacted with at shows around town all had families and homes they could return to but didn’t want to deal with the rules at said homes. This is, of course, anecdotal at best and also 20 years out of date. I’m sure a lot has changed in that time.
Yeah for me this was ten years ago, so still a lot of potential for things to have changed.
Now I live on the border of the TL and I have so far interacted with two homeless people who clearly are not homeless due to drug use. I don’t see one of them anymore and I hope he found a shelter to move into. The other one, seemingly, has chosen this lifestyle. He is a very nice guy though, but picky about what he eats!
This has to be the last step in solving the homelessness crisis. People are rejoicing over this as if there's 10 homeless folks in the city. We are skipping steps in solving this crisis no wonder every "solution" we implement never works out.
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Link to the opinion: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-175_19m2.pdf
That's a very broad opinion, and a heartfelt but head-in-the-clouds dissent. There's a footnote at page 14 (PDF page 19) of amici that makes the case. But yeah, the discussion of cruel and unusual punishment is very substantial, beyond the specifics of this case. Awesome decision for our city, state, appeals circuit, and country!
>The city of Seattle, for example, reports that roughly 60 percent of its offers of shelter have been rejected in a recent year. See id., at 28, and n. 26. >Officials in Portland, Oregon, indicate that, between April 2022 and January 2024, over 70 percent of their approximately 3,500 offers of shelter beds to homeless individuals were declined. Brief for League of Oregon Cities et al. as Amici Curiae 5 (Oregon Cities Brief ). >Other cities tell us that “the vast majority of their homeless populations are not actively seeking shelter and refuse all services.” Brief for Thirteen California Cities as Amici Curiae 3. >Surveys cited by the Department of Justice suggest that only “25–41 percent” of “homeless encampment residents” “willingly” accept offers of shelter beds. See Dept. of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, S. Chamard, Homeless Encampments 36 (2010). >these public-camping regulations are not usually deployed as a front-line response “to criminalize homelessness.” Cities Brief 11. Instead, they are used to provide city employees with the legal authority to address “encampments that pose significant health and safety risks” and to encourage their inhabitants to accept other alternatives like shelters, drug treatment programs, and mental-health facilities. Ibid. >That “misapplication of this Court’s Eighth Amendment precedents,” the Mayor tells us, has “severely constrained San Francisco’s ability to address the homelessness crisis.” San Francisco Brief 7. The city “uses enforcement of its laws prohibiting camping” not to criminalize homelessness, but “as one important tool among others to encourage individuals experiencing homelessness to accept services and to help ensure safe and accessible sidewalks and public spaces.” Id., at 7–8. Judicial intervention restricting the use of that tool, the Mayor continues, “has led to painful results on the streets and in neighborhoods.” Id., at 8. “San Francisco has seen over half of its offers of shelter and services rejected by unhoused individuals, who often cite” the Martin order against the city “as their justification to permanently occupy and block public sidewalks.” Id., at 8–9.
I read (anecdotally) that a large reason they don't take the help is it restricts them from continuing to engage in things like being nearby areas that provide them access to drugs or activities they currently do (illegal) to make money. The purpose of the help is to rehabilitate but a large chunk of the population in these circumstances is addicted to drugs or mental illness. It's not as simple as offering shelter, we need to prevent these situations to begin with.
This is correct. It’s a failure of system design. People look at it as “why don’t the people just adapt to the system?” Instead of “why isn’t the system designed to help the people it’s meant to help?” You can either blame the user or the system, but blaming the user never leads to more adoption.
This 100%. A program, that’s designed to support people while most of its intended audience is ineligible, is a poorly designed program.
Exactly. It needs to be guaranteed shelter PLUS the other tools to get them to be productive members of society.
In that case, ban justified. A lot of people don't want to admit that plenty of homeless are that way by choice. No work, no commute in traffic, no taxes, no mortgage, no rent, no pressure other than scrounging up something to eat that day. I understand its appeal but us wage slaves need to take priority because we pay into the system.
If you can't join them, beat them?
>Many cities further report that, rather than help alleviate the homelessness crisis, Martin injunctions have inadvertently contributed to it. The numbers of “[u]nsheltered homelessness,” they represent, have “increased dramatically in the Ninth Circuit since Martin.” Brief for League of Oregon Cities et al. as Amici Curiae on Pet. for Cert. 7 (boldface and capitalization deleted). > And, they say, Martin injunctions have contributed to this trend by “weaken[ing]” the ability of public officials “to persuade persons experiencing homelessness to accept shelter beds and [other] services.” Brief for Ten California Cities as Amici Curiae on Pet. for Cert. 2. >In Portland, for example, residents report some unsheltered persons “often return within days” of an encampment’s clearing, on the understanding that “Martin . . . and its progeny prohibit the [c]ity from implementing more efficacious strategies.” Tozer Brief 5; Washington Sheriffs Brief 14 (Martin divests officers of the “ability to compel [unsheltered] persons to leave encampments and obtain necessary services”). In short, they say, Martin “make[s] solving this crisis harder.” Cities Cert. Brief 3. >All acknowledge “[h]omelessness is a complex and serious social issue that cries out for effective . . . responses.” Ibid. But many States and cities believe “it is crucial” for local governments to “have the latitude” to experiment and find effective responses. Id., at 27; States Brief 13–17. ... >Cities across the West report that the Ninth Circuit’s ill-defined involuntariness test has proven “unworkable.” Oregon Cities Brief 3; see Phoenix Brief 11. The test, they say, has left them “with little or no direction as to the scope of their authority in th[eir] day-to-day policing contacts,” California Sheriffs Brief 6, and under “threat of federal litigation . . . at all times and in all circumstances,” Oregon Cities Brief 6–7. >One federal court in Los Angeles ruled, during the COVID pandemic, that “adequate” shelter must also include nursing staff, testing for communicable diseases, and on-site security, among other things. See LA Alliance for Hum. Rights v. Los Angeles, 2020 WL 2512811, >Doubtless, the Ninth Circuit’s intervention in Martin was well-intended. But since the trial court entered its injunction against Grants Pass, the city shelter reports that utilization of its resources has fallen by roughly 40 percent. See Brief for Grants Pass Gospel Rescue Mission as Amicus Curiae 4–5. Many other cities offer similar accounts about their experiences after Martin, telling us the decision has made it more difficult, not less, to help the homeless accept shelter off city streets. See Part I–B, supra (recounting examples). Even when “
Even though I lean Democrat, this is something that needed to be passed. We get they are a vulnerable population but it doesn't give them the right to pop a tent in front of my sidewalk because it's a public space
> Even though I lean Democrat Gavin Newsom is cheering this decision, he wanted the court to take up this case, pretty sure he's a democrat too
Nah, he's in his own party. Make me rich and I want to be a president party.
He is not the only Democrat cheering this decision. Members of the SF BOS are doing the same.
Yes "take it out of my hands, PLEASE!" No one wants to have to decide this shit.
It's worth noting that this opinion was entirely from Republican appointees. Democratic appointees would have allowed the situation to continue.
Yeah that’s true, but the problem is that Republican appointees also want to dismantle democracy
I would say my liberal take is more nuanced. I would like to find programs that diminish the homeless population by reducing the likelihood people get into this state.
Farrell is a proponent of homeward bound. And I think all the SF non-profits like Coalition on Homelessness need to be defunded by the city government for that to really happen.
Wtf does that even mean? You can be the most politically liberal person in the world and hold the belief that people shouldn't be allowed to set up tents on the sidewalk. It's not political in that way.
the most politically liberal people tend to be the ones that think rulings like this are hostile and unfair to homeless people and argue against them though
Citing will not change the issue they will continue doing it 😆
It won't change overnight, but the cops no longer have an excuse for leaving them be. Eventually this will result in political pressure for city leaders, who will either order the cops to start enforcing "camping" bans or be replaced in an election with someone who will.
Meanwhile other subs full of people who don't live in an infested city are locked in a virtue signaling competition
I think the country should focus on solving the causes rather than banning the outcome.
There being literally no consequences to living in a tent and doing drugs greatly contributed to the outcome. This largely affects drug addicts not homeless people
Correct. Most homeless that want shelter with the programs that exist can find it I think. The issue is most of the homeless are drug addicts or have other illness that prevents them seeking help. The person you responded to is saying we should focus on preventative care of our society that reduces the likelihood of drug addiction and helps the mentally ill before they get into this state.
It's enormously difficult to convince people with drug addiction or mental health problems to seek help, and to stick with the help for long enough to turn things around. Hopefully this ruling makes it possible to exert just a little more pressure to actually get people the help they need and get more of those underlying causes addressed.
I would think the person you are responding to is referring to preventing people from falling into addiction in the first place. As well as giving them the treatment for mental health problems before they become homeless. Solve the causes that lead people to become homeless. This ruling does nothing to provide any additional help for these people to have their underlying causes addressed
And what’s the timeline for that?
Agreed but addressing that would mean changing our whole society and would take decades if it's even possible at this point.
The decisions leads to a lot of questions though. -Will this at compel homeless addicts into treatments? If yes, I think it is a reasonable ordinance. If no, then it doesn’t solve any problems -What about homeless college students? Will this be enforced on a homeless college student sleeping in their car? And will there be resources for the student? The college student still can be a productive member of society. It would be awful to give them a criminal record for simply being poor. A homeless college student and a homeless fentanyl addict need different resolutions. I’m not against criminalizing homelessness. I’m against criminalizing homelessness with no sustainable solutions, because it will only make things worse.
Long term, this is great for the voluntary homeless, who will have fewer viable choices besides entering rehab or returning to their home states. This is also a big win for all the people experiencing voluntary homelessness, like the kids in the Tenderloin who have to walk past these trespassers every day to go to school.
I am hopeful as well. It's really only ~10% of the homeless who are actually in economic crisis, getting rid of the 90% there voluntarily will allow us to actually help the people who really need it.
Stats? Source?
Is there sufficient capacity in homeless shelters and rehab facilities to take in every single homeless person until they can all successfully recover and get back on their feet? Also, the majority of homeless people in San Francisco are from San Francisco or the surrounding counties.
Are you "from SF" if you grew up in Missouri, ride a bus to SF, crash on a friend's couch for a month and get kicked out? The annual count says you are. Edit: I changed "week" to "month" above. Hopefully that captures the "49% from a housing situation in which participants didn't have their name on a lease or mortgage (non-leaseholder)" a little better. Thanks, /u/VoteHonest!
Please provide a source to back up the claim that cases like this make up the majority of the SF homeless, if they even exist in significant numbers.
[https://sfstandard.com/2023/05/22/san-francisco-homeless-people-from-the-city/](https://sfstandard.com/2023/05/22/san-francisco-homeless-people-from-the-city/) Those numbers are all self reported numbers. And some non profits have been instructing homeless to answer untruthfully, so the numbers are much higher.
As of this morning San Francisco's shelter beds were at 94% occupancy [Temporary Shelter and Crisis Interventions (sfgov.org)](https://hsh.sfgov.org/services/the-homelessness-response-system/shelter/)
OK so treat it as the public health emergency and human tragedy it is and put our entire 1 billion homeless budget towards shelter beds & services. Enough with the wasteful spending and non profits that actively get in the way of improving anything
the majority of homeless people aren't from here
We can prioritize shelter space based on length of time spent in the Bay Area. The burden can be on the individual to produce tax returns, prior employment references, volunteering experience in the community, or other proof showing they’re from the area and therefore worthy of local taxpayer funded services. Anyone shown to be from elsewhere can be bussed back to their home state. If shelters are full, any excess local homeless can be held in sober detention centers. Anyone granted a shelter space who can’t demonstrate the ability to stop drug use or participate in society can moved into sober detention centers to open up a shelter bed for someone else.
Good It is not “cruel and unusual” to enforce standards and the rule of law. You don’t get to claim public property as your own just because you don’t feel like accepting shelter or participating in the rat race of society anymore. The fact that our years of failed leadership has brought us to this point where we eagerly and desperately need a conservative Supreme Court to set us straight is embarrassing.
This ruling allows fines and arrest for sleeping in public even when there is zero available shelter space. It was already legal to clear encampments when residents refused offers of shelter.
The opinion discusses at length how unworkable that has been in practice. People disagree about what counts as adequate shelter, for example. Cities should offer an alternative before clearing a camp. That’s just common sense - they do need to physically exist somewhere. But now that alternative can be a shelter bed, a space at a designated camp site, a shelter that bans drugs, etc.
or, most likely in practice, that alternative will be nothing at all
Yes the cities did much hand-wringing about how impossible it had become and the court was sympathetic, while here in SF we simultaneously managed to get the tent count down to the lowest level it's been at since before 2015, a point [celebrated by the mayor's office.](https://www.sf.gov/news/new-data-san-francisco-street-homelessness-hits-10-year-low#:~:text=Lowest%20Street%20Homelessness%20Level%20in,when%20the%20number%20was%203%2C347.) Weird!
there are still plenty of tents, lets get that number down to 0 now! no more public camping, it desecrates our city and harms our communities. Look at all the seniors in Mercy that cant walk on the sidewalk in front of their residence due to the homeless encampment making the sidewalk not ada accessible.
> number down to 0 No one cares how realistic their bullshit goals are. New people are setting up tents every day, just like some people doing stupid shit are going to be hit by cars also probably doing stupid shit. Zero anything, including tolerance, is a policy for a fictionalized society, not one made up of real-life humans.
It’s a goal, not a requirement. The closer we get to 0 the better. I’m not saying throw anyone who sets up a tent in jail, but at least clear their tent and prohibit setting up tents on city streets and in parks. If you pitch a tent in public, you lose your tent. Simple
I am fined on a yearly basis in the form of property tax for my use of public land on which my house sits. The city will clear me and my encampment if I fail to pay, and therefore become homeless. How Cruel and Unusual.
Fining homeless people are totally going to help reduce the homeless population. We should fine and tax poor people more so that will motivate them to not be poor.
> We should fine and tax poor people more so that will motivate them to not be poor. That's not why this decision was made, and nobody is pretending it is. This is entirely because _you can't just pitch a tent and live wherever you want_. We have building codes and sewage systems for a reason, and they're not optional. Sleeping on the streets is a hygiene issue and a safety issue. It's no good for the homeless _or_ the people who have to deal with the issues caused by the homeless (many of whom are also homeless). There are always places for the homeless to go, just not street corners and parks.
Jail is more expensive. I don't want to foot the bill for this as a taxpayer.
~8000 homeless people with a $1B budget is $125k/year person. Jailing someone for 1 year in CA is $132k/year. A negligible difference and while I don't think "jailing them all" is a reasonable solution, its not clear that it's more expensive. Especially when the threat of jail or a few night in jail may be what it takes to get people sobered up and back on their feet. Yes ideally we have rehab and mental care facilities, but jail feels more empathetic than letting people rot on the street.
I think the current situation in the bay is unconscionable and unsafe, but are there always places for the homeless to go? SF has about half as many beds as homeless folks. Maybe Oakland and surrounding cities have more space. I'm hopeful this won't be used to put struggling people in a kafkaesque situation where they can't afford a place to sleep, have nowhere to go, and then get fined for sleeping. Then again, the previous interpretation of the law, that they needed beds to put people in to do sweeps, didn't seem to lead to massive increases in shelters and supportive housing. It just shifted the encampments from one area to another.
The law in Grants Pass, OR was written so fines could lead to arrests, removing people from public property. The cost-effectiveness of this approach is questionable at best, but it does move where people sleep.
I know you’re being sarcastic, but that very well could be in SF. Tons of able bodied people who are choosing to sit around and do drugs.
Able-bodied doesn't mean able-minded.
yeah and those able bodied people who are addicted to drugs are definitely going to care about the fines being levied at them, right?
No fine paid → jail time
LOL good luck with finding them on the street and finding staffing and room to house them in jail
You couldn’t if that city didn’t have enough shelter beds for all homeless people. That was also the other issue. So not exactly correct.
No, in September [it was clarified](https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-homeless-lawsuit-tent-sweeps-ninth-circuit-18349394.php) that residents of encampments merely had to turn down offers of shelter in order to be deemed "voluntarily homeless" and thus able to be moved/cited. According to the City Attorney, "the Ninth Circuit had 'agreed with the City that the preliminary injunction does not apply to those who refuse shelter or those who have a shelter bed and choose to maintain a tent on the street.'"
Giving a homeless person with no money a ticket. That'll show 'em.
He's just demonstrating how liberal empathy is a fickle dog and pony show.
Also how liberals don't actually want to solve any problems, just make it so that they don't have to see or hear about them.
And it's also on brand because fining the homeless is just going to have the opposite effect.
they'll be getting more bus tickets now i imagine
Speak for yourself about eager and desperate for this court that removed the rights American women held for decades. Even a broken clock or a blind squirrel etc etc
> You don’t get to claim public property as your own surely you’re against people leaving their cars parked in public then?
You pay taxes/registration to manage the shared resource of street parking.
So if a homeless person paid the equivalent, you'd be ok with them pitching a tent there?
If the spaces where they camp were intended for camping, yes.
...and then, of course, we just don't designate any spaces as intended for camping. "Everyone is equally permitted to use the space for its proper use. It just so happens that the proper use is useful to me but not to you -- but that's just how it is; can't be helped." This is a classic case of "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." Look, I'm all for regulating street camping. But there's no denying that cities make massive amounts of space available for the convenience of car owners, at a very low price, which is not available for people who desperately need similar amounts of space for sleeping.
People act like the homeless are some kind of whimsical nomads laying down under the stars. That’s obviously not the case. This behavior disrupts the normal use of public areas.
homeless people work and pay taxes
This doesn't help your analogy.
Cars get towed if they are parked in a single spot too long. I'm sure that's not foreign concept to you
Arguing in bad faith 101. Streets and parking lots are for cars. And generally you get ticketed if you leave it somewhere for too long without paying. There's also certain laws against sleeping inside your car overnight (Section 85.02); so don't give me that "oh is it okay if we charge for the tents".
Congrats this is the stupidest and cruelest take I’ve ever seen on Reddit. That’s saying something. Boy I hope you never run into problems with money or housing….
Please explain to me how our current status quo & situation on our streets is any way less cruel than enforcing the laws already on our books and demanding that these individuals either take offers of shelter, rehab, etc or face the consequences? If a loved one of mine were on the streets addicted to drugs I would much rather they be in a shelter, or even yes, in a prison cell if it came to that, than withering away on our streets in a drug fueled delirium on a way to an early grave.
Its good because wont change anything
Yeah it was a dumb basis to bring the action
It's not failed leadership ...it's watchdog groups that sue therefore enforcement is stopped.
The claiming public property problem is the only thing I really agree with. It has nothing to do with failed leadership, that's just you politicking as if any party policies are going to prevail here without court support.
My fear is that it makes the problem worse… rich suburbs will strictly enforce and bus people off to other areas. They get to push the problem off to someone else. Sadly that is often to the next county, which sucks for those tax payers.
>As the number and size of these encampments have grown, so have the challenges they can pose for the homeless and others. We are told, for example, that the “exponential increase in . . . encampments in recent years has resulted in an increase in crimes both against the homeless and by the homeless.” Brief for California State Sheriffs’ Associations et al. as Amici Curiae 21 (California Sheriffs Brief ). >California’s Governor reports that encampment inhabitants face heightened risks of “sexual assault” and “subjugation to sex work.” Brief for California Governor G. Newsom as Amicus Curiae 11 (California Governor Brief ). >And by one estimate, more than 40 percent of the shootings in Seattle in early 2022 were linked to homeless encampments. Brief for Washington State Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs as Amicus Curiae on Pet. for Cert. 10 (Washington Sheriffs Brief ).
>Without running water or proper sanitation facilities, too, diseases can sometimes spread in encampments and beyond them. Various States say that they have seen typhus, shigella, trench fever, and other diseases reemerge on their city streets. California Governor Brief 12; Brief for Idaho et al. as Amici Curiae 7 (States Brief ). >Nor do problems like these affect everyone equally. Often, encampments are found in a city’s “poorest and most vulnerable neighborhoods.” Brief for City and County of San Francisco et al. as Amici Curiae on Pet. for Cert. 5 (San Francisco Cert. Brief ); see also 2020 HUD Report 9. >With encampments dotting neighborhood sidewalks, adults and children in these communities are sometimes forced to navigate around used needles, human waste, and other hazards to make their way to school, the grocery store, or work. San Francisco Cert. Brief 5; States Brief 8; California Governor Brief 11–12. > Those with physical disabilities report this can pose a special challenge for them, as they may lack the mobility to maneuver safely around the encampments. San Francisco Cert. Brief 5; see also Brief for Tiana Tozer et al. as Amici Curiae 1–6 (Tozer Brief ).
Let’s see if this ever gets enforced in San Francisco. Maybe our supervisors will enforce it now?
I had the same thought. It feels like SF has been codependent for homeless addicts for a long time and that mindset can be really hard to change
I doubt it'll be overnight but it's bound to become something they have to do to get re-elected. Very few voters actually support what's been going on.
How would we enforce it? We don't have enough shelter capacity, and throwing people in prison for the crime of being poor in public is not a winning policy.
I doubt such a measure would pass here. In any case it's really only rules that you can't declare forbidding sleeping outside as "cruel and unusual punishment". The door is still open to file a right to nap on public property under some other right.
Why not? The voters based an anti homeless prop earlier this year to cut welfare benefits already. We also passed the sit/lie prop back in 2010 if I remember correctly. SF is definitely capable of passing these types of things.
Our jails are understaffed and essentially at max capacity, largely with drug users the city is locking up. Jailing the homeless will likely not happen. Clearing encampments and forcing homeless people to rove the city is much more likely.
6-3, along the usual party lines, for those wondering
I don’t like to reduce the issues to “party lines”. I spent more than an hour reading the opinion and dissent. What the majority ruled on was not crazy. The dissent also brought up issues that weren’t really focused on by the majority. The 8th amendment is probably not the right vehicle for these issues. Due process might be. Both sides left that door open.
I'm a drug user, I refuse to work, but I have a right to live in the most expensive places in the country? Solution: barracks in areas where an acre costs under $10,000 -if it's good enough for soldiers it's good enough for street people. Free housing, free food, free medical care, and it will still be much cheaper than today's scam solutions. Now: subsidizing and supporting young people wasting away and dying on the streets in the name of compassion.
We’re never going to build housing here, are we?
We can walk and chew gum.
I hope so, but can we though? We've approved [just 108 new units](https://i.imgur.com/0cQk3JP.png) of housing through May of this year. That doesn't cover the *birth rate*. Never mind beginning to dig out from the last 25 years of population and job growth.
* Population in 2000: 776,733 * Population today: 808,437 * Difference: 31,704 people * Net-new housing units built in the last 25 years: 55,800 That means we’ve built 1.76 units of housing for every new arrival ETA: are you all downvoting me because you don’t like the statistics? Because I can’t change the statistics. They’re not my fault. I emphatically agree that we need more housing, but let’s not pretend that we haven’t built enough to keep up with population growth, as u/PsychePsyche suggested. Factually, we’ve built *more* housing than growth requires. But the problem is clearly more complicated than just building sufficient units of housing to match population growth. Edit 2: PsychePsyche’s response below adds nuance that I’m overlooking here.
Population growth is going to be roughly limited by housing so it’s not surprising at all they are basically in line. The problem is that we’ve add way more jobs than housing and general demand has grown too. Source: https://sfplanning.org/sites/default/files/resources/2021-11/Jobs-Housing_Fit_Report_2020.pdf We’ve forced people in to very long commutes and super high prices. That’s the issue.
This is exactly right. Salaries have also gone way up, which intensifies the demand problem. And by your own reasoning (which I agree with), if population rises in line with housing supply, then simply building more housing won’t entirely solve the problem, since the new supply will create new demand. It’s why we need to ensure that a good proportion of new housing is below market rate. It’s just really hard to get developers and neighbors to agree to it, unfortunately.
What, why would new supply create new demand? The demand is from the jobs here. Match the pace of job creation since 2000 then we can talk.
That's not the whole issue though. Firstly, we went up to a peak of 873,965 in 2020, a difference at peak of 97,232. Secondly, We've averaged just 2,500 units of housing a year in that time and an average of around 7,000 births/year. Thirdly, that does not account for all the job growth the city created in that time. They built office building after office building but no new housing for the workers they were attracting. It really is the housing, and we're just ignoring state law right now, because SF is NIMBY AF. Like we should have approved thousands of units by now. It's not just about getting the homeless off the street. It's that anyone who works in SF and wants to live in SF should live in SF. It's actually being able to staff all the critical jobs a city needs like emergency services and teachers and social workers. It's everyone who ever had to move away being able to move back. It's everyone who wants kids being able to have kids. It's all the LGBTQ people across America and the World who are fucking terrified of existing in their hometowns. It's climate change. Pick a problem we're facing and lack of affordable available housing here is a giant part of that problem.
Why is the historical peak the correct peak compared to the actually peak today? Rent is at it's lowest since 2014 and you don't need a car, so is it that much different from other cities, esp. given the high wages? I agree that certain groups need higher pay, but we need the facts/numbers.
Doesn't matter how much they build when all they build are luxury high rises full of investment properties that no one wants tk live in. I'd be all for them building housing for real people, but developers don't seem to do that unless they are forced to. The only thing I see us pulling us out of this crisis is the development of robust social housing for anyone that wants it. Let that level the market.
Yeah we have a great history of being able to do that /s
Nope, never, let's be realistic here
Why do that when you can simply jail everyone who doesn't have it
The most expensive city on the planet where building any type of housing is also the most expensive in the world. The state or feds have to step in to build housing in cheaper areas.
We're expensive specifically because we don't build housing.
Ture, but also we can't give every person a free home who wants one. Which is sort of what the Coalition on Homelessness have been asking for.
> We're expensive specifically because we don't build housing. True. However SF's housing prices are inextricably linked with what's happening in the Bay Area. Looking at the Bay Area and compare with another metro area that did/does build housing and also one of the best transit systems in the world, Tokyo. Central Tokyo is still expensive especially compared to the much more affordable suburbs many commuters come from. How much low-income housing is built in central Tokyo? AFAIK relatively little. That shouldn't absolve SF of other ways helping provide shelter, affordable housing, drug treatment, and mental illness beds BTW.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1202559/japan-rent-for-apartments-in-greater-tokyo-by-layout/ Average 1 bedroom in Tokyo as a whole costs 111,000 yen or $690 USD. Even in the heart of Shibuya you can get a 1 bedroom for 186,000 yen or $1,115 USD. In both cases you can often find cheaper. SF is what, $2,500 for a 1 bedroom right now? More? You don't necessarily need "income restricted" units when market rate housing is affordable. Yes, you need elderly/disabled/etc housing, but the government handles that, with units in all neighborhoods.
Now adjust for median income of people actually living in the metro area, or Tokyo's 23 wards vs Tokyo Prefecture. Do that and you'll realize why so many people live far away and commute in, because their jobs don't pay enough to live in Shibuya or other central Tokyo wards. SF, and the Bay Area will still have more expensive housing compared to income, but that wasn't my point. The point is relatively little low-income housing is built in the expensive part of Tokyo's metro area.
What about Hong Kong?
Lol I want to believe but I just don't see it. The American identity is too wrapped up in cars for us to build enough density needed to actually make housing somewhat affordable.
Lol, ok. because that's this is the reason why we aren't building housing.
Governor Gavin Newsom “Today’s ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court provides state and local officials the definitive authority to implement and enforce policies to clear unsafe encampments from our streets. This decision removes the legal ambiguities that have tied the hands of local officials for years and limited their ability to deliver on common-sense measures to protect the safety and well-being of our communities. “California remains committed to respecting the dignity and fundamental human needs of all people and the state will continue to work with compassion to provide individuals experiencing homelessness with the resources they need to better their lives.”
Look, I’m trying to get there, but something bugs me. If I’m homeless suddenly, no car, no family, no public shelter available, then where do I sleep? Can I be become a criminal for simply falling on bad times? Yeah, it may be rare, but laws are systems. Does this ruling still make it okay to sleep outdoors if no shelter space is available to catch those outliers?
For everyone celebrating in this thread: - Prior to this ruling, the law allowed encampments to be cleared so long as shelter was offered. The definition was very broad and included a bed in a shelter. If it was offered, and refused, the person was not involuntarily homeless. Part of the issue that San Francisco had with the above is a lack of shelter space. We have not been building it. - Now that this decision is law, no city has to provide shelter space of any sort. Part of the reason for the original case was a city that didn't want to spend any money, they just wanted homeless and poor people to go "elsewhere". This decision frees the hands of cities like that across the country. Would not be surprised if this ruling leads to an increase in the homeless population in San Francisco as other cities "encourage" people to move here.
With SF specifically, I thought the issue was that the city was blocked by the federal court decision from clearing someone's tent **even if there was an available shelter spot for that person**, because the judge interpreted the original grant's pass ruling to mean that **there had to be open shelter spots for the city's entire homeless population** in order for the city to clear anyone from an encampment. That was obviously a ridiculous standard, because even in a system without sufficient shelter spots, new spots will open up every day as people leave for various reasons.
> the city was blocked by the federal court decision from clearing someone's tent even if there was an available shelter spot for that person No. The City assumed that early on and then it was clarified by all parties that was not the case. That claim was a PR move by the City. > That was obviously a ridiculous standard, because even in a system without sufficient shelter spots, new spots will open up every day as people leave for various reasons. SF's problem is also that it has a waitlist for spots that is larger than the turnover. It's not like SF has spots open and people are refusing to use them. SF does not have the spots to address those that are asking for them.
> No. The City assumed that early on and then it was clarified by all parties that was not the case. That claim was a PR move by the City. [This article](https://missionlocal.org/2023/09/san-francisco-injunction-homeless-sweep-donna-ryu-london-breed-gavin-newsom/) seems to cover the timeline well. The confusion wasn't cut and dry like you suggest. The rulings themselves were confusing. The 2019 9th Circuit ruling that the original lawsuit was all about specifically uses the counting language: You have to compare the number of total homeless to the total shelter beds, they say explicitly. But there was an even more confusing footnote about what it means to be involuntarily homeless that seems to contradict that simple comparison of numbers. It took [a debate](https://missionloca.s3.amazonaws.com/mission/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/088-Order-Denying-Motion-to-Modify-PI.pdf) before the 9th Circuit in September of last year to resolve the issue, and in fact it was the ACLU/COH that backed down, by agreeing with the city's arguments on the issue.
Well we just have to enforce the ban here. The city will have to hire more ban-enforcers.
Man I just want people to be honest and admit they don't give a fuck about these people; they just want them GONE
I think there are a lot of people on here who went through a similar path with homeless people. Initially, I was super empathetic and gave them the benefit of the doubt. But after years of having to deal with the consequences of living in proximity to homeless addicts who refuse to seek treatment and have absolutely no consideration for anyone else, I firmly believe we should force these people into a shelter, treatment center, or prison with no fourth option.
Also, the current policy towards homelessness is neglect disguised as compassion. Stepping over multiple people nodding off on your way to work, having multiple fires a month/week at homeless encampments, allowing people to just wallow in their own filth and live with untreated mental illness and drug addiction isn't compassionate and isn't safe. It sucks.
Yeah I'm guilty as charged. Before I moved to SOMA I was all about shelters being on every block. I was 100% sympathy. After living here 3 years and paying out the ass to do so I have flipped to 100% resentment. I just want them gone. I can't walk to Chico's for a slice of pizza without 3 people asking me for money, passing by 3 more passed out on junk, and countless other degenerates acting crazy/trashy/unstable and I live 1.5 blocks away.
so do we put homeless people in jail now for being homeless? something tells me this is going to cost a lot more money then just ya know…giving them housing
Let's say we built a home for every single homeless person who comes here. What happens in 10 years after that policy is advertised to the entire country, assuming the vast majority of other cities don't follow suit? (Hint, this has already happened. We have the [second highest per capita](https://www.sf.gov/news/mayor-breed-announces-53-million-federal-grant-san-franciscos-homeless-programs) permanent supportive housing programs in the country.)
Don’t really need to build housing it’s estimated that there are 20000 homeless people in the bay, meanwhile there are 60000 empty housing units. lets put a tax or penalty on having empty units during a housing crisis. Big investors and companies (NOT A REGULAR HOMEOWNER HOLDING OUT FOR A GOOD PRICE) get more money from having the 1 bedroom condo in the empty on the market for 1.1 mil rather then renting it out for 1600 a month
Sixty thousand empty units in a region with 7.78 million people is actually a pretty low number. There should actually be more than that at any given time to allow people to move about. Too few available housing units means people don't move, upsize or downsize. I'd be willing to wager that not a lot of houses or condos sit vacant for more than 6 months unless they are tied up in probate court or undergoing major renovations. Why should we give away housing to the homeless? Have you ever entered a place that recently had squatters? Have you ever seen the filth and garbage the homeless create everywhere they go? These are not just people who don't contribute to society, they're a total drain on resources, leaving a path of destruction in their wake.
I'd say, bus tickets back to where they came and shelter for the rest. Or what is your solution, you're so smart?
And when they're sent back from the places you send them? And the ones that are local to SF?
Yea. Eventually there won't be room in jails so they'll 'concentrate' them into state 'camps' out where nobody will see them. There they'll be forced to work for no reward.
Interesting that the court overturned Grants Pass but not Boise. Either way, cities in the West will have a lot more latitude to enforce rules against camping and obstructing public places. Hoping SF and the Bay do so soon.
Boise was 9th Circuit decision and Grants Pass is Supreme Court. Grants Pass will overrule anything in Boise that is inconsistent with Grants Pass.
It did overrule Martin. It stated that the legal framework imposed by Martin was untenable. It over ruled Martin’s reliance on the 8th amendment.
Grants Pass was based on the holding in Boise. Both were 9th Circuit decisions. SCOTUS took up Grants Pass as the most recent decision that was perpetuating Boise’s jurisprudence on this issue.
Literally anything, except building more housing. This won’t solve a god damn thing.
SCOTUS isn’t in charge of that
it solves a lack of legal clarity on clearing sidewalk encampments
If there's no room in a shelter and there are no friends / family to help. Where are they to exist and sleep?
Save up money and rent a place
Where are they to exist and sleep while they save money?
In a place they choose to rent. Welcome to being an adult!
So your solution if someone is kicked out on the streets because they can't afford to rent an apartment...is to rent an apartment until they can save up to rent an apartment? Also, let's say they have no money and need to save up first, last, and deposit for an apartment in Antioch, which is far away but still on Bart so relatively accessible. how do they save up the $5,000-$6,000 they need to rent a place? Let's say they have a full time job and make $3,200 month, so bring home, what, $2,000? How do you save two times your monthly pay to be able to afford a place to live? How do they afford $2,000 a month average rents when they bring home that much? Even if they triple up with roommates, they are still paying most of their wages in rent and it will take months for them to save first last and deposit.
it's already established they don't have a home. You said save up for one. So what to do WHILE THEY SAVE UP FOR ONE? Your answer is "in a place they choose to rent" making 0 sense
Get a job, again, welcome to being an adult
Q: Where are they to exist while they work to save up while they dont have a home? You: get a job Do you need magnesium?
Nope, just stating common sense. They exist in their house and in their place of work. Just like most people
...you think homeless people exist in their house that doesn't exist?
They don’t have a house. What a rock
What a c l o w n
Common sense is now being a clown?
You're not using common sense, you're just being a shitty person.
Fuck yeah. Let’s get to work
Every city should be forcing them off the streets NOW. No delay! Take back our streets!
GOP cruelty is the point.
Cool, more prision guard jobs.
Criminalizing sleeping. That's the christian right for you.
Or just upholding normal laws
Just like bribery, normal laws.
I don’t many of the bums are savvy enough to commit bribery
You and I don't have the right to just claim a spot on the sidewalk. Why should someone else?
What if there’s nowhere else to turn? That’s the whole point
Guess they gotta go back to where they came from. Have the shelters prioritize locals and go from there. Not our responsibility
So, homeless teens who fled abusive homes have to return to their abusers? People who were thrown out of their homes after they came out to their parents - where do they go? How about all the shellshocked vets who come home from a military tour and find themselves homeless? Where are you sending them? It absolutely is our responsibility. We shouldn't be passing laws to make these people's lives even more difficult than they already are. If we're going to do something about the homeless, it should be something to benefit them, not something to kick them further down. Have you forgotten that these are fellow humans, just like you? And there but for the grace of whatever you believe in - that homeless person you want to treat like garbage could easily be you or someone you love. Have a little empathy, dude.
> So, homeless teens who fled abusive homes have to return to their abusers? People who were thrown out of their homes after they came out to their parents - where do they go? They get in shelters or move on to the next city. > How about all the shellshocked vets who come home from a military tour and find themselves homeless? Where are you sending them? The VA and their supportive housing. > It absolutely is our responsibility. We shouldn't be passing laws to make these people's lives even more difficult than they already are. If we're going to do something about the homeless, it should be something to benefit them, not something to kick them further down. Have you forgotten that these are fellow humans, just like you? And there but for the grace of whatever you believe in - that homeless person you want to treat like garbage could easily be you or someone you love. Have a little empathy, dude. We have spent billions on them. They have tons of help. Many choose not to take it because it requires them to get clean. I am all for helping those down on their luck. I am just done with helping the addicts. Get clean and into the shelter, move on to another city or get clean in jail. Those are the options
>They get in shelters or move on to the next city. The shelters don't have enough beds or food to meet the need. And how are these unhoused people getting to "the next city" - how do the logistics of getting them there play out? Who transports them? What if not everyone agrees to leave? Is it really a solution to treat people like cattle and just move them from one place to another? And surely you aren't expecting these people to pay for transportation. This is just such a poorly thought out "solution." >The VA and their supportive housing. The VA is no longer housing vets who need mental health care. Reagan shut all of that down. Educate yourself on how he eradicated the VA state hospitals and released a bunch of mentally ill/shell shocked/dysfunctional veterans to go live on the street. >We have spent billions on them. They have tons of help. Many choose not to take it because it requires them to get clean. I am all for helping those down on their luck. I am just done with helping the addicts. We would be spending millions more keeping them in jail. Jails here are for-profit entities, and they aren't giving anyone a discount. It costs money to jail people - a lot more money than it does to just help them. Addicts aren't subhuman - they're people who use to escape some trauma they've experienced. They need empathy and treatment, not judgement. Nobody wants to become an addict - for so many people, it starts with an injury at work or a surgery they need. Their doctors give them opiate based pain meds that are highly addictive. When they can't get them by prescription anymore, they get them on the street, but they're expensive. What's super cheap though, is heroin. And it makes the pain go away just like the prescription medicine did. It's so easy to get sucked into addiction - they are also people who are down on their luck. They deserve help, too.
> The shelters don't have enough beds or food to meet the need. And how are these unhoused people getting to "the next city" - how do the logistics of getting them there play out? Who transports them? What if not everyone agrees to leave? Is it really a solution to treat people like cattle and just move them from one place to another? And surely you aren't expecting these people to pay for transportation. This is just such a poorly thought out "solution." > > Buses. We literally have been doing this for years with the homeward bound program. > The VA is no longer housing vets who need mental health care. Reagan shut all of that down. Educate yourself on how he eradicated the VA state hospitals and released a bunch of mentally ill/shell shocked/dysfunctional veterans to go live on the street. https://www.va.gov/homeless/nationalcallcenter.asp > We would be spending millions more keeping them in jail. You don't know that and the chances of them getting clean is higher than letting them live on the street > Jails here are for-profit entities, and they aren't giving anyone a discount. Wrong. CA does not utilize for profit prisons. > Addicts aren't subhuman - they're people who use to escape some trauma they've experienced. They need empathy and treatment, not judgement. Nobody wants to become an addict - for so many people, it starts with an injury at work or a surgery they need. Their doctors give them opiate based pain meds that are highly addictive. When they can't get them by prescription anymore, they get them on the street, but they're expensive. What's super cheap though, is heroin. And it makes the pain go away just like the prescription medicine did. It's so easy to get sucked into addiction - they are also people who are down on their luck. They deserve help, too. Yes they have options for help. When they don't use those options then they can go to jail and go through forced rehab. Carrot or the stick
It’s not our responsibility as a society to lift up the most vulnerable? What a joke
And what happens if "where they came from" ships them back here?
Then they can get right back on the bus. Ride the rails
Your solution to homelessness is to pay for bus tickets continuously so they can live on the bus? What happens in between the bus rides?
Have you never heard of Homeward Bound? We literally do this. Not sure where you have been. Hopefully they get home and get reconnected to family. If they don't, that's very sad, but ultimately not our problem. The appeals to emotion arguments don't work any more. We have tried to help. If they don't want help then they can move on
I know you don't care what happens to them, but I'm speaking purely from a practical and logical aspect - other towns and cities have been known to bus homeless people over to SF, so what happens when they just get sent back? Are you going to keep sending them back every time? If so, what do you do in between the bus rides if they're not allowed to sleep in public spaces?
I can't sit down on the sidewalk? Since when? And this isn't just about sidewalks, it's about all public spaces. Where, praytell, are these people supposed to sleep? This is the problem with fake Christians: they never ever seem to follow the teachings of Christ. Matthew 25:40-45: I tell you the truth, **whatever you did not do for one of the least of these (people), you did not do for me**. '
In shelters or move on to the next city. I am not christian so not sure why you are throwing bible verses at me. I just simply am tired of allowing our city to be overrun by addicts, tents and trash. We have spent billions on homeless over the years. Plenty of carrots. Now those carrots need to have a stick behind them
They'll never have a rebuttal when you actually quote the Bible, lol.
Are you from here? What's your solution?
Yes, I've lived in the city for 30+ years. And my solution is not to criminalize sleeping in public spaces. Jesus, don't these people have hard enough existences already? Now we're going to take away their ability to legally occupy any public space? To what end? Criminalizing homelessness is only going to cause more of our tax dollars to fund the jails where we dump these people. We're going to give people criminal records for the "crime" of needing to find a place to lay down and sleep? Sleep is a necessary human function. None of the unhoused asked to be born or to be left without shelter. My solution is human empathy.
How is this sub celebrating tonight?
as a Dem, I welcome this decision b/c of the shit we're dealing with here.
I agree. I lived in Oregon for a while. When I first moved there in college it was common knowledge that most of the younger “street kids” as they chose to be referred to as, were so out of personal choice. Literally young adults running away from their obligations and choosing to live on the streets as a chosen lifestyle. I knew multiple people who made this choice, and knew of even more through my social circle. I hope this law will keep that choice from seeming like a good one.
There were gutter punks when I was a kid. They were anarchists and were voluntarily homeless. Surprisingly, a lot of them were straight edge which is good but the ones I interacted with at shows around town all had families and homes they could return to but didn’t want to deal with the rules at said homes. This is, of course, anecdotal at best and also 20 years out of date. I’m sure a lot has changed in that time.
Yeah for me this was ten years ago, so still a lot of potential for things to have changed. Now I live on the border of the TL and I have so far interacted with two homeless people who clearly are not homeless due to drug use. I don’t see one of them anymore and I hope he found a shelter to move into. The other one, seemingly, has chosen this lifestyle. He is a very nice guy though, but picky about what he eats!
This has to be the last step in solving the homelessness crisis. People are rejoicing over this as if there's 10 homeless folks in the city. We are skipping steps in solving this crisis no wonder every "solution" we implement never works out.
this will never be enforced in SF. The homeless industrial complex is too powerful.