So why is it technically illegal in larger cities to be homeless?

Excluding domestic violence and substance abuse, you can't expect everyone to afford housing with an minimum wage job and several utility bills. But there times when their employer has to downsize and it can take months to find a new one. With the salaryman sleeping on the streets while he fills out applications for an new job, he runs the risk of being criminally charged for sleeping on private property or on a bench or sidewalk that belongs to the city. And with the way the justice system works nowadays, he has an fair chance of being incarcerated, which in turn hurts his employment opportunities and fuels an vicious cycle. Which raises the notion of what's the point in punishing someone because they're legally unemployed and they can barely afford penal fines. To me, it's an wasted effort since it's an waste of an jail cell and it's trapping someone in debt over an trivial matter. I can't really find the status on whether or not that these laws exists everywhere. But I do know that it's associated with larger cities like San Diego and NYC; and that it used to be illegal in L.A. to sleep in your car overnight, an city in Hawaii outlawed panhandling because of tourism, and the bench thing might still be on the books.

Yes, I know that they are shelters out there; but with an sizable portion of America's population living on the streets and they usually have limited availability, they can't help everyone.

Answer no master, never the slave Carry your dreams down into the grave Every heart, like every soul, equal to break

IIRC, the law doesn't make it technically illegal to be homeless so much as "no sleeping in public property". Of course, in the de facto, these laws target homeless people and make their lives difficult. The purpose is that people sleeping on public property and loitering about (particularly homeless people, who are stereotypically unkempt) are bad for business-people don't want to visit parts of a town filled with homeless people, which hurts that area economically (think of it as being like graffiti or broken windows-people assume there's something wrong with the town if they see a lot of them). I'm not saying this is right, (these types of laws tend to be blatantly classist) but that's basically the reason such laws exist.

edited 28th Jun '16 12:24:38 PM by Protagonist506

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

Well, there is. But these laws hide the problem instead of solving it (by providing social security, shelters etc) and punish those it should help.

As has been noted, it's not illegal per se to be homeless in most places, but it is illegal to do the things that homeless people do that cause problems for the people who have to deal with them. For example, sleeping on benches that are designed to be for people to sit on while waiting for the bus, or in the middle of a sidewalk where people are walking, or panhandling - because most people do not want to be walking home or eating at McDonalds and have some random guy come up and ask for a handout.

(I find it perplexing that it's even controversial that sleeping on someone else's private property without permission is illegal. That's the definition of trespass.)

Social security isn't "hiding the problem." That said, there is something wrong with a society where there are homeless people who have not been housed in some way.

edited 28th Jun '16 8:04:01 PM by Ramidel

I despise hypocrisy, unless of course it is my own.

Social security and shelters were meant as solutions to the problem in contrast to hiding it. >_< Bad phrasing.

*sigh* I hate thinking about homeless people because it is a giant red flag on the performance metric of society in terms of social awareness. It is a failing grade on the system.

Anyway, the question has mostly been answered by one of the above posts. The goal of laws that make it illegal for homeless to sleep and eat is to force people outside the jurisdiction of the laws in question instead of dealing with the problem morally.

As I recall, it would actually be cheaper for the government to just build free permanent housing for them than it is for them to continually arrest them and keep them in jail. It's just deeply unpopular politically because it's seen as rewarding personal failure.

The chronically homeless for the most part are mentally ill or addicted to something, so even just giving them free homes doesn't solve the root of the problem, they need that plus an assigned social worker to keep them from just wandering off.

Short-term homelessness tends to solve itself, which is where emergency shelters have their use, sometimes people just hit a snag and need somewhere to land while they build back up, and you need to consider them differently than the chronically homeless (except that the short-termers are more in danger of developing the issues that would make it chronic, perhaps).

Somewhere in Utah did that, actually and has touted both their savings of millions of tax dollars and the success stories of homeless people who managed to turn around their lives once they had a home.

A few weeks ago, I saw an article about homelessness among students in the University of California system. I didn't read the whole article, but near the beginning it had a quote from one of the homeless students saying, in essence, that when you're struggling to figure out where you're going to sleep that night, or how (or if) you're going to eat tomorrow, it takes up so much mental focus that you almost literally cannot plan for the future.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

It's rough, because especially since mass deinstitutionalization happened, we've seen large overlaps in the Venn diagram between homelessness, mental illness (with accompanying antisocial behavior), and inability/unwillingness to take full advantage of even the help that's available. That complicates everything unbelievably.

Also, two things we have to remember:

• Whatever fools and demagogues on one side may say, virtually no one wants homeless people to be outlawed, brutalized, or simply driven out of town with nowhere to go.
• Whatever fools and demagogues on the other side may say, virtually no one wants the worst accompanying pathologies of homelessness to set the tone for public life, or to go unchallenged in most public settings.

Unfortunately, right now we seem trapped in a zero-sum game between those two bad non-solutions that no one actually wants: the more you get of the former the less you get of the latter, and vice versa. When you try a lateral move outside of that repression/dysfunction cycle, you run smack-dab into issues of mental health, individual volition, and externalities.

So, the short answer to the thread title is this: every time larger cities try something else, they incur large-scale disorder & livability issues that drive non-homeless folks out of town, and drive the city governments right back to the legal-proscription well. I live in hope that we can break this dynamic ... but if we do, it'll probably be through measures that give yet other groups something to be upset about (and maybe not unjustifiably, either).

edited 29th Jun '16 6:47:37 AM by Jhimmibhob

"She was the kind of dame they write similes about." —Pterodactyl Jones

One issue with Housing First is that, once you have the housing units available, you have to get the homeless to come in. This is not an easy task when dealing with the chronically homeless, who are usually dealing with mental and drug issues and are often suspicious of long-term help.

I think Anchorage's drug court model might help with the chronically homeless: a pretrial diversion system where felony drug abusers are diverted into a 12-to-18 month substance abuse treatment and therapy program, required to work or go to school and maintain sobriety. At the end of that, if they've completed the treatment, charges are normally dropped. Given the link between homelessness and drug abuse (and the two perpetuating one another), that should help with some of the problem.

edited 29th Jun '16 9:50:25 PM by Ramidel

I despise hypocrisy, unless of course it is my own.

I think It is unhealthy to consider the link between homelessness and drug abuse to be significant. And not just because poverty is a great way of not being able to afford drugs. It perpetuates stereotypes that can be used to abuse and disenfranchise people..

I also think it is completely impossible to require someone to work, outside of countries that have government run industries. (likewise it is impossible to require a person to go to school if there are no government run schools.) If it were possible to require a person to work, then about five percent of the population would sign up ASAP.

The problem with mandatory work schemes is that little (if no) accommodation ever is made for those who don't fit into standardised workplace settings.

If somebody can't fit in at work, they won't feel like working. Whatever their reasons for not fitting in. All too often the narrative goes "they refuse to fit in" or "voluntarily made jobless" which then leads to "voluntarily homeless". When undiagnosed (or even diagnosed, but outright ignored) neurological conditions, psychiatric conditions and sometimes learning disorders are all too common. They don't even have to be flashy ones like paranoid schizophrenia. Get a double-dose of undiagnosed dyslexia with a form of aphasia (and the associated traumas of having failed dismally at school despite trying meaning performance anxieties you've never had help to deal with), and... well: good luck in most workspaces.

Because employers are oh-so understanding of grunts' needs and screw-ups. <_<

edited 29th Jun '16 10:36:04 PM by Euodiachloris

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the feeling that there's an unspoken "even if it is significant" in your statement. And I disagree. If drug abuse perpetuates chronic homelessness and vice versa (which I believe to be the case), then you want to equip your programming to address both problems simultaneously - as Alaska's drug courts do (someone who's in drug court is eligible for specific housing assistance programs). Straight Housing First programs, by contrast, just need coordinators who can make sure that drug rehabilitation and mental health assistance are available.

As for work and schooling requirements, first, we're dealing with societies where there are, in fact, government programs for people to get their GED. Second, work requirements that are intelligently managed (yeah, I know, laugh it up) don't punish you for not having a job, but for not having or seeking one ("seeking" defined as either filling out applications, having interviews, going to available job trainings...). I definitely agree that mandatory work programs should go hand in hand with government jobs programs - or if nothing else, a nondisabled person* could do sixteen hours of community service a week at minimum wage and call that "work."

• Obviously, someone who was unable to work due to a disability would be excluded from the requirement. In a sane world that would go without saying, but apparently it has to be said.

I despise hypocrisy, unless of course it is my own.

That all sounds like a really fun situation to put an actual living person through.

Anyway, you are completely right. Those unspoken words were intended. Not saying that drug treatment plans shouldn't be integrated with homeless treatment plans. But, is there any possibility that homeless drug users could get preferential treatment over homeless non-drug users under your system? Would a person have to start taking drugs in order to get into the program?

Anyway, you said that there were charges being laid against people? How will the program be maintained when the relevant drugs are decriminalised?

Anyway, I think the reason you are not supposed to profile people is it gives one group legal authority to beat up another group or something. Because it is more statistically likely that they did something wrong or something. And if it doesn't give them legal authority to harass them with traffic police, or prevent them from getting in the country or prevent them from getting jobs or prevent them from practising religion, it will give the less civilised among us the moral authority to assault them, insult them, steal from them and use them as scapegoats.

You could maintain that drug usage is a public health issue, and maintain the program that way?

Keep Rolling On

There is currently no serious movement toward decriminalizing use of heroin and cocaine in the United States. (Sit down, Libertarian Party. I said "serious.") Obviously, you can't have a drug court like Alaska's somewhere like Europe, because in Europe, you don't generally face criminal charges for drug possession or use in the first place.

To be clear, I much prefer the European model. Alaska's drug court is, ironically, an attempt to get drug cases out of the criminal system and into a treatment model, and housing aid is just one of the programs available through the system^note One of the reasons this is needed is because of asinine FHA regs that require normal housing aid to be Drug Free Housing, in the sense that you're kicked out for one failure, no exceptions - I just mentioned it because I've heard that it's a successful program, within the context of our American system. But it is still backed by coercive authority.

edited 30th Jun '16 12:53:49 AM by Ramidel

I despise hypocrisy, unless of course it is my own.

Even seeking a job can be hard for people with mental illness. In the context of the dyslexic guy they might not have the skills to write a resume even with help. They might not be able to read want ads. Add in no transport and seeking is nigh impossible.

Even just depression can make seeking hard because it zaps tour will to do anything in a profound way that's really hard for people to understand.

It's not that some of these people don't want to. It's that they can't.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

I would imagine that being homeless looks pretty terrible on a resume anyway. It's a self-perpetuating loop.

As someone who has struggled with depression in the past, I think it's too strong a statement to say "cannot". "Very difficult, very much benefiting from aid and support" is closer to the mark. That said, we (in the US, must remember that the internet is international) have programs to help those with disabilities, both physical and mental, find work were they can do well. Why can't we extend that to those who are homeless as well?

edited 3rd Jul '16 3:31:59 PM by Sharur

Nihil assumpseris, sed omnia resolvere!

Because of the idea of the deserving and undeserving poor. :/

I'd argue that perhaps a bad drug habit might be something that contributes to homelessness, rather than the other way around? A bad drug addiction generally isn't generally conducive to great career success, is really expensive, and something people won't give up even as their lives fall apart around them. Ergo, (in theory-I'm just speculating and don't have any data to back this up) a disproportionate amount of homeless people would have drug addictions, because their drug addiction made them homeless in the first place.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

Don't. Care.

To get the point where your addiction rules your life, several factors will have come into play. Including unaddressed mental, social and/or physical issues.

Generally, people hit drugs in a big way because something in their life majorly sucks balls, and they can't see any other way to relieve the pressure.

Which... means, it's a symptom of a wider issue (or, more likely, issues), not just a personal failing.

edited 3rd Jul '16 4:50:01 PM by Euodiachloris

Drug addiction affects all facets of life. They just hit people in certain sectors (most notably those who generally can't afford to keep up their addictions without sacrificing the ability to live healthily) harder. Certainly it would contribute to keeping a poor man down, but it wouldn't be the only thing keeping them down. Drug abuse is a symptom (as mentioned), not the issue.

Insert witty 'n clever quip here.