The high court’s ruling is already having a ripple effect on cities across the country, which have been emboldened to take harsher measures to clear out homeless camps that have grown in the aftermath of the pandemic.
Many US cities have been wrestling with how to combat the growing crisis. The issue has been at the heart of recent election cycles on the West Coast, where officials have poured record amounts of money into creating shelters and building affordable housing.
Leaders face mounting pressure as long-term solutions - from housing and shelters to voluntary treatment services and eviction help - take time.
“It’s not easy and it will take a time to put into place solutions that work, so there’s a little bit of political theatre going on here," Scout Katovich, an attorney who focuses on these issues for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told the BBC.
"Politicians want to be able to say they’re doing something,”
Some groups of people will be hurt, and other groups will be helped. The groups that will be helped are the ones that vote and pay taxes, and even in liberal areas these groups are running out of patience with being on the giving end of expensive but apparently ineffective local programs to deal with homelessness the nice way.
“I don’t care where you go but you can’t stay here” doesn’t work if it’s the policy everywhere, but the alternative appears to be a situation where cities that do more to help the homeless simply attract homeless people from other places until they too are overwhelmed. (It’s a big issue in NYC with the large numbers of migrants arriving here, but the city is required to provide them with shelter by the state constitution so the Supreme Court ruling won’t have a direct effect.)
I think local and state level solutions are fundamentally unsuited to actually solving the problem but I don’t expect a federal solution either, especially if Trump is elected. So it seems like LA, San Francisco, and other places with an insurmountable liberal majority and good weather all year are simply screwed.
We don’t actually attempt to deal with homelessness in the nice way here, and we virtually never have. Giving these people housing is seen as a handout instead of what it actually is: a solution that costs less, reduces violence, reduces drug use, is more likely to be accepted, AND has less recidivism - there is literally no drawback, when you consider how much empty real estate there is (another problem we refuse to actually address).
But this is America, we don’t want any of that. We just want prisoners for the for-profit prisons. We want the cruelty against people we see as “lazy.” We want the perceived moral victory of not being one of them.
San Francisco (for example) has spent a billion dollars a year attempting to address the problem and apparently not succeeding. I think people would be entitled to ask where the hell the money is going if it isn’t dealing with homelessness the nice way.