As more people end up experiencing homelessness, they’re also facing increasingly punitive and reactionary responses from local governments and their neighbors. Such policies could become legally codified in short order, with the high court having agreed to hear arguments in Grants Pass v. Johnson.
Originally brought in 2018, the case challenged the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, over an ordinance banning camping. Both a federal judge and, later, a panel from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck the law down, saying that Grants Pass did not have enough available shelter to offer homeless people. As such, the law was deemed to be a violation of the Eighth Amendment.
The ruling backed up the Ninth Circuit’s earlier ruling on the Martin v. City of Boise case, which said that punishing or arresting people for camping in public when there are no available shelter beds to take them to instead constituted a violation of the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause in the Eighth Amendment. That applied to localities in the Ninth Circuit’s area of concern and has led to greater legal scrutiny even as cities and counties push for more punitive and restrictive anti-camping laws. In fact, Grants Pass pushed to get the Supreme Court to hear the case, and several nominally liberal cities and states on the West Coast are backing its argument. If the Supreme Court overturns the previous Grants Pass and Boise rulings, it would open the door for cities, states, and counties to essentially criminalize being unhoused on a massive scale.
There are good arguments for both sides here. IMO the solution would require recognizing that homelessness is not a local problem and allocating funds at the federal level for assisting the homeless. I don’t see any other way of avoiding the unfair situation created when homeless people quite reasonably choose to travel to cities that provide more assistance to them.
A conservative is not capable of charity. For a conservative to agree to give something to someone, there must be something in it for them.
For example, if a conservative’s church does something nice for someone, they believe their “good deed” will be rewarded with eternal bliss. And the church gets the PR it needs to increase its profitable collections. They all get to call themselves “charitable” while not actually engaging in any charitable behavior.
To a conservative, there is no charity. There is only a transaction.
The statistics say this isn’t the case. Here, in California, they did the most comprehensive study of homelessness ever conducted and concluded that high housing prices were to blame for the overwhelming majority of homelessness…not homeless people from Idaho moving here. Which, in hindsight, seems obvious because how many homeless are even in Idaho? And how many homeless people would even have the money to move in order to improve their homeless life a tiny bit?
EDIT: Here’s the study for reference: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/06/425646/california-statewide-study-investigates-causes-and-impacts-homelessness
HUD could buy up vacant rental properties and act as a renter of last resort. This would also set a floor to the rental market to stop it’s gallop into speculative pricing.
That’s just silly though, most legislators in this country are real estate agents or married to one. They’d never stand for people getting in the way of their grift.