Here’s the issue in the starkest terms I can put it.
I own a piece of property – food. It is entirely legal to own it. In fact it is entirely legal for anyone to own it – there are no issues of licensing or minimum age or even citizenship status that can interfere with owning this particular piece of property.
What right does the government have to prevent me from giving a piece of my personal property to another person, as a gift?
No argument that the intent isn’t to make it more difficult to be homeless in the city. I haven’t been able to find the actual text of the ordinance that the person was cited under - has that been publicized at all? I think it’s a good thing that the church is trying to help the needy.
That being the case, the other considerations are still pertinent. Those rules that are being enforced are obstensibly to protect the public from potential dangers. If you think that is a worthwhile purpose then it impacts everyone, not just homeless. Keep in mind, the law being enforced targets the provider of food, not the receiver. Homelessness isn’t being criminalized. Homeless folks aren’t being forcibly kept away from tourists or anyone. This is about regulating how food can be distributed. Of course, the intent is to make it more difficult to provide food to the homeless, but it falls under the umbrella of providing food to everyone.
The rights of the homeless are not being impacted. Their right of movement and assembly isn’t affected. They are not being kept from public view by the police. Essentially your whole post is a strawman.
I think the regulation may be different. It’s obvious this was done to target the homeless. But the law needs to be discussed within the framework of what it actually does. If the law says that a provider of food needs to provide a bathroom within a certain distance, that should be evaluated by itself, not on whether it impacts the homeless. Because if that’s a good thing (providing bathrooms) then it should be done, and the church in question can provide should they choose to continue. In other words, if food providers don’t have to provide bathrooms, then no food providers should be forced to do so. If they are subject to ADA, then all should be, for example.
Will the next step be to tell police to shoot the homeless on sight?
Heartless community.
In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread.
While SF has had its issues, I would have to point out that this sort of thing has always been a problem, but has visibly been improved in most of North America’s great cities without making it illegal to feed people.
It is undeniably the case that in New York, Chicago, and many other great cities with tourist trade, the problem of homelessness has been abated, cities cleaned up, and tourist areas improved through methods less hatchet-shaped than making it illegal to give someone a slice of pizza.
The city should be up for recognition as the most heartless city in America, or some such.
At the OP’s link it is stated that jail inmates from all over Broward County are released in Fort Lauderdale. I suppose because it’s the largest city in the county? Perhaps inmates should be released near homeless shelters. Or better yet, be given bus tickets out of town, probably to Miami.
I doubt that there’s much of an annual migration of homeless from the Northeast to Fort Lauderdale. These folks generally don’t have the money for a plane or train and hitching is a tad risky these days.
For about eight years the job I had kept me so busy that I generally ate at my desk. Either a lunch I brought or something I ordered. But on Fridays I usually made it a point to get out of the office.
One Friday I noticed an apparently homeless man begging on the street. I ordered a bit extra and brought it to him that day. Over the next few years I probably did the same thing for the guy twenty or thirty times a year. Don’t know how he stayed alive otherwise, but he managed.
Then I changed jobs and no longer walked by his corner. A few years after I did walk by, and he was no longer there. (In the meanwhile the Giuliani crackdown against the homeless had occurred.)
There’s a novel about the legal problems of the homeless from John Grisham, Street lawyer. Not a bad read.
I can’t speak to the motivations of those who passed these laws or support them. But I personally would not want someone to set up a homeless feeding place right outside my house or down the block.
While there are a lot of homeless people who are fine people who are down on their luck, there is also a pretty large percentage who are afflicted with various mental problems, or are substance abusers, or street criminals (of late a lot of pedophiles have become homeless, due to restrictions on where they can live). As a practical matter, having the neighborhood attract a lot of homeless people will negatively impact the quality of life for most of the residents.
As a practical matter it’s better to set up homeless feeding/sheltering places in other areas, and to have them run by people who take more responsibility for the overall situation than just giving out some free food.
I guess it’s possible that most of the sanctimonious people posting in this thread are much more righteous than me and would not turn all NIMBY as soon as it’s their neighborhood and not some far off place that it’s relevant to. Anything is possible. You never know.
Fort Lauderdale is the Broward County seat. 2 of the 4 county jails are there.
How do you define “other areas” besides outside of someone else’s house or down someone else’s block?
I can appreciate wanting organizations to take more responsibility. Of course, all of these people need to eat, sleep and poop every day. Whether or not a group feeds them a meal is not really going to change that. Unless you’re counting on starvation to reduce the sanitation requirements. They provide for one of the needs that these people have, and do not provide for another, does that mean the first need should go unmet?
Absolutely not. Freedom of religion should only mean you can’t ban <sharing food with the homeless because a religion commands it>, and not that you can’t <ban sharing food with the homeless> because a religion commands it.
Religious doctrine should not be an argument for or against a practice being legal, because religious doctrine has no real mechanism for distinguishing right from wrong. The same religion that tells you to feed the poor might also tell you to kill your child if they talk back to you, and the basis for both would be equally worthless: a fictional character said so.
If this law is worth fighting - and I certainly believe it is - it’s worth fighting right.
nm
Tha law they just passeed. Maybe you should try reading the thread next time, or at least the OP.
I think you might have missed his point by just a little bit.
I am hoping this refers to the post just before yours and not to me.
Seems like a pretty good reason, rather than letting these guys go homeless then bitch at and harass them, to setup social programs to help ex-cons reinsert themselves into productive society and…
Wait. Florida. Nevermind :o.
I can tell nobody follows links, but even so
fight ignorance, don’t propagate it
How do I know nobody followed the previous links?
Lack of outrage
Says invalid URL.
For the record, the gentleman being prosecuted in the linked story did not “set up a homeless feeding place” right outside anyone’s house, nor at any fixed place. He was arrested for carrying plates of food into public parks and beaches, and giving them to people.
There are food distribution to the homeless near the place where I live. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one, and I’m pretty sure most people in this situation would be shocked to read that their city had banned food distribution to the homeless. What you wrote tells a lot about you. Many people are decent, even when inconvenienced, and couldn’t accept that their city mandates to let people go hungry.
Now, if it’s NIMBY, where? What are these “other areas” you speak of, away from the view of all residents who could be inconvenienced? What are those other responsibilities they should take? You want to set up refugee camps away from towns, with barbed wire so that these people won’t escape back to where you could see them and have your quality of life negatively impacted?
Your link is supposed to demonstrate what?