According to the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, the United States ranks with Sudan and Russia as the worst offenders when it comes to housing rights violations.
Some ot the US’ demerit comes from the homelessness caused in Iraq, but the centre is equally as scathing of the policy of criminalisation of homelessness in just about every state.
I appreciate that homelessness often makes a city look a little unkempt, but what is the official rationale behind making not having a home illegal in the Land of the Free?
Some of it is just flat out NIMBYism – people don’t want to trip over the homeless or even be reminded of their existence. Homeowners don’t want shelters or halfway houses in their neighborhoods for fear of crime or reduced property values. We’d rather do the easy stuff that makes us feel good rather than fix the problems.
That said, there are many many causes of homelesness. Some of them are economic, but a lot are social and not so easy to fix. Many homeless are substance abusers or mentally ill, and they don’t want the help. But help doesn’t matter because they can’t be forced to get treatment. Some are kids fleeing abusive (or not abusive) families. Basically, for every homeless person, there’s a reason why that person is homeless. Some of these can be taken care of through low-cost housing and access to social services; others can’t be because the person doesn’t want help.
:shrug: The poor will always be among us, I guess.
Robin
I understand that, but advocates of these laws must couch their reasoning in more publically acceptable terms than: “We just don’t like it”
While realising that for almost all homeless people their predicament is a negative one, the more I think about it, the more odd its seems to me that it is illegal to not have a home.
I saw a documentary about working people in the US who, for one reason or another, were forced to live in their cars: presumably these people are breaking the law also.
And what about someone who has means but decides to sell up and travel the country, sleeping on trains and buses etc. What if he turns up late in a town and has to wait awhile for a connection and falls asleep on a bench. Could he - in theory - be charged as homeless?
I poked around your link a bit and I didn’t see anything about the illegality of being homeless in the United States. I can only guess that you’re talking about loitering laws. As far as the US goes we do have property rights so it isn’t as if people are having their homes destroyed left and right. I’d say so far as Security of Tenure goes, we’re doing just fine. Most people also have access to clean water, electricity, heat, and in many cases air-conditioning.
Marc
Can you give us a cite that it is illegal to not have a home in the US?
In my town it is illegal to sleep outside, be under a blanket outside, or sleep in a car. So while being homeless is perfectly legal, doing those things that homeless peole do- like not have someplace reasonable to sleep at night- are.
Loitering, vagrancy, and no-visible-means-of-support laws have been held to be unconstitutional by the federal courts. PAPACHRISTOU v. CITY OF JACKSONVILLE, 405 U.S. 156 (1972). While these decisions rest on highly dubious constitutional grounds, it has been very hard for municipalities to “charge persons with being homeless” since the Supreme Court discovered the constitutional right to loiter.
Even more focused laws, aimed at preventing gang activity and drug dealing, have been successfully challenged. http://aspin.asu.edu/hpn/archives/Jun99/0166.html
So the good news is your OP may well be based on a faulty premise: It is not, in fact, illegal not to have a home in the U.S. Actually, it never was; it was only illegal to engage in certain proscribed conduct in public places. And even many of those laws have been struck down.
You don’t appear to have poked very far: “COHRE named the US as a Housing Rights Violator for its failure to protect the rights of millions of homeless people within its borders and the criminalisation of homelessness in many of the fifty states.”
Forgive me if “criminalisation” and “illegality” are different.
Hmmm. Cite me to an in-force U.S. law that actually “criminalises homelessness” (in spite of the already-cited activist Supreme Court decisions to the contrary), rather than an activist website’s characterizations of the law, and we can talk.
Remember, quotations from advocacy groups are not statements of what the law actually is.
Other than the assertions made in the linked document in the OP, on which I wished to base this debate, no.
If the conclusions reached in that report are flawed or biased in someway, please enlighten me.
[On review, this is for Huerta88, too]
I was hoping for specifics not generalities. Are they talking about laws against loitering or being in public parks after hours? I don’t know because your link wasn’t all that specific.
Marc
I can’t argue specifics with you, other than to point out the very specific U.S. case-law I already have, because th press release you’ve cited does nothing more than refer to the “crimijnalisation of homelessness.” Certainly, it contains no cites, examples, or evidence.
Thus, there aren’t really any “conclusions reached in that report.” Instead, you’re dealing with a press release that states a load of provocative allegations in a few paragraphs and then . . . concludes.
Rather than mock the (absolutely inflammatory and self-satisfied) tone of the press release, I will try to follow what I think is its (unspoken) message. No, the U.S. doesn’t literally “criminalise” homelessness (people can live wherever they want, in their own homes, in the homes of relatives and friends, in government-funded shelters (an odd thing to exist, if ‘homelessness’ were criminal). The U.S. doesn’t even “criminalise” being on the street and “homeless” (because the Supreme Court struck down loitering and vagrancy laws).
But . . . so goes the argument, the U.S. doesn’t go as far as it could to help vagrants by, who knows, giving them studio apartments, or tolerating their aggressive panhandling, or permitting them to stockpile filthy rubbish (though see BERKELEY / Carts stay cool as city takes heat on storage policy / When the homeless lose or abandon stuff, it gets frozen). These are the type of “rights” that “homeless advocates” are fighting for. And . . . more power to them, I suppose.
Just don’t mistake the very modest strictures on derelicts that actually exist and are allowed to be enforced in the U.S. with a global criminal ban on being “homeless.”
It’s not just loitering in parks - some entire cities have bans on loitering and sleeping in public. That’s de facto making homelessness illegal.
From Bup’s link:
“Instead of the compassionate responses that communities have used to save lives in the past two decades, the common response to homelessness is to criminalize the victims through laws and ordinances that make illegal life-sustaining activities that people experiencing homelessness are forced to do in public,” said Donald Whitehead, Executive Director of the National Coalition for the Homeless.
Yes, but that’s more generalization and framing. I agree with it, but I can see where a person who doesn’t believe it wouldn’t be swayed. The thing I was really trying to point out on that page was the list of percentages of cities with city-wide bans:
Percentage of Cities Banning Activities
Obstruction of Sidewalks/Public Places 89.4
Closure of Particular Public Places 69.1
Loitering in Particular Public Places 55.3
Begging in Particular Public Places 53.2
Urination/Defecation in Public 53.2
Sleeping in Particular Public Places 51.1
“Aggressive” Panhandling 50.0
Camping in Particular Public Places 47.9
Sitting/Lying in Public Places 44.7
Bathing in Public Waters 38.3
Begging City-wide 30.9
Camping City-wide 26.6
Sleeping City-wide 19.1
Loitering City-wide 19.1
The last two, of course, are what a homeless person simply cannot avoid.
As you are so critical of other posters’ lack of evidence, care to give us some to back up your statement? (And I presume you never read the article you linked to, because it has very little to do with what you said in your post.) In any case, most assessments of the true problem of homelessness include people in shelters, on floors, etc, because they do not have a home.
And does anybody have a figure on how many ‘governmen-funded shelters’ actually exist in the US?
Actually, I wouldn’t say they rest on dubious Constitutional grounds. The case you cited was not based upon the Substantive Due Process that conservatives work themselves into a frenzy over.
The decision was based upon procedural due process, and it was made with no dissent.
Which article do you mean? The advocacy press release? I read that one. It said that “homelessness” had been criminalized, but offered no evidence.
The one about Berkeley spending thousands of dollars to cryo-store the “belongings” of vagrants? Read that one too. Berkeley has concluded that they can’t discard the rubbish stored (then abandoned) by its vagrants on public property, including lots of almost-certainly-stolen shopping carts (whose thefts Berkeley chose not to investigate).
Do you want me to give a cite to the absence of convictions for “homelessness?” Gee, I can’t prove this negative. Can you prove the corresponding positive (which is the only kind of proposition that can actually be proved, in logic): that people are being convicted for merely not owning a home? Proving that people are being prosecuted for defecating in the street does not qualify.
My mother in law, who volunteers through her (Catholic) church at various shelters now and then, says that homeless people want to be homeless. On more than one shift she had great difficulty in persuading people on the street to come back to the shelter for a hot meal and a cot (I think they drove around in the church van looking for folks).
I didn’t know what to say to that, but it just struck me as wrong.
It’s not a crime to be poor, but it might as well be
- Will Rogers