This poignant question was posed by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty in the 11th iteration of “No Safe Place,” the advocacy group’s report on the criminalization of homelessness. The report found that in cities across the United States homeless individuals are criminally punished for being in public even when they have no other alternatives.
At a time when nearly 160,000 individuals experience homelessness on a given night, U.S. cities have increasingly created laws that ban sleeping in public, loitering, panhandling, and sleeping in vehicles, effectively making it illegal to be homeless. For example, over the past three years, bans on sleeping in vehicles have increased 119%, while laws against begging have increased 25%, and laws against camping in public have increased 60%. At the same time, resources for individuals who are homeless appear to be decreasing: affordable housing resources have decreased about 13% over the past three years. These policies have steadily crept up in cities and rural areas all across the U.S. In February, we published a blog post on Osceola County in Florida, who spent roughly $5 million dollars arresting homeless individuals over the past nine years.
These laws sharply juxtapose recent housing initiatives in Vancouver, where local organization RainCity Housing has created pop-up roofs to add to benches for homeless individuals to use on rainy nights (check out our recent blog post on this topic).
Why do you think cities propose these types of laws? Why isn’t there more political will to create policies and adjudicate resources to alleviate poverty? What laws would be better alternatives?
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