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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28302 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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Unfortunately, the 9th circuits ruling in Boise and then in Grants pass made it extremely difficult to police the homeless. Do you want to know why LA, San Fran, Portland, and Seattle are drowning in homeless while New York isn't? It's because they fall under the 9th circuit jurisdiction and NY doesn't. Even more conservative cities like Boise, Anchorage, and Spokane have seen homeless encampments spreading across their public parks and downtowns over the last five years. It wasn't just that they ruled you couldn't punish a bum unless you had a shelter bed available for him; you had to have a shelter bed that he would voluntarily accept. You could have provided hundreds of beds and still not been able to round up the bums if they didn't want to live in the shelter; perhaps because the shelter does not allow the public use of narcotics, for instance.

The 9th circuit has caused harm to the entire west coast with their holier than thou decrees, and has harmed me personally. Grants Pass is a hero for seeing this through to the supreme court.

If Grant's Pass wanted to Ban the Bums, they could have looked at any number of other options that would have achieved the goal without raising any constitutional questions. First, the ban on "sleeping apparatus" or whatever it was should have been more narrowly tailored. I don't know what the climate is like there, but prohibiting tents, boxes, tarps, and other temporary shelters would have at least gotten rid of anyone who didn't want to sleep outside.

That kind of ban would was illegal to enforce under the 9th circuits ruling.

Setting park hours would have helped, though it's understandable that they'd want the parks to be open overnight.

Also illegal to enforce under the 9th circuit's ruling.

Or they could have just removed the people without arresting them, which is what happens in most cases of minor violations where the cop isn't just being a dick.

Also illegal under the 9th circuit.

Do you want to know why LA, San Fran, Portland, and Seattle are drowning in homeless while New York isn't?

Ah, yes, definitely a mystery for the ages. The following data is from this page. I included the "# homeless" for completeness and I understand the source has an incentive to overstate it. But I actually wanted to highlight is the large difference in number of shelter beds.

State NY CA OR WA
Total Pop 19,571,216 38,940,231 4,233,358 7,812,880
# homeless/night 74,178 171,521 17,959 25,211
/10,000 pop 38 44 42 32
Temp Beds 65,899 24,033 2,953 7,342
/10,000 pop 34 6 7 9
Permanent Beds 36,480 33,660 7,895 9,359
/10,000 pop 19 9 19 12
(Temp+Perm) Beds 102,379 57,693 10,848 16,701
/10,000 pop 52 15 26 21

New York has way more shelter beds (I'm assuming all of these numbers are dominated by the cities... because I wasn't able to find finer-grained data easily). They're not getting in legal fights over their refusal to build shelters because they're not refusing to build shelters.

Shelter beds aren’t that useful if you can’t require that people use them. In New York if someone set up a tent in Central Park the cops will intervene and let him know he can go to a shelter or go to jail. Until yesterday you couldn’t do that on the West Coast. If Mr. Tent doesn’t feel like going to the shelter, then he gets to stay put.

I'm fine with requiring people to use shelter beds (although I gather some of the debate is on what constitutes an acceptable shelter bed) and as far as I can tell, so is the Ninth Circuit. I assume there's some technicality making their ruling not actually do what it appears to? I thought this whole fight was because Grants Pass didn't have enough shelter beds.

The ninth circuit isn't okay with requiring people to use shelter beds unless the number of beds (and only certain types of beds—if they require various sorts of things, they don't count) is greater than the homeless population. Notably, that means that if you have 500 beds and 600 people, 200 of whom want to stay on the street, you have to leave 200 on the street, not 100, I'm pretty sure.

Your point holds true for OR and WA but unless I’m misreading the graph, California has 100k extra homeless but only 40k fewer beds. Even if they build as many beds as New York they’d still have a homeless problem.

On a more meta level, you seem be presuming that homeless people have a right to a bed in the major metropolis of their choice. I don’t think it’s illegitimate to say, ‘we have 20k beds and 50k homeless, so the 30k we don’t have beds for need to go somewhere they can find work and cheaper accommodation’.

Your point holds true for OR and WA but unless I’m misreading the graph, California has 100k extra homeless but only 40k fewer beds. Even if they build as many beds as New York they’d still have a homeless problem.

That's a strange way to look at the data. I gave the per-capita numbers because I thought it was much more fair to norm on the size of the state. What you said is equivalent to saying that if California built as many beds as New York, a state half its size, then it would still have a homeless problem. Which when put that way seems completely unsurprising.

On a more meta level, you seem be presuming that homeless people have a right to a bed in the major metropolis of their choice.

I made a descriptive claim, not a normative one. There being shelter beds available to sleep in seems like a more immediate cause of fewer homeless people visibly sleeping on the streets than the police forcing homeless into beds, which doesn't seem like a workable strategy if there aren't enough beds.

You seem to be implying an alternative strategy of forcing the homeless to move elsewhere, which unlike forcing them into shelters that don't exist is at least physically possible. It's unlikely to be very popular with either the homeless or the elsewhere, but it's possible you could come up with an option some of them would find acceptable. One difficulty is that in the US outside of urban centers, you usually need a car, which is part of why homeless shelters are usually in fairly dense areas with transit.

It's pretty common in cities with climates that are undesirable to offer homeless people free greyhound tickets to coastal California during peak bad-weather season(EG August in Dallas, December in Milwaukee) IIRC. And, honestly, New York probably has more homeless in shelters than coastal California at least partially because there are times of year when you'll die if you sleep on the streets in NYC.

And, honestly, New York probably has more homeless in shelters than coastal California at least partially because there are times of year when you'll die if you sleep on the streets in NYC.

Yes, as unpopular as homeless shelters are, letting them all die of exposure is even less popular. But the political consensus in west coast cities seems to be on the side preferring people sleep on the streets over building homeless shelters.

This is, in part, because you can sleep outside year round on the west coast without dying.

I gave the per-capita numbers because I thought it was much more fair to norm on the size of the state. What you said is equivalent to saying that if California built as many beds as New York, a state half its size, then it would still have a homeless problem.

Mea culpa, I missed this. I’m not American and I instinctively think of NY and CA as having similar importance and size. I apologise.

I take your point about requiring car access but OTOH expecting to house a hundred thousand homeless in the richest and most expensive cities in the world doesn’t seem plausible. I would be inclined to think that either they are capable of finding work at some level and should move to where land is cheaper and competition is less fierce, or they genuinely can’t support themselves in which case the government should house them somewhere it will cost less.

I’m not sure how this plays out with regards to state budgets and central funding though.

I’m not sure how this plays out with regards to state budgets and central funding though.

This is pretty core to the problems with housing and the homeless in the United States. Housing is handled at the very local level, often effectively even below the city level due to the impact of public meetings. There's been some pushback on that in the past few years with some amount of state-level zoning overrides happening in a few places, but I'm pretty sure most places do homeless services funding at the county or city level, so sending the homeless to another city is a cheap and popular solution for the source city.

You can build trailer parks in the middle of nowhere to house former homeless in. They'll leave, of course. No one actually wants to live in a trailer park full of lumpenproles, including the people who do so now.

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