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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28514 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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The End of Homeless encampments?

My consumption of mainstream or traditional news is always a little slow and awkward. I mostly just read headlines, and I barely trust the headlines half the time. Local news is at least often verifiable by me directly or directly by someone I know in person.

One of the items I have been seeing more of is "homeless encampment in [local park / forest] cleared by city". I mostly just read these with a tentative mental "yay?" and moved on. Well once of those news headlines referred to a homeless encampment that is just down the street from where I live, so I've gotten more curious about what is actually going on with these stories.

I have a couple theories but I'm not sure where the truth lies:

  1. Cynical take: These stories are like "drug busts" a sort of photo opportunity for politicians. The policy does have real consequences, but mostly its an unsolvable problem so they like to just loudly "do something" about it on occasion near elections.
  2. Supreme court ruling: The supreme court recently had a ruling about homelessness and the ability of cities to criminalize 'camping'. So perhaps the legal landscape shifted at the city level, and their hands were no longer tied when trying to address this.
  3. Voter preference shift: The preferences of voters on this issue shifted enough that the former general sentiment was "be nice to people that are down on their luck" and has now become something like "eww, get these drug addicts out of my sight"

This may be a case of liberal progressives having their cake and eating it too. Non-profits can continue to help with a Delegitimize SCOTUS Campaign while municipal governments can accept the court's ruling that allows them to deal with a problem they had been forbidden from dealing with. The Republican SCOTUS made homelessness illegal message still gets sent by media, NGOs, and activists. I predict we will not see many successful city political campaigns run on "bring back the encampments" message. If you do see this campaign then you'll have your answer as to where the voter preferences lie.

I searched and found previous Motte discussion when the ruling came out. "It will be interesting to see whether this leads to rapid improvement in the homeless schizo situation in big West Coast cities." Maybe?

Getting to a point where authorities can offer you a choice to go to jail, or in a Christian shelter, or another town has potential to be a huge improvement for the West Coast. I'm not mean spirited about it. More deprogramming programs. Good. That homeless people require sleep thus can sleep wherever, but only being homeless bestows this protected status/privilege, seems not-very-constitutional. Sotomayor said cities could still regulate fire in public spaces, but don't homeless people also have a biological need to not freeze to death?

I support the charity of Americans to reach the homeless population and provide them a place to sleep. Broadly, if some of us have the right not be cruelly and unusually punished for to camp out in a public space indefinitely, then this should be a freedom all Americans share. On a more practical level, enforcement seems like a necessary part of every step of the process: remove vagrants, offer them a place somewhere safe, force decisions upon them, and attempt to get them off the streets. This is not Freedommaxxing, but if the courts say the Constitution prohibits cops from moving anyone sleeping in places, that'd be fine too.

I think part of (2) is that if a government is divided, the homeless advocates within the government can no longer play the "it's illegal, checkmate" card; they can't even generate Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt to that effect ("we'd like to do something, but we're concerned the city could be sued for removing them"), because the Robed 9 said otherwise.

(1) and (3) are likely also part of it. The pandemic greatly increased the number of visible homeless in NYC, for instance, and the more voters encounter them the more they dislike them. And even (1) isn't so bad. If the politicians remove the homeless camps in more populated areas to be seen as "doing something", and more just sprout up elsewhere... that's an improvement for most. If all the homeless encampments end up e.g. on industrial properties downwind of the sewer plant, it's a much more tolerable problem.

Here in Seattle, I can say that the number of drug zombies on the streets has declined since peaking in 2021. The city is clearing encampments regularly now, but it's not exactly clear where people are going. Apparently, when they clear an encampment they are required to offer shelter but nearly everyone refuses.

In the U.S. about 100,000 people die from fentanyl overdoses every year. I wonder to what extent that is thinning the homeless population.

Here in King County, we had 1,300 overdose deaths just last year, which is 3 times as many as in 2019. For perspective, we have about 10,000 unsheltered homeless.

But the drug overdose counts are improving and 2024 will be better. Murder rates are also going down. And all of this despite the failure of government agencies to do anything about crime or homelessness. Our city just went off-the-rails insane in 2020 and now things are slowly healing. But the next crisis will take us to new depths, I'm sure.

Not discounting the first two, but I think there has been an interesting swing in voter opinion. I follow a number of local subreddits, and one recently had a controversial picture of a shiny new bus stop that had no shade and only a bench that could only be leaned on. There were upvoted comments about how this homeless-hostile architecture, but also upvoted comments about how functionally encouraging encampments at public transit stops is, practically, hostile to working-class transit users and the environmental cause of public transit more generally by encouraging those with means to just drive. Definitely a vibe shift since 2020.

There are probably some interesting parallels to consider in adjacent issues: "it's compassionate, and basically free to you so why do you care?" seems to slowly be losing ground to "it's obviously not free, and I'm not even sure it's actually compassionate" more broadly on several fronts, but it's not clear to me where that will stabilize in the short and long term.

That's just reddit, it's where misanthropic nerds go to hang out. The compassionate people are still there in real life local government meetings, spending hours arguing fiercely for why the homeless should be allowed to do whatever they want and the rest of us just have to take it.

Could also be a better understanding of how the problems with this population compounds when they're allowed to congregate. Keep them spread over the city, even if it means there's some in the fancy neighborhoods, and they'll mostly keep quiet. The few that don't are easily handled by the police. But if you let them assemble they start getting agitated, they steal from one another, they argue loudly, the desperation grows, they take more drugs, and the police will hesitate more to wade into a group of potentially hostile addicts to intervene. Keeping the homeless and addicts tucked away in an encampment in a park or forest might seem like it's hiding the problem, but it spills out in a much worse form.

They don't need to be spread out over the city, necessarily. The number of homeless in Allegheny County has halved in the past 15 years, but the problem is much more salient now than it was then. In 2009 there were certainly bums on the streets but most of the actual encampments were in the interstitial places that nobody sees or even thinks about. You had to go out of your way to find them, and into places that nobody had any reason to go. In the past few years they have taken up residence along our riverfront bike trails, including the GAP, which is a major attraction. People complain about being harassed and having to dodge needles and stray dogs. If the city would simply dismantle two encampments (which are tiny compared to what I read about in other cities) and keep the trails clear, the bums will eventually go back to the places that draw the least attention. The local news isn't going to do a story involving citizen complaints about a homeless encampment on an abandoned triangle of land between a rail yard and a highway embankment.

This article suggests that yes, the recent court ruling has unbound the hands of city officials to clear up these encampments, at least in San Francisco.

In July, Mayor London Breed promised that the city would conduct “very aggressive” encampment sweeps in August following the U.S. Supreme Court Grants Pass ruling, which allowed cities to conduct sweeps without offers of shelter.

Breed said the city would still offer shelter before dismantling encampments, and that the goal of the sweeps was to make life “so uncomfortable on the streets of San Francisco that they have to take our offer.”

During the sweeps, city officials have thrown away homeless people’s belongings, and have encouraged homeless people to leave San Francisco by giving them bus tickets. Mission Local documented several encampment clearings in the Mission and Bayview, finding that some homeless people were arrested, and that residents returned to their old haunts after just a few days.

Homelessness has become a staple of the campaign trail ahead of the November election. Breed has promised a tougher hand with those living on the streets, saying that the city will still lead with “compassion,” but that repeated refusals to take shelter may result in arrest.

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