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I'm not sure how the current precedent is worded, but any rule along the lines of "you can only ban sleeping on the streets to people whom you offer 'acceptable' shelter" of course is going to have a lot of arguments over what constitutes "acceptable" shelter. Which should probably be below a studio apartment and might be below what is acceptable to rent out (although the laws setting overly high minimums on what's acceptable to rent out are a non-trivial factor in the rise of homelessness, so, uh, those should probably be lower, too).
But we should definitely set the line somewhere and actually enforce public camping laws if a reasonable attempt has been made to get the person into "acceptable" housing. And I thought that was more or less what the precedent said.
That rule is insane, because it basically mandates a massive ongoing expenditure for all municipalities.
It also opens up a bunch of other potentially insane rules that the justices pointed out.
Can you only ban public defecation if there are publicly available toilets?
Can you only ban public cooking fires if there is cooked food available?
Can you only ban theft if welfare money is available?
Can you only ban murder if sufficient mental health care is available?
This feels like Copenhagen Ethics written into law. You can't try to partially fix a problem, you can only fully fix it.
... I... kinda agree with this? If there are no public toilets and people with no alternative are shitting on the ground, I'm not going to blame the people shitting on the ground. I'm going to either move to another city or lobby the municipality for public toilets.
Maybe I'll look for some other non-public solution, but what should it be? Prison? Well pragmatically that is also a massive ongoing expenditure for all municipalities. And- those prisons are going to need bathrooms!
The way I see it, dealing with the fact that humans need to shit is mandated by reality. Not by any law.
Yes, the alternative is prison.
There has been an ongoing debate between enforcement and cleanup.
Enforcement is mean. And it looks expensive on a per incident basis. But the main benefit over cleanup is that it stops additional people from adding to the problem.
Time and again people have opted to drop enforcement thinking that the current cleanup costs aren't as high as enforcement, only for them to be completely overwhelmed by cleanup costs when there is zero enforcement.
In the case of California cities they are now drowning in human shit on their sidewalks and streets as a result of this decision.
Well maybe they should have more public bathrooms so as to reduce cleanup costs. I don't get why you're considering the choice where we remove this option viable... I agree that there should be enforcement. It should just be enforcement of people actually using the public bathrooms and not smearing shit on the walls. This will be cheaper than imprisoning 100% of the people who lose their homes because you unilatterally refuse to provide bathrooms.
This would be a rather perverse system. The only benefit I can see is that it might make people too terrified to take any risks that might render them homeless. But that sounds like it will cause mental anxiety that will increase the number of homeless and reduce economic growth to me.
Imprisoning them all gets them off the streets, which might make sense as a stopgap measure. But if we don't solve the issues that created them we just get more homeless.
And also now you've removed all the public bathrooms. So. I don't really want to live in your city because I also need to poop sometimes.
Then we don't disagree with each other, but we do disagree with the policies some cities have chosen.
The rest of your post seems to flow from that misunderstanding, so I don't really feel that it applies to me.
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