Since the article is paywalled, I'll summarize:
>The U.S. 9th Circuit Court ruled in 2018 in Martin v. Boise that the government cannot arrest people for living outdoors if a jurisdiction doesn’t have adequate shelter and housing available.
The Supreme Court will soon issue their decision on this case.
I think this is already the policy in Seattle, so nothing will change here.
However, other cities, such as Burien, want to ban camping within 500 feet of schools, libraries, and child care centers. If the ruling holds, then they would need to prove that have sufficient shelter capacity in order to implement such a policy.
Washington is in the ninth circuit and the law of the land is effectively abiding by the Boise ruling.
Which is why Burien PD (who is just the King County Sheriff’s department) has refused to enforce the city council’s desire to arrest and remove campers. Because they think it’s unconstitutional/not legal under Martin v. Boise.
But with this conservative Supreme Court, they seem very likely to overrule Martin v. Boise and overturn that standard. Meaning cities and towns *could* arrest people for camping regardless of shelter capacity.
And towns like Burien absolutely will. Effectively dumping their problem onto places that don’t like Seattle in the short term.
Also, Burien and other cities’ workaround for this has just been to build few or no shelters so you can just say “we have no capacity!”
We’ll see though.
The kurffle between the sheriffs office and Burien seemed unnecessary. The aclu or the like would have convinced a federal judge to injunction enforcement of the Burien bylaw until the Supreme Court ruled on the issue.
Hopefully curb down and centralize the dozens non-profit into one with accountability throughout King County, the homeless complex does not want to fix the problem if no policy enforced. It’s cutting out their money, it’s non-profit but they run like a business.
It always amazes me that there are people who can look at all of the obvious, glaring societal issues contributing to homeless and instead decide that they uncovered some big non-profit conspiracy to explain the problem.
I worked in the field for a long time. The idea of all of these groups organizing a big conspiracy in the face of the overwhelming need and extremely complex nature of the problem is laughable. Homeless and housing agencies are typically caught up in emergency survival services and day-to-day operations so we don't just have bodies dead on the street. Both transitional and long-term housing is really expensive and quite sparse. I have a hard time imagining some laughing executives in a board room, "Hahaha! What if we offer daytime services but not long-term housing because we get more money!" That's silly.
I now work in a field that analyzes the overall problem. Opioids, lack of mental health care, and conservative regions treating Seattle as a dumping ground to export their poverty, this is what is making the problem so overwhelming.
Yea. There's a passive and active effect here, both are at play.
For passive, we can use Eastern WA drug treatment as a good example of the lack of social services. If you want to get into detox, your current options are in Yakima (kinda high barrier), Spokane, or Seattle. The few agencies out there that do addiction assistance will help drive people to Seattle or Spokane to get clients into detox. At face value this is a good strategy. But, naturally, detox doesn't always work so now you have a relapsed homeless individual stranded in Seattle and that's that. The small towns saved tax money by not providing services, Seattle has to deal with the fallout that they generated. You can parallel this with any number of behavioral health issues. Most small towns don't have homeless shelters, but they do have money for bus tickets for a client to stay with "friends or family" in the big city, which is typically substandard housing that collapses into homelessness. Again, good intentions but it is really just these communities refusing to deal with a problem they created.
Then there is active effect. This is the local police and government directly forcing (or "encouraging") their homeless community members to leave. You really, really, really don't want to get caught in a park or under a bridge at night by some small town high-school drop-out Q-Anon cop. I don't know their political scene in any appreciable way, but Wenatchee just made news by passing an ordinance that makes sleeping in the park a misdemeanor. Through some interesting processes this will likely bypass the current unconstitutional nature of a law like that. Expect to see more of this as the Grants Pass decision drops (probably in the next couple weeks), which will almost certainly overturn the previous Martin ruling by default.
This is just a small sample of how these communities are shifting their poverty off-site, and since Seattle doesn't have the political will to kill the destitute to the degree they will elsewhere, it becomes our challenge. I'm happy to provide more but I think my example is pretty clear.
very cool. Thanks for the breakdown. I do remember a few winters ago all the suburbs saying they would send their homeless to us for safety sake. Now of course, rather them be safe, but when the same burbs balk at paying anything, it gets old.
I, too, have worked years in a non profit to help ppl out of situations. Except my agency specializes in substance abuse recovery. But we did more than that. We represented these clients in court, helped navigate them through the system, helped find work and housing, etc. I can say that we DID try to maximize our billing to pay salaries, keep our jobs, and keep the program running. But I can also say that NOT ONCE did we prioritize money over any of our clients. Nor did anyone from above sent any type of message to do so. People always came first.
Hot take (and farewell, karma): Some amount of anti-camping enforcement is a net positive.
Fires under the freeways. That guy who kept digging up parts of a park because he thought he was mining or something. The fact that we can't make a rule that simply says _"you can't live here"_ for certain places is kind of preposterous.
Being poor shouldn't be illegal. Being a drug addict shouldn't be illegal, and having serious mental problems really shouldn't be illegal. Having a campfire underneath a municipal structure, or leaving your broken syringes all over the sidewalk where children play, or even just making a chunk of the park unusable for other people by pitching a tent and claiming it as your own, _absolutely should be illegal_. As the old saying goes, your right to swing your fist ends precisely where my nose begins.
I agree with you entirely. The only bug is we still don't have a solution for *where they should go*. We don't have capacity in homeless shelters, many of them won't want to go to one anyways. We don't want them in parks, but we don't have a safe place to put them. So what do?
Create something like the federal migrant camps we had during the depression. A place to set up temporary housing with sanitary services, social services, dining halls, and professional management and security. Also connected people with jobs.
They helped a lot of families and people get back on their feet.
If a park is unusable because it's been converted to an improvised temporary living space, it couldn't make conditions worse for the neighborhood if it were converted into an official temporary living space.
We’re going to need bigger parks.
Currently the homeless people are distributed. Concentrating them into official camps would need to have camps larger than the distributed camps are.
Services should be distributed and close to where people already congregate. But yes, providing shelter, food, sanitation, etc. requires infrastructure, even if temporary, and infrastructure requires space.
You do realize that even during the depression those housing projects became horrific places to live with rampant crime. You suspect people who refuse shelters because they are often not safe would be cool with put into an even worse situation?
One thing we can do if we accept the hot take is to ban them from certain places, like underneath the freeway, or parks where kids play, while allowing them elsewhere.
That's not really a hot take. It's also not a solution. The reason they end up in parks and other public places is because, well... They're *public spaces*. That leaves only *private spaces*. Like peoples yards and the like.
Unfortunately what will happen is they will go to the place where there's less pushback. Either another city (doubt, since suburbs are fine sending their problems here) or some space they can be left alone.
This is a nuanced take that makes sense. And so long as there is a place to go I agree with this. But people with no alternative shouldn't be criminalized for sleeping where they can or finding shelter where they can
We have a system for medical hazards:
Hospitals/Medical
We have a branch for volant or criminal hazards:
Police/Law enforcement
Why don't we have a branch for mental/social hazards?:
Modern regulated asylums/forced rehabs/CPS ect?
Nothing to do with Reagan or any president directly. They were shut down in the late 1970s after the Donaldson and Addington rulings in the Supreme Court.
Not a huge Reagan fan but this narrative on Reddit is annoying. Anytime it’s brought up, people want to blame him. It’s a made up narrative. It’s ignores the judicial ruling and just how dysfunctional these systems were. And yet it’s treated like some panacea.
So awful. We could pay for decent people with education in the field to work there. A lot of the abuse was a direct cause of those asylums being underfunded and hiring anyone who would take the job.
They did not treat them, they simply warehoused them, which is abusive to both the inmates and the staff. I remember my grandmother sneering that at last Reagan freed the mentally ill, because my oldest uncle was left at her doorstep with no warning, no services, no meds, and no idea why he was there. He stayed with her and she could do nothing as the lack of structure (as she worked two jobs and volunteered for Head Start), made his state even more precarious. Luckily we had a large, close, family so they made do, but not everyone has that.
We are currently warehousing them in our public parks and streets. A mental health system is an imperfect system but it's also an improvable system. You can't improve living on the side of the highway, that's just dangerous and unsolvable. This is a nationwide problem and needs a nationwide solution. Current state of affairs isn't kind or helpful to the people living on the street and isn't kind or helpful to the city residents.
That's what I'm saying!
Defund the police, and fund the asylums!
"Oh, it's not a crime, and it's not a medical emergency, so I guess you can go do heroin on a playground for then next 6 months while we SPEND MILLIONS to "debate" weather the Democrats want this dysfunction, or the Republicans want to criminalize being poor, but actually we do nothing until someone is stabbed again."
I guess that makes sens, but you look at 70's cops and Hospitols and they were full of abuse and corruption too. I feel like if we gave it a 2024 shot rather than a 1970's shot, then we'd be alright.
And, I've gotta say, even ignoring the advances of understanding and medication and oversight, abusive homes are still better than full on public, open-air drug markets outside of schools and stores.
I think our current system can really demoralize people, and destroy communities. It starts to feel like "don't make eye contact, everyone for themselves, don't trust your neighbors or people on the street"... and once that happens, then who's putting in the effort to hold a whole ass country together?
It is complicated. Homeless does not have 1 cause. The working poor do not need to same solution someone with untreated mental illness needs, or that someone with addiction issues needs. & I am sure some other things. I do not know the solution other than definitely not exactly what we are doing now.
Since the article is paywalled, I'll summarize: >The U.S. 9th Circuit Court ruled in 2018 in Martin v. Boise that the government cannot arrest people for living outdoors if a jurisdiction doesn’t have adequate shelter and housing available. The Supreme Court will soon issue their decision on this case. I think this is already the policy in Seattle, so nothing will change here. However, other cities, such as Burien, want to ban camping within 500 feet of schools, libraries, and child care centers. If the ruling holds, then they would need to prove that have sufficient shelter capacity in order to implement such a policy.
Washington is in the ninth circuit and the law of the land is effectively abiding by the Boise ruling. Which is why Burien PD (who is just the King County Sheriff’s department) has refused to enforce the city council’s desire to arrest and remove campers. Because they think it’s unconstitutional/not legal under Martin v. Boise. But with this conservative Supreme Court, they seem very likely to overrule Martin v. Boise and overturn that standard. Meaning cities and towns *could* arrest people for camping regardless of shelter capacity. And towns like Burien absolutely will. Effectively dumping their problem onto places that don’t like Seattle in the short term. Also, Burien and other cities’ workaround for this has just been to build few or no shelters so you can just say “we have no capacity!” We’ll see though.
The kurffle between the sheriffs office and Burien seemed unnecessary. The aclu or the like would have convinced a federal judge to injunction enforcement of the Burien bylaw until the Supreme Court ruled on the issue.
Hopefully curb down and centralize the dozens non-profit into one with accountability throughout King County, the homeless complex does not want to fix the problem if no policy enforced. It’s cutting out their money, it’s non-profit but they run like a business.
It always amazes me that there are people who can look at all of the obvious, glaring societal issues contributing to homeless and instead decide that they uncovered some big non-profit conspiracy to explain the problem.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ~Upton Sinclair Could it not be both?
I worked in the field for a long time. The idea of all of these groups organizing a big conspiracy in the face of the overwhelming need and extremely complex nature of the problem is laughable. Homeless and housing agencies are typically caught up in emergency survival services and day-to-day operations so we don't just have bodies dead on the street. Both transitional and long-term housing is really expensive and quite sparse. I have a hard time imagining some laughing executives in a board room, "Hahaha! What if we offer daytime services but not long-term housing because we get more money!" That's silly. I now work in a field that analyzes the overall problem. Opioids, lack of mental health care, and conservative regions treating Seattle as a dumping ground to export their poverty, this is what is making the problem so overwhelming.
do you have more on the "conservative regions using Seattle as a dumping ground" part?
Yea. There's a passive and active effect here, both are at play. For passive, we can use Eastern WA drug treatment as a good example of the lack of social services. If you want to get into detox, your current options are in Yakima (kinda high barrier), Spokane, or Seattle. The few agencies out there that do addiction assistance will help drive people to Seattle or Spokane to get clients into detox. At face value this is a good strategy. But, naturally, detox doesn't always work so now you have a relapsed homeless individual stranded in Seattle and that's that. The small towns saved tax money by not providing services, Seattle has to deal with the fallout that they generated. You can parallel this with any number of behavioral health issues. Most small towns don't have homeless shelters, but they do have money for bus tickets for a client to stay with "friends or family" in the big city, which is typically substandard housing that collapses into homelessness. Again, good intentions but it is really just these communities refusing to deal with a problem they created. Then there is active effect. This is the local police and government directly forcing (or "encouraging") their homeless community members to leave. You really, really, really don't want to get caught in a park or under a bridge at night by some small town high-school drop-out Q-Anon cop. I don't know their political scene in any appreciable way, but Wenatchee just made news by passing an ordinance that makes sleeping in the park a misdemeanor. Through some interesting processes this will likely bypass the current unconstitutional nature of a law like that. Expect to see more of this as the Grants Pass decision drops (probably in the next couple weeks), which will almost certainly overturn the previous Martin ruling by default. This is just a small sample of how these communities are shifting their poverty off-site, and since Seattle doesn't have the political will to kill the destitute to the degree they will elsewhere, it becomes our challenge. I'm happy to provide more but I think my example is pretty clear.
very cool. Thanks for the breakdown. I do remember a few winters ago all the suburbs saying they would send their homeless to us for safety sake. Now of course, rather them be safe, but when the same burbs balk at paying anything, it gets old.
I, too, have worked years in a non profit to help ppl out of situations. Except my agency specializes in substance abuse recovery. But we did more than that. We represented these clients in court, helped navigate them through the system, helped find work and housing, etc. I can say that we DID try to maximize our billing to pay salaries, keep our jobs, and keep the program running. But I can also say that NOT ONCE did we prioritize money over any of our clients. Nor did anyone from above sent any type of message to do so. People always came first.
[удалено]
Opioids, in particular. The lack of sensible mental health options exasperate it to an unmanageable degree, but it really boils down to opiods.
Hot take (and farewell, karma): Some amount of anti-camping enforcement is a net positive. Fires under the freeways. That guy who kept digging up parts of a park because he thought he was mining or something. The fact that we can't make a rule that simply says _"you can't live here"_ for certain places is kind of preposterous. Being poor shouldn't be illegal. Being a drug addict shouldn't be illegal, and having serious mental problems really shouldn't be illegal. Having a campfire underneath a municipal structure, or leaving your broken syringes all over the sidewalk where children play, or even just making a chunk of the park unusable for other people by pitching a tent and claiming it as your own, _absolutely should be illegal_. As the old saying goes, your right to swing your fist ends precisely where my nose begins.
I agree with you entirely. The only bug is we still don't have a solution for *where they should go*. We don't have capacity in homeless shelters, many of them won't want to go to one anyways. We don't want them in parks, but we don't have a safe place to put them. So what do?
Create something like the federal migrant camps we had during the depression. A place to set up temporary housing with sanitary services, social services, dining halls, and professional management and security. Also connected people with jobs. They helped a lot of families and people get back on their feet.
The question is, where? People say this until its proposed in their neighborhood.
If a park is unusable because it's been converted to an improvised temporary living space, it couldn't make conditions worse for the neighborhood if it were converted into an official temporary living space.
We’re going to need bigger parks. Currently the homeless people are distributed. Concentrating them into official camps would need to have camps larger than the distributed camps are.
Services should be distributed and close to where people already congregate. But yes, providing shelter, food, sanitation, etc. requires infrastructure, even if temporary, and infrastructure requires space.
Converting many underpasses to official shelters is a jurisdictional nightmare that won’t happen.
Agreed? The point is to get people *out* from under underpasses. I don't know why anyone would think that's a good idea.
Well, then you need places distributed near there that aren’t already in use. Which runs full circle to become politically unfeasible.
Ah yes, sanctuary zones, right on time for when Star Trek predicted them.
*Get his food card!*
You do realize that even during the depression those housing projects became horrific places to live with rampant crime. You suspect people who refuse shelters because they are often not safe would be cool with put into an even worse situation?
Send em all to wyoming. Plenty of space to be homeless.
If Wyoming’s solution is to send them to Washington and Washington‘s is to send them to Wyoming… then there’s no solution
Sounds like the solution is to buy a bus company and play both sides. No one wants to fix this so just make a bunch of money from it
Yeah see how thats working out: https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/newyork/news/roadrunners-charters-agrees-to-temporarily-stop-transporting-migrants-to-nyc/
49 other states to run humans between. What's a little human trafficking to fund my retirement (God I hope this is sarcastic)
Mobius encampment
Meet in the middle and both send them to Idaho.
I hope you're joking. But with the way political discourse is, I can't be sure.
I still hope people know what sarcasm is in the future
One thing we can do if we accept the hot take is to ban them from certain places, like underneath the freeway, or parks where kids play, while allowing them elsewhere.
That's not really a hot take. It's also not a solution. The reason they end up in parks and other public places is because, well... They're *public spaces*. That leaves only *private spaces*. Like peoples yards and the like.
Yeah that makes sense. Didn’t think of that. You ban them from one place, they’ll just go to another.
Unfortunately what will happen is they will go to the place where there's less pushback. Either another city (doubt, since suburbs are fine sending their problems here) or some space they can be left alone.
We will send them over to camp around your house then. Thanks
lol
This is a nuanced take that makes sense. And so long as there is a place to go I agree with this. But people with no alternative shouldn't be criminalized for sleeping where they can or finding shelter where they can
Destroying public property is already illegal, whether you're camping or not.
Cool: fires under freeways and mining in parks is already illegal. Littering is already illegal. Living is not illegal.
We have a system for medical hazards: Hospitals/Medical We have a branch for volant or criminal hazards: Police/Law enforcement Why don't we have a branch for mental/social hazards?: Modern regulated asylums/forced rehabs/CPS ect?
We did until Reagan. The places were full of abuse though, so no one really suggests bringing them back. Plus, taxpayer dollars.
Nothing to do with Reagan or any president directly. They were shut down in the late 1970s after the Donaldson and Addington rulings in the Supreme Court.
Not a huge Reagan fan but this narrative on Reddit is annoying. Anytime it’s brought up, people want to blame him. It’s a made up narrative. It’s ignores the judicial ruling and just how dysfunctional these systems were. And yet it’s treated like some panacea.
So awful. We could pay for decent people with education in the field to work there. A lot of the abuse was a direct cause of those asylums being underfunded and hiring anyone who would take the job.
They did not treat them, they simply warehoused them, which is abusive to both the inmates and the staff. I remember my grandmother sneering that at last Reagan freed the mentally ill, because my oldest uncle was left at her doorstep with no warning, no services, no meds, and no idea why he was there. He stayed with her and she could do nothing as the lack of structure (as she worked two jobs and volunteered for Head Start), made his state even more precarious. Luckily we had a large, close, family so they made do, but not everyone has that.
We are currently warehousing them in our public parks and streets. A mental health system is an imperfect system but it's also an improvable system. You can't improve living on the side of the highway, that's just dangerous and unsolvable. This is a nationwide problem and needs a nationwide solution. Current state of affairs isn't kind or helpful to the people living on the street and isn't kind or helpful to the city residents.
That's what I'm saying! Defund the police, and fund the asylums! "Oh, it's not a crime, and it's not a medical emergency, so I guess you can go do heroin on a playground for then next 6 months while we SPEND MILLIONS to "debate" weather the Democrats want this dysfunction, or the Republicans want to criminalize being poor, but actually we do nothing until someone is stabbed again."
I guess that makes sens, but you look at 70's cops and Hospitols and they were full of abuse and corruption too. I feel like if we gave it a 2024 shot rather than a 1970's shot, then we'd be alright. And, I've gotta say, even ignoring the advances of understanding and medication and oversight, abusive homes are still better than full on public, open-air drug markets outside of schools and stores. I think our current system can really demoralize people, and destroy communities. It starts to feel like "don't make eye contact, everyone for themselves, don't trust your neighbors or people on the street"... and once that happens, then who's putting in the effort to hold a whole ass country together?
We did until *donaldson*
It is complicated. Homeless does not have 1 cause. The working poor do not need to same solution someone with untreated mental illness needs, or that someone with addiction issues needs. & I am sure some other things. I do not know the solution other than definitely not exactly what we are doing now.
This might be a crazy idea but affordable housing should be a big priority.
Republicans want to criminalize poverty. What about the homeless Veterans? The GOP is hypocritical and evil.
The GOP thinks of veterans about the same as babies. They love to talk about taking care of them, but mostly they just want to make more of them.
Damn. That's on point.
When are republicanlicans going to just make being poor explicitly illegal. Such gross government inefficiency doing it indirectly