Supreme Court to consider whether local governments can make it a crime to sleep outside if no inside space is available
Supreme Court to consider whether local governments can make it a crime to sleep outside if no inside space is available
Legal precedents hold that criminalizing someone for their status, such as being homeless, is cruel and unusual punishment. But what if that status leads to actions like sleeping in public spaces?
Let’s just get straight to the point and make it illegal to be poor. Maybe then it will get through to people how inhumane this is.
Assuming conservatives would care about that? Bold conclusion
Conservatives are by no means the only problem here.
Ultimately, people become homeless because they cannot afford a home. Shockingly, housing prices thus have an extremely strong effect on homelessness rates. The great state of West Virginia, despite all its many many flaws and challenges between extreme poverty, addiction, lack of jobs, and everything else, does not have a significant homelessness problem. Why? Because housing in West Virginia is dirt cheap such that even people who are struggling can still maintain housing.
This is a policy choice, not some natural and inevitable state of affairs. While subsidies and other programs can move the needle a little bit, by far the greatest factor affecting housing costs is raw supply v. demand, and the fact of the matter is that voters all over the United States, even in the most progressive zip codes in the country, have decided that they would rather restrict the supply of new housing in order to increase the value of their own property investments instead of allowing new housing to be built, even if the consequence is huge swaths of people can no longer afford housing at all. To make themselves feel a little bit better, progressives might throw some money at broken homeless shelter systems and pretend that that band-aid actually fixes the problem.
West Virginia certainly didn't avoid a homelessness problem by aggressively subsidizing affordable housing, making huge investments in public housing projects, implementing huge restrictions on landlords, or building a massive shelter and support system. They simply maintained an adequate supply of housing relative to the amount of people that want to live there. Until blue cities and states wake up to this fundamental fact, nothing is going to meaningfully change. You cannot simultaneously have your housing be an ever-increasing lucrative investment asset and have housing be affordable, no matter how many progressive sign posts you put in the lawn. It's incredible how quickly people like California progressives who claim to care so much about the poor and the downtrodden show their true colors the moment you suggest building an apartment building in their single-family house suburbia that might actually be affordable by those same people.
Las Vegas beat you to it.
WWJD
That rich mofo was born in a manger and had three kings visit him. Plus I don't trust zombies.
Bub was ok.
The whole system is fucked. Wage stagnation, increasing cost of living, lack of affordable housing, dynastical wealth concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer elite citizens and oligarchies.
Before these issues are improved upon dramatically, there’s simply going to be a growing number of homeless people.
If the solution is to throw homeless individuals in jail, then what? Jails are still funded by tax dollars, so why not be proactive and invest that money in getting people housed by building more affordable housing, providing more jobs with things like infrastructure improvements that are badly needed throughout the country, rather than taking punitive measures? I think this needs to happen at the federal level because it is indeed a broken system of the entire country.
For-profit prisons are definitely taking advantage of subsidies, but that doesn't matter, because only poors pay taxes, and for-profit prisons are for profit... Profit for rich people who do not pay taxes. The solution is revolutionary action. The only peaceful way is through massive labour pushback, but that can't happen in a nation of docile workers, who are too afraid of becoming the next homeless person themselves, to risk being courageous. This will end with even more suppression of the lower classes followed by an inevitable implosion, because neither of the many forces at play are willing, nor are they even able to throw the brakes at this point. The only way this changes is if human nature suddenly shuts off, and rich people's hearts grow two sizes, or we stop taking their bullshit and do something about it.
Unfortunately the people who run the private prison systems have lobbyists that try to ensure the system is constantly fed prisoners, so they can make even more profit. If the quarterly earnings aren’t constantly increasing, the board of investors won’t be happy.
Sure, the entire system will crash like every other system that expects infinite growth, like the housing market bubble, but we have to think of the investors! /s
Helping people get on their feet only makes sense if your goal isn't oppression.