Posted on 01/13/2024 2:34:50 AM PST by Libloather
The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to weigh in on whether homeless individuals have the right to camp on public property. The issue is the biggest SCOTUS case in decades on the rights of the homeless, and the decision has the potential to impact how cities across the U.S. handle the homelessness crisis.
Grants Pass, located in southwestern Oregon with a population of nearly 40,000, requested that the high court review a lower court decision that ruled it unconstitutional to punish homeless residents for camping on public property when no shelter alternatives are unavailable.
According to court filings, there are there are no homeless shelters in the city and the two privately operated housing programs in town “serve only a small fraction” of the homeless population. The plaintiff’s lawyers wrote how in 2013, Grants Pass “began aggressively enforcing a set of ordinances that make it unlawful to sleep anywhere on public property with so much as a blanket to survive cold nights.”
The filing added, “The Ninth Circuit correctly concluded that the City’s efforts to punish involuntarily homeless persons for simply existing in Grants Pass transgress the Eighth Amendment’s ‘substantive limits on what can be made criminal and punished as such.'”
The issue has brought together liberal and conservative leaders in an unlikely position of urging the Supreme Court to overturn the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, and other Democratic leaders in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Honolulu, have asked the high court to review the restrictions on homeless encampments — joining conservative Arizona legislators, and district attorney offices backing the appeal.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Now do looting. Or grand theft auto.
House them in properties owned by Dems and RINOs.
The answer/solution here....treat public camping as a fee situation, and the ‘camper’ has a daily fee of $20 unless you settle for a designated city/county-run camp-ground on the outskirts of the city and agree to some form of rehab.
I suspect Justice Thomas (a big-time RV camper) is going to have a very interesting view of ‘rights’.
So either the worst of the homelessness can be cleaned up—or we all at least have some place to sleep once we “own nothing”.
$600/month is the cost of a room in a basic apartment.
Then they should work towards that.
Enabling homelessness by giving them free stuff is the wrong thing to do.
Agreed, but we have a massive of the drug addicted and mentally ill out there now. Cities outlawed boarding houses/”flop” houses decades ago because they concentrated a problematic population.
But I think one small part of the solution to (or management of, as that is the best we can really hope for) the problem may include going back to some form of that housing option.
Now in the Arlington/Fairfax area....a 400 sq-ft studio runs you almost $2k. Pretty much the same story in SF and LA.
Even if you weren’t on an alcohol binge, paranoid-act or drug-issue...I’d question how one’s burger-flipper or coffee shop barista job would survive in most urban ‘zones’.
Live in a house in Manassas with 15 other people.
America is going to need to open these public places so our illegal alien voter base will have some place to call home.
Simple:
TAX Officers of the Court to pay FOR THEIR DECISIONS.
“when no shelter alternatives are unavailable.”
Rolling Stoned.
The people in question are not homeless.
They are tent dwellers
Who wrote and who edited this nonsense?
when no shelter alternatives are unavailable???
This is going before SCOTUS?
I’m not suggesting studio apartments.
And also not fancy areas for the down and out.
But this discussion only marginally impacts the mental health and addition crisis.
BTW, ship 50 million illegals home and we’ll have plenty of affordable housing.
There are no homeless people sleeping in tents... They are instead mentally ill people sleeping in tents. And what they truly need is a mental institution to house and control them.
Mental health authorities are shunning their responsibilities and not dealing with individuals who should be under their care and supervision. They instead rely on the families of these sick individuals to deal with their sickness... And these families don’t have the means or the ability to do so.
The end result... Mentally ill people wandering the streets, many of them hooked on drugs and acting dangerous towards themselves and towards the strangers they meet. It’s a recipe for disaster. Building more jails is a great idea... Building more mental institutions (many of them shuttered in the 80s and 90s), should be an even higher priority.
The streets of north America are teaming with mentally ill individuals walking around like timebombs and there is only one way to cleanup those streets... Mental institutions.
Easy solution, live in a cheaper city or state where you CAN afford to live.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.