There was no circuit split here and the status quo did not involve any pressing constitutional controversy or original jurisdiction, so it was unlikely they would grant cert (take the case). The law as it stood was protecting a right that may or may not exist, but the court is unlikely to weigh in on lower courts creating rights or interpretations of rights that enable individuals.
Had the lower court's decision involved criminalizing hundreds of thousands of people's daily lives, that might create the sort of controversy the court would consider vital to resolve.
But: Sometimes doing nothing is the best answer. Sometimes, it takes enormous wisdom and personal restraint to act on that fact by doing nothing. It's why sayings like "The only way to win is not to play" are popular.
A nice hidden gem in this ruling - the supreme court didn't refute or counter the 9th circuit court's statement to the effect of
> The 9th Circuit noted that those facilities could still refuse to shelter homeless people who exceed limits of the number of days they can stay or who object to mandatory religious programs.
It'd be quite problematic for folks to be jailed for refusing mandatory religious programs - even if those people were homeless. I'm happy to see that this group of people managed to stand up for their rights against Boise - and maybe the city just needs to put out a bit more money toward health and safety by supplying adequate secular shelter options[1].
1. As an aside, I really dislike that so many of the US domestic charities are religiously driven.
Yeah. This sounds like another case of religious organisations picking on the vulnerable for "conversion" / indoctrination purposes (aka brainwashing). :(
Even if that's true, at least they're helping them. I'm sure when given a choice between being "not brainwashed" and being fed, most homeless people would go for the latter. Also, if you're homeless you literally have nothing, what's wrong with finding solace in religion? At least you'd have some comfort.
"Also, if you're homeless you literally have nothing, what's wrong with finding solace in religion?"
A significant portion of homeless people are actually 'invisible' homeless people- people living out of their cars, or sleeping on couches. They arguably do have things, up to and including a sense of identity and self for which any attempt of indoctrination must erode. I don't think someone who is sleeping on a friend's couch would be down for sleeping on a bed instead for the low low price of conversion therapy.
(FTR: I don't think religion is brainwashing/conversion therapy or whatever. I also just think this take is also very bad.)
This line of reasoning doesn't defend their practices nearly as well as you think it does. For instance, paying homeless people to fight each other will certainly make sure they have money for food, and it might provide them some much-needed organized activity!
If the reason you help someone is because you want to sell them something or use them, you're doing help wrong.
Not everyone agrees that intention is relevant. For me, it’s important to help while minimizing harm and trying to respect the agency and wishes of the recipient, which the fighting analogy violates. that is a challenging balance in practice, but we are talking about ethics, where there is more grey than b&w.
I suppose you could argue that religion is harmful.. but even as an atheist, that’s a stretch for me to agree with.
> I suppose you could argue that religion is harmful.. but even as an atheist, that’s a stretch for me to agree with.
How is that a stretch for you? Have you ever heard of conversion therapy. Do you know how that came to be and similar to slavery. I know a lot of LGBT+ friends that had religious parents throw them on the streets because of God wouldn't make them not be normal.
Let me guess, you also think that Muslims are terrorists? Why are we so found of generalisations? A number of individuals engaging in a horrible activity, doesn't make them a representative of the entire group. You can be religious without condoning any of those things because they don't affect your daily life, which is true for most religious people I'd argue. I am not religious but I can see why someone would turn to religion to give them a sense of purpose in their life. That doesn't mean that they have to convert people.
I spent nearly six years homeless. The programs holding you hostage to listen to a sermon and try to brainwash you were typically amazingly shitty programs that I didn't return to. The ones run by people simply practicing their faith and trying to do good in the world because it's an article of their faith were vastly better.
Catholic Charities had consistently good programs. In my experience, they did not ever require you to listen to a sermon to get the help you needed.
Yes, I chose to go hungry rather than attend shitty services with lousy food that put my welfare at risk with their shitty policies. Some so-called "help" is worse than nothing.
And not all homeless have literally nothing. Some have income, just not enough to support a middle class life. Some have regular jobs and live in fear of being fired if their employer learns of their situation.
Friend of mine worked for a Catholic Charity. She's Jewish. The Nuns the ran the place did not care. They didn't care that some of their employees were gay. They had no interest in converting the people they served.
The thing that bothers me now about the homeless is how many of them appear to have their basic shit together.
> The thing that bothers me now about the homeless is how many of them appear to have their basic shit together.
Hmm? I think there's a typo in there. Did you mean that it bothers you about homelessness (not the homeless people) that people with "shit" together still have trouble getting housing?
As someone who is religious, I think this is a bad approach because it is transactional and tries to force the will of someone unfortunate. Both of those directly oppose the values of my Christian faith (grace and freewill).
But unlike others, I don't agree that religious charities should not do any proselytizing. A genuine religious person believes their doctrine, not just in being a good person like anyone can be. Christians believe there are eternal issues at stake.
The point is that basic services should not be conditional and proselytizing should invitational, not mandatory.
>I really dislike that so many of the US domestic charities are religiously driven.
In fairness, many of them are very good. The Mormons, for example, have always impressed me. I had a friend who grew up in Menlo Park, fell on hard times, and ended up in Utah. The Mormon community there was very supportive in substantial ways, and although they did evangelize, I hear it was pretty mild.
But yeah, it's...evil when a religion gets transactional with it's charity.
Yea, I used to work in a soup kitchen regularly with a group from my church, a lot of the work and the people doing it are great - but we didn't evangelize and I think that's how it should work. As a religious organization feel free to support charities and note that your organization accepts people from all walks of life - even include pamphlets if you'd like... but the aggressive evangelism is where it gets weird - if dinner and shelter that I require to live is contingent on me accepting religion then that shifts religion from a freely associated faith into an exchange.
See, that name sounds like religion-down-the-throat. When I was younger, and I volunteered at a food bank in (let's call it) Foo County, it was called "Food for Foo County". Ambiance matters.
That is about the minimum possible religious content, so little that many people would not even notice. And you regard that as "religion-down-the-throat"? I would suggest that you are a bit hypersensitive.
> But yeah, it's...evil when a religion gets transactional with it's charity.
Getting transactional with charity is the whole point. That's why religious organizations often fight against public programs instead arguing that religiously affiliated charity should take its place (receiving public funding to do so in many cases).
Utah in particular loves to under-fund programs, and let the church pick up the slack. The benefit to them is that it is both transactional, and allows them to exclude as they desire.
The Mormons might be nice, but they shouldn't be getting public money to provide public assistance. They should be cut out entirely and taxes should fund these programs directly and fairly.
I don't think that's a charitable way of interpreting the comment.
Mormons as a rule are very generous with the church, and often with church affiliated charities. If the deduction for charitable giving was removed, the Mormon church would do fine, and likely so would many of their charitable activities, and it would seem more like separation of church and state to me.
If the charitable giving deduction were removed, I guess I agree that at that point there wouldn't be a way to argue (from a constitutional perspective) against Mormons in Utah voting for low levels of government support.
As it happens, I'm not convinced the "all charity should be provided by religious institutions in Utah" narrative for Utah voters is actually accurate; Salt Lake City at least is fairly generous with the homeless, at a government level.
Cynicism like that makes me sad. Cynicism is one of those weird attitudes that totally justifies itself. It is the psychological interior of the "defect/defect" Nash equilibrium. It's saying "Oh yeah, all politicians are liars, all charity is a scam," which tends to produce a world where all politicians are liars, and all charities are scams. When an exception occurs, the cynic says, "Yeah, that honest politician is going to get eaten alive by the liars; those selfless charities are going to go bad someday, out competed by the transactional ones." And everyone who believes this makes it more likely that it is so.
But spirituality is quite real, and there are those who really believe in selfless giving without expectation of anything in return. Lots of people. They exist in the "cooperate/cooperate" equilibrium, and honestly, it's better there. It's not that you don't see the cheating, the greed, especially in the name of charity, its just that you're choosing to do something different, something that feels more wholesome. (I say this as someone who's served a bunch of meditation courses, and really enjoyed it.)
Why are religious organizations fighting public assistance programs? Why are their members arguing that a church should provide these same services instead? Your "criticise the crique" strategy isn't actually a retort, just an argument that religious affiliated organizations should be above criticism wholesale.
If religions want to stay out of politics, I'm all for leaving them be. But as it stands they're a major power broker, particularly at a local level, and therefore cannot be ignored (particularly when they're arguing for religious discrimination of public services).
You said, "Getting transactional with charity is the whole point." I disagree. It's the point for some, but not all religious charities. It is wrong to paint all with the same brush. I won't comment on the Mormon relation to the state; I know only about their relationships with some individuals.
My other point was noting the cynicism behind your view, and why I think there are better options.
I don't know. If I had to listen to a spiel to get a meal, I think that would be okay. Beats prostitution any day of the week. And it's still way above selling plasma.
If I have to watch a show chosen by KFC, but in the end I get a free sandwich, I really don't care. You call it a paid promotion, I call it a subsidized benefit.
The church is engaged in a giving action that is subsidized in part by their ability to get paying members. So in a sense, the church is a two legged business. One is to genuinely help people. The other is to find people that are willing to assist in the continuation of that goal.
(Thanks for the downvote. I've always noticed that the most heartless people downvote the most.)
This is very, very, very dependant on your experiences. My family is from India and they've told me some fascinating stories of the lengths some Catholic charities and churches are willing to go to convert people.
If your friend is a straight white male, and the only example you have real first-hand stories of, it might be best to reserve judgment. I don't have any personal experience, but I think there's plenty of historical evidence to support defaulting to a suspicious position on that particular organization.
As an aside, I really dislike that so many of the US domestic charities are religiously driven.
I guess another way of looking at it is why aren't there more atheist charities? What is it about religion that makes people help other people so much more?
Most religions are centered around the afterlife, and you can't take anything with you when you die. The dogma of most religions states that charity is good and will help get you into whatever version of heaven they believe in, hence charity.
A friend of mine teaches computer science at a small Jesuit college.
He was wanting to put together a program where students would go volunteer to help NGOs do software projects in India.
Something he was surprised by was that NGOs in India are almost all oriented around lobbying the government to do things (particularly that they'd already promised to do) and not around provisioning social services themselves.
My understanding is that in some religions, we are living today in the "afterlife" of a previous life, and subject to karma based on what we've done.
If one has bad karma that has put one in an undesirable social position, it's not a stretch that Earth is a hell for those people, and we're supposed to be the demons that make life miserable for them.
> My understanding is that in some religions, we are living today in the "afterlife" of a previous life, and subject to karma based on what we've done.
If one has bad karma that has put one in an undesirable social position, it's not a stretch that Earth is a hell for those people, and we're supposed to be the demons that make life miserable for them.
Can you name those religions for me. I view everything as deterministic and see the world as either heaven/hell. Although the idea of karma doesn't make sense when understanding determinism. Since everyone is destined to do bad or good depending on the life they're born into.
edit: whoever downvoted me, I'm asking a simple question and stating what I observe. Please let me know why you find the need to downvote for that.
I get the eastern religions that reference karma but the part I'm interested in is from "it's not a stretch that Earth is a hell for those people, and we're supposed to be the demons that make life miserable for them" and because I haven't seen that expressed before. It would be nice to know the specific names that share that ideology of others being demons for some that are destined to experience a bad life this time around.
This is the hypothesis that religious people are gullible, stupid, and selfish - only concerned with the threat of their own eternal torment in hell, not with the welfare of others.
It's offensive to many, but it's also unquestionably true of a non-trivial portion of the religious populace. That subset of the religious demographic is also prone to making equally-offensive but less truthful accusations along the lines of saying that atheists cannot be moral because morality can only come from their god.
This is the hypothesis that charitableness can be modeled on a normal distribution, but the additional incentive of religion shifts the mean of that distribution higher for religious people than atheists. It's not offensive to believe there is a subset of the population that is influenced by the dogma of the church to do things they wouldn't already do.
The best churches to me are the ones who believe that church is for the "sinners" not the in-group. This means accepting everyone and not excluding anyone.
But we also have to recognize that churches are centered around people and people are very flawed. Organizations tend to be too.
I have to say, I fall much closer to atheist than theist now but that's mostly due to doctrine not practices within the church.
Also, as a side effect of how I was raised I was on the out-group of two religions. 90% of people in both churches treated me with respect and dignity. It was up to me to see that the 10% had no power in either church or over me.
I’m not sure I buy it. Similar logic leads people to believe that atheists, lacking fear of retribution from a vengeful god, are more likely to commit crimes. I believe the data suggests otherwise. This suggests a moral center in atheists that comes from somewhere else.
Interesting, religious peoples in the US account for 77% of the country[1] - I wonder if a lot of religious folks just end up supporting secular charities or if the general understanding that religious donations support the majority of charities is incorrect.
Studies performed by religious organizations themselves (who if anything are likely to skew the numbers more positively), across the board, "Local and national benevolence receives 1 percent of the typical church budget", and an additional 5% goes to "church run programs" (be it after school care, social or group activities).
This is a little concerning to me. I see religion and the state as opposing forces for change. I wish we had more diversity in how atheists could organize outside of religion.
That’s awful. There is nothing voluntary about giving to the state nor is there any selection in what cause to support. Pretty antithetical to charity.
Why do you think charity needs to be voluntary and give you the option to be discriminatory? It sounds like your idea of charity centers more on making the donor feel good about their choices than on actually helping people most in need. If taxpayer-funded programs can do a better job of helping people than religiously-motivated charities, then your concerns about whether it's voluntary are antithetical to the end goal of helping people.
Black swan effect? It may just be that the charity and/or atheism isn't reported.
> that makes people help other people so much more?
I think that's reading a lot more into both motivations and actions than is possible from here; or, in other words: I think you're anecdotally on to something - my religious neighbors definitely feel more kind / charitable than my other neighbors - but science would need to be done. For example, perhaps it's not the "religious" part but the "community" part that drives participation in charity efforts. I also wonder about the role that tax exemption plays into all of this.
I think the reason religious organizations have a good hold on running charities is because they have big enough places to host them. I'm guessing the administration task of hosting a charity is a hurdle unless you have big enough buildings already for it and where you know when it will be used compared to nobody using it.
I would assume because atheism in and of itself doesn't stand for anything. It would be a bit like having a dislike-of-bowling based club. Most secular charities are centered around their goals and methods, not their lack of particular beliefs.
It's also worth noting that in the US, there still exists a fairly strong bias against any openly atheistic people or organizations[1], so it would make sense to direct the public's attention towards what they're doing and therefore away from what they don't believe.
I think people here are using atheist and secular interchangeably.
When people say atheist charities, what they are trying to say is secular charities lacking any religious affiliation. They aren't trying to say charities that are actively "affiliated" with being atheist.
What is it about religion that makes people help other people so much more?
I can think of 2 reasons why the religious want to help others:
1. Within many religions, the concept of charity is tied to eternal salvation
2. Helping people is a good way to recruit numbers
I guess another way of looking at it is why aren't there more atheist charities?
Why pick on atheists? What about secular charity or otherwise irreligious charity? Many such charities/aid groups exist. Doctors Without Borders, ACLU, Unicef, Goodwill, Oxfam, Rotary International, etc.
More importantly, what about social security?
I think the US government is too conservative when it comes to relying on outside entities for help getting people up on their feet. It really should be a government's prerogative to proactively help people enter society as a productive member, earning a wage, staying healthy, spending money and paying taxes, no?
Now then, yes, there are many, many valid religious charities (and by this I mean organizations, as well as that component of church giving that factors into benevolence).
But by studies performed by religious organizations themselves (who if anything are likely to skew the numbers more positively), across the board, "Local and national benevolence receives 1 percent of the typical church budget", and an additional 5% goes to "church run programs" (be it after school care, social or group activities).
If a secular charity - and lets go back to Charity Navigator here - Top Ten Inefficient Fundraisers (https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=topten) we see some of the worst charities spending 15% of their donations on "program expenses" (i.e. doing what they are being given money to do).
I'm not familiar with the monitoring of 501(c)3 groups, but I suspect if charities were to regularly spend only one per cent of their givings on what they got to enjoy tax exemption to do, they'd likely have such a status revoked.
And, if you factor in this average percentage (even the six per cent combined, which is generous, as as much fun as social and youth activities are, they're not necessarily serving a critical need), and start to question 'how much money is being spent on 'spreading the word', patting themselves on the back, competitions in Texas to see who can built the world's biggest cross just down the road from where the world's previously biggest cross was built at costs of millions, there comes more and more skepticism of just how highly you can value "giving to your church" on the scale of charitable contributions.
A study by ECCU (http://web.archive.org/web/20141019033209/https://www.eccu.o...) stated that churches use 3 percent of their budget for children’s and youth programs, and 2 percent for adult programs. Local and national benevolence receives 1 percent of the typical church budget.
So I -do- place some skepticism on the idea of blanketing 'religious giving' as 'charitable contribution'.
Depending on your definition, pretty much all activist organizations could fall into this. Red cross, project eden, engineers without borders, etc. Honestly I'm stumped as to what constitutes "atheist charity" vs any non profit whose goal is not "spread the word of $deity".
it's the same reason you don't see many atheist "churches". the organizational problem--getting a bunch of people, along with their resources, aligned--has already been solved by the overarching religious organization (and companies, incidentally).
it's then a smaller step to use some of those organizational resources for evangelizing in the form of charitable acts.
Why do you dislike that? Religion is something that ties people together. The United States is by far the most religious country in the developed world. Americans also donate many times more per capita to charity than other developed nations. There is in fact a strong correlation between the most religious states and the states where people give the most to charity as a percentage of their income: https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/almanac/statistics/wh....
(Notably, it’s not like less religious places have devised secular replacements for religious charity. As a percentage of income, people in San Francisco donate just half of what people in Alabama and Mississippi do.
If the government is jailing people for not attending religious events that counts well enough - and they potentially were in this specific case. That said, I don't dislike religion. I'm privately faithful but my parents are religious and a lot of my friends have been, the father of a good friend of mine growing up even managed to keep his alcoholism under control with faith - so whether it's a community or a support I'm happy with that.
That said, I really despise hypocrites and the biggest ones I can see today are Prosperity Gospel preachers and that Evangelical voting block that support the "good christian" in office today. I have no problem with faith and churches, but when they start getting political or taking advantage of the needy then they've got to go. Lastly, it's getting a bit weird with religious institutions fighting against women's health organizations - and that discussion is a pile of snakes so let me just say I understand where both sides come from and don't really care to discuss the topic.
It is highly likely that the religious institutions you're thinking of aren't these partisan televangelists or con-men but those guys have left a sour taste in my mouth for religious institutions in general - I default to spurning and distrusting them until I've seen an organization act in a beneficial and ethical manner. I trust them more slowly then I trust secular charities.
> If the government is jailing people for not attending religious events that counts well enough
But that's not what was happening, right?
> I have no problem with faith and churches, but when they start getting political
I disagree with the notion that religion must be a private matter. Religion is not only a matter of personal belief. Its a framework for organizing communities and raising children. Forcing people to keep religion private amounts to an infringement on "the free exercise thereof."
Notably, religion in the U.S. has always been political. Many of the original colonies were founded by religious people who were too radical for Europe. They didn't create a Constitution where the right to "free exercise" implied banning the very religious communities they had come to America to establish. Rather, religion has always been a part of peoples' politics. It played an outsized role in everything from abolition to women's suffrage to the civil rights movement.
"If there is a homeless shelter open, we can cite and jail you for sleeping outdoors".
"But one of the shelters has a policy of always being 'open', even if there are no beds. They also require mandatory religious activity and participation."
"If there is a homeless shelter open, we can cite and jail you for sleeping outdoors".
Regarding what's happening, it's a bit of a generous read potentially but I think these lines are pretty clear at stating that it may be happening and the court is concerned that it is happening or that an overeager ruling would endorse it happening.
> Boise said it does not issue citations if the city’s three homeless shelters are full. The plaintiffs said that the two Christian-based shelters have policies to never turn away anyone for lack of space, and so police have continuously enforced the ordinances.
>
> The 9th Circuit noted that those facilities could still refuse to shelter homeless people who exceed limits of the number of days they can stay or who object to mandatory religious programs.
As to your other point
> I disagree with the notion that religion must be a private matter. Religion is not only a matter of personal belief. Its a framework for organizing communities and raising children. Forcing people to keep religion private amounts to an infringement on "the free exercise thereof."
That's fair, it definitely needs to be a balance, it's my opinion that things like Prosperity Gospel not being outright illegal and pundits like Pat Robertson are good examples that it has gone too far, but I definitely see and understand concerns about going too secular. I'm privately faithful and secular in nature, but that's just me and I understand that other folks have their own understandings of faith and religion.
The point is the government is doing it. Boise Police to the homeless: Either be prosecuted as a criminal or attend mandatory religious indoctrination.
If person A takes from person B by coercion to give to person C because person D voted for it. Neither person A nor person B nor person D can claim to be engaging in charity.
It's very easy to see whether this is true, just look at non-socialist countries and whether their social safety net is as strong as socialist ones. I think you'll notice that, on average, it's nowhere near.
That's not really what I was saying. If the will of the people doesn't support giving resources to all the people (goodwill) Socialism is not possible.
That said, a better example is that 'socialist' countries seem to give less to charity for those abroad. The biggest donating countries per capita are Myanmar, the USA and Australia, the most likely to help strangers appear to be Iraq, Libya and Kuwait. Even in Europe, it's topped by the UK which, while it is in possession of a social safety net, I would not call Socialist.
Those secular places have high taxes and social services, which is secular charity.
Mississippi and Alabama need religious services because religious people suffocated the government. I'd much rather be poor in San Francisco and enjoying public services than be poor in Mississippi hoping for religious services.
> Those secular places have high taxes and social services, which is secular charity.
It’s not really voluntary, which brings in the question of if it’s really charity.
> I'd much rather be poor in San Francisco and enjoying public services than be poor in Mississippi hoping for religious services
Which public services do you think SF has that aren’t available in Mississippi? I think you’ll find that the real difference is tolerance of homelessness in general and programs that allow continued drug use while receiving benefits.
Because people should have freedom of conscience? If you don't believe in God, or if you're a follower of a different avatar of Abrahamic religion, for example, why should a Muslim or Jewish homeless person have to follow a mandatory Christian program to receive "donated" shelter? Suddenly it's not charity, it's a transaction for one's soul.
I'm going to match your cynicism (and probably many other forthcoming comments) and say: what are you doing about it?
My speculation: nothing, but perhaps call for higher taxes on everyone, "generously" calling for higher taxes on yourself included. No real skin in the game, but hey, you get to feel better than religious people!
If your grand vision is to wait for progressive politicians to substitute for religious charities, don't tear down the charities before that happens. What is supposed to happen to the poor people in the meantime?
Speaking as someone who donates a bunch of money to my church and to both religious and non-religious charities that help the poor (and makes sure it all adds up to a tithe of my AGI, in fact) and thinks that I should be taxed quite a bit higher... the religious charities don't seem to be solving the problem either. There are still poor people on the streets.
I agree we should not tear down the charities first, but I don't think that we should pretend the charities are successfully solving the problem. They are making the problem less bad than it otherwise would be, and that's valuable, but they're not actually solving it. People have been saying "Private charity will solve the problem" since Judas wanted to sell that one bottle of ointment, and the poor are still with us.
> "the religious charities don't seem to be solving the problem either"
The parent poster did not say that religious or secular charities could "solve the problem"; nothing can solve the problem. What the parent poster did say is that religious charities are expending far more effort in helping the homeless.
Sure, it's true that religious charities are expending far more effort in helping the homeless. That is largely because we've set up our society in a way that is much more favorable to private charity (religious and otherwise) helping than to tax revenue helping. In fact, the more people donate to private charity, the less tax revenue the government gets.
I'm not disputing whether religious charities are working more effectively now. I'm disputing whether that is the right strategy. If, in 2000, you were to argue that an open-source web browser is the right thing for the world, "Most people use IE, which is closed-source" (though true) would not be not a counterargument.
It is not obvious to me that nothing can solve the problem. (To be clear, I take Jesus' words about "you will always have the poor with you" as a statement addressed to the people there at the time, not to humanity forever, but even if not, a passing comment from God still seems like an inappropriate basis for public policy in a non-theocratic society.) Even if nothing can solve the problem, it's also not obvious to me that we're anywhere close to doing as good a job as we can at reducing the problem.
Hypothetical question. Suppose I love calculus so much, I want to share it with the whole world. So I rent a building and announce free food to the homeless on condition that they attend my lectures on calculus. Would you bar me from ejecting people who want to come in for the free food but refuse to attend the lectures?
No, they're religious. And the City of Boise will threaten to put you in jail if you would rather sleep outside than listen to mandatory religious sermons and participate in mandatory religious activities to have access to the shelter.
That was one of the keys - "the City said it wouldn't cite people when shelters weren't open", but the plaintiffs said that one of the religious shelters had an "always open" policy, even if they didn't actually have beds, and they did require religious participation, so the city's point was effectively moot.
There is no constitutional principle of separation of church and state either. The Constitution says: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The "separation" concept was manufactured a century after the Bill of Rights was enacted: https://www.heritage.org/political-process/report/the-mythic....
At the time Massachusetts ratified the First Amendment, everyone was required to belong to a church and State tax money was used to support those churches: http://www.statelegalhistory.com/home/1-new-england-legal-hi.... Several New England states had government-supported churches well into the 1800s.
Yes, there is an opposite view. I will add a few observations about the opposite view:
1) It's full of invective and straw-man arguments. It accuses Christine O'Donnell of not having read the Establishment Clause, for example. And it makes a completely irrelevant reference to "old antebellum slave oligarchies," even though it was the free New England states that were the ones that had state-supported churches.
2) It makes tenuous arguments. The "words 'separation of church and state' are not in the text," the article concedes. But "the idea of separation is" present. Of course! In support of that view, it points to the fact that the Constitution prohibits religious tests for office. "If government can't require its officials to support a church," it reasons, "is there a serious argument that church and state are not separate?" Of course, the prohibition on religious tests is entirely consistent with the existence of a plurality of public religions.
It also pulls a "??? Profit!" over the most significant issue: what does "no law respecting an establishment of religion" mean? The article states that it "mean[s] that not only no church but no 'religion' could be made the official faith of the United States." That reads the phrase as "no law establish[ing] [a] religion." But if that's what the Framers meant, they would have written that. That's how they wrote the rest of the first amendment "no law ... prohibiting ... or abridging ...."
3) As with the present Supreme Court precedent on the subject, the article rests almost entirely on the letter of Thomas Jefferson. But Jefferson (a) was not a Framer; and (b) was a radical wingnut. What he thought about things carries some weight, but not all that much. (I would add that almost everyone who invokes Jefferson's view to interpret the First Amendment would recoil in horror at invoking his views to interpret the Second.)
This is, by definition, a law respecting an establishment of religion. It was permissible only because the Bill of Rights was not applied to the States until the passage of the 14th Amendment.
It depends on what you read "respecting an establishment of religion" to mean. Does it confer an individual right to live free of an established church? Or does it simply prohibit the federal government from messing with established state churches? There is a very good argument that it means the latter: http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=17....
If you look at the first amendment, the Establishment Clause stands out:
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
For the other rights, Congress used verbs: "prohibiting" the free exercise of religion, and "abridging" the freedom of speech, etc. But "an establishment of religion" is a noun. What is an establishment of religion? In 1789, "an establishment of religion" was a known thing: the established churches of the states. So the First Amendment can be interpreted to mean that Congress can't mess with the established churches of the various states.
Turning to incorporation: remember, its not automatic, and incorporation of each amendment must be justified on its own terms. Not all of the Bill of Rights makes sense as applied to the States--for example the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, because those set forth a separation between State and Federal power, not individual rights. There is a natural reading for incorporation of the Free Exercise Clause. But whether it makes sense to incorporate the Establishment Clause turns on what you interpret the Establishment Clause to mean. If the latter, then its really setting forth a separation of State/Federal power, not an individual right, and it makes no sense to apply that to the states.
Does it confer an individual right to live free of an established church? Or does it simply prohibit the federal government from messing with established state churches?
It means neither.
"Respecting" means "with reference to", and this definition is the same as it was when the Constitution was written. Ergo, "respecting an establishment of religion" means "with reference to an establishment of religion". "Establishment of religion" means "an organization of religion", including both lay churches all the way up to the Anglican Church and the Vatican. So the first half clearly states that Congress shall make no law "with reference to an religious organization."
This is where the separation of church and state comes from. That, and Thomas Jefferson saying explicitly that this was the purpose of that clause and the commonly understood meaning of the Constitutional Congress when they voted on the language...
For the second half: "thereof" means the thing just mentioned, and "exercise" meant "practice" (as in practice a religion, from the original Latin meaning). So "prohibiting the free exercise thereof" means "prohibiting the free practice of religion."
> "Establishment of religion" means "an organization of religion"
Reading "establishment" synonymous with "organization" would be anawkward and un-idomatic even today. Would you call the ACLU a "civil rights establishment?" Would you call NARAL a "women's rights establishment?"
There are good reasons to believe that's not the sense in which the word is used. The Constitution repeatedly uses the word "establish" in the sense of "to make official." It uses the word "establishment" in one other place, referring to the requirements "for the Establishment of this Constitution.” I.e. the requirements to make the draft constitution the official law of the country.
And historically, "establishment" was used precisely in that sense--a religion that had been made official. The Church of England was an "establishment of religion." The Colonies had had "established" churches, and many, but not all, had "disestablished" their churches. “An establishment of religion” is not a weird way to say “religious organization” but a legal thing that existed at the time that made sense to talk about. And what the First Amendment does is prohibit the federal government from making laws with reference to those "establishment[s] of religion."
Within that framework, Congress was probably prohibited from establishing a national church. But why? Is the answer: because established churches were bad in the same way that cruel and unusual punishment is bad? That would be an odd reading given how many of the original 13 colonies had some form of government supported religion. The other interpretation is that the amendment endeavored to protect these establishments from federal interference. That’s what makes the most sense given the structure of the colonies at that time.
Within that framework, incorporation doesn’t make sense. You take a provision that was intended to protect states' rights to maintain their established religions free from federal interference, and turn it into a provision that eliminates the very right the amendment sought to protect. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
The language drift is absolutely confusing here but "establishment" as "organization" seems to be quite correct. Establishment is also used (even to this day) as a vague word for location in a utilitarian sense, "Business's establishments" is one surviving usage of the term that comes close to that archaic usage - it is a tool or asset in support of the operation of a thing, a thing established in support of the thing.
Lastly I wanted to mention the parallel term you draw here because it's also a drifted phrase
> to make official
Is actually a highly accurate synonym for establishment, but only in archaic word usage, official (the adjective) is actually just a corruption of official a noun, it's sort of like "the influencer lifestyle" or "that's an influencer hat". Technically all "off-*" words originally related to religion, but that's gone by the wayside quite a bit by now.
Reading "establishment" synonymous with "organization" would be anawkward and un-idomatic even today. Would you call the ACLU a "civil rights establishment?" Would you call NARAL a "women's rights establishment?"
Quite frankly, I don't care what the words mean today, since we have a body of court cases that has expanded the application of the First Amendment beyond the strict scope of the words as they were written.
There are good reasons to believe that's not the sense in which the word is used. The Constitution repeatedly uses the word "establish" in the sense of "to make official."
You keep trying to make linguistic arguments while ignoring the linguistic means of the words at the time they were originally written, especially when one of the men responsible for actually writing the Bill of Rights explicitly stated what the words of the First Amendment were intended to mean at the time they were written.
The First Amendment was explicitly intended to create separation of church and state at the Federal level. Like the rest of the bill of Rights, it wasn't intended to apply to the states at the time, so your arguments about state churches are entirely irrelevant.
Both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison wrote that the 1st Amendment was intended to separate church and state.
Jefferson wrote this in 1802:
> Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their "legislature" should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and State.
Madison wrote repeatedly about the separation of church and state, as anchored in the 1st Amendment. It was one of the issues that he was particularly passionate about.
As for the states passing legislation regarding religion, the 1st Amendment was originally only a limit on what the Federal government could do. The 1st-Amendment separation between church and state was extended to the states through the 14th Amendment (which led to several of the liberties in the Bill of Rights being extended to the state level).
So in conclusion, the idea of the separation of church and state goes back to the founding generation of the United States. That's not to say it hasn't evolved over time and become stronger. It was a novelty at the time, so you wouldn't expect it to have sprung from Zeus' forehead fully formed.
If the point is calculus, you can give away free food to anyone. That additional condition of "for the homeless" gives the lie to the claim that the goal is merely to share your love of calculus.
There is, in fact, a church in northern San Diego county that has a free meal open to anyone on Friday nights, no questions asked. It does involve listening to a sermon. It's one of the best free meals I attended while homeless and I wrote it up on one of my websites as a model program that should be copied because it was so well done.
That sounds benign on the face of it, but one wonders how high pressure sales the sermon is. I like the Sikh approach in providing meals at every Gurdwara. A free meal is available to anyone of any wealth, race, or religion with the only conditions that you eat with everyone else, remove your shoes and cover your hair.
No sermon, no lecture, just unconditional -- and very good -- food as part of a deeply held sense of community. They have leapt to help in disasters, kept going through riots a few years back, and keep sticking to those principles as numbers keep rising. Rising because the UK government created a need for food banks out of nowhere over ten years, and more and more now need free food... I keep hearing of quiet Sikh efforts across the country as our government deconstructs the benefits system and safety net.
I'm life-long atheist, but I feel much warmer toward our Sikh communities than the UK's formerly christian heritage - where charity so often seems to come with a catch, or a sales pitch, or worse is conspicuously absent. The Sikh sense of community feels far stronger, and more of a true belief as a result.
I think the Sikh community probably was the source of the absolute best homeless meal I ever got, but I wasn't offended at listening to them share their Christian faith at the program mentioned above and it was a good meal, far better than most homeless meals.
There is zero contradiction in saying "Don't hold homeless people hostage for a meal" and saying "Offering a free meal as part of sharing something you love -- be it Calculus or Christianity -- with whomever wishes to join you is not the same as holding homeless people hostage." They are entirely different points and they in no way conflict.
That's fair, and I think your other comment's point of holding hostage as opposed to charity without judgement is key. It's that tendency that's made me default to suspicious of christian charity, despite it being my origins, as it has been quite a common habit - charity as a means to convert, rather than simply doing good works for those in need. Not at all surprised to hear the food was poorer too.
I'd have no qualms of barring you from ejecting people who refuse to attend the lectures if you are offering food and shelter conditional on a lecture to the homeless - but it wouldn't be defensible for me to do so under separation of religion - I just think it's annoying that you'd feel entitled to control people's time like that, it's essentially reinforcing a devaluation of their lives and opportunities.
But that's a darn good example because free food with a lecture (or timeshare opportunity, or conference on industry tool) is a really common occurrence marketing wise and it raises a question that I can't answer in terms of legal and moral right - those lunch and learn conferences, do some people feel pressured to attend because it's subsidizing the cost of their lunch that day? How much time do they lose to engaging in such things and how many of them missed better job opportunities because of it.
The Constitution. But, that only applies to charities receiving state funding. If you want to self-fund a dinner-for-calculus program, you are free to do so.
Yeah, the article addressed a slightly different angle than most of the discussion in this thread.
This case (partially) answered "Can the government jail you for being homeless?" The answer being "No, not generally, but perhaps under a certain set of circumstances that are outside the scope of this case."
Much of the discussion here is "Can a charity compel you into indoctrination in return for bed/food/etc?" The answer to which is "No, not if they are receiving state funding." (They probably shouldn't regardless of funding, but that's a moral question, not a legal one)
My apologies - I have been reading this in line with the article with the scenario question including "... and potentially be jailed for not attending".
Omitting that addendum I agree this is more clear cut legally - I still think there may be moral questions about feeding people conditional on their attendance to a lecture religious or otherwise, but honestly... there are some moral questions about refusing to feed someone in need in any circumstances that our society has mostly moved on from acknowledging so I think most of my objections (excluding the potential arresting scenarios) are academic and beyond the common ethics.
Yeah, the edge case is jailing the homeless, when there are beds available, but those beds are contingent on indoctrination. The way the article reads, that wasn't fully answered with this case. FWIW, my vote would be forced indoctrination would be illegal in this context (ie, you can't jail for declining a bed with religious strings attached).
I don't know if it's technically a law per se but yea there is in the US:
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
this has generally been opined to imply a separation of church and state since any state endorsement of a religion (any directly stated ties) would support the establishment[1] of one religion[2] while also curtailing the establishment[1] of another religion.
1. The usage of the word establishment is pretty archaic language-wise, I think it's fair to conceptually substitute organization, enrollment and participation.
2. Generally, traditionally we haven't minded supporting religious organizations unless that support is unequal, this is why a lot of religious organizations are tax free and have some other fun benefits.
This comment is terribly misinformed. The First Amendment to the US Constitution does not apply to charities distributing their own resources. There is no law preventing them from conditioning aid on listening to a religious sermon.
The original topic under discussion involves the US government by way of Boise police arresting people for not being in shelters - in some cases there were beds available that came with mandatory religious programs and the 9th circuit court held that that was insufficient to count as freely offered housing.
People were, essentially, arrested for not attending religious ceremonies - there is a lot more interesting nuance here, but suffice to say that the 1st Amendment is absolutely relevant if people are potentially being jailed by the state due to a failure to attend religious ceremonies.
When Boise threatens you with arrest for being homeless, and says that "shelter A over there had a bed/soup kitchen and you didn't use it", but shelter A mandated that you had to participate in religious ceremonies or sermons, you now have the state putting you in jail should your beliefs not be compatible with the religious bent of the charity.
No-one in this case is "blaming" the shelter. Sure, they're free to offer charity under whatever terms they like.
But the shelter's policy can and should limit what the city is allowed to do. Saying "I have a 'choice': to go to your religious shelter or be arrested for sleeping outside" is a problem.
I think people chronically devalue their time. Many schemes exploit this: free lunch to sit through a sales pitch is one. Another is the $0.05 "bag tax." Most rational humans would just pay because it's a hassle to carry around enough reusable bags in your car and remember to bring one in the store with you. But the policy drastically reduces plastic bag use, way more than can be explained by rational behavior.
I don't think the poster was implying the shelters shouldn't be allowed to eject people. Merely that it would, hypothetically, be very unfortunate if someone were compelled to agree to a shelter's demands, because being ejected would mean they are jailed for sleeping outdoors.
The ruling doesn't say that you cannot do exactly what you describe. You can still deny the homeless a room if they don't want to listen to your lecture on Calculus or Jesus.
What the ruling says is that you cannot prosecute a person for sleeping on the street if they have nowhere to go, and that a room that comes attached with a lecture about your life choices doesn't count as a place to go.
It's a very interesting question. I suppose the logic of the ruling shouldn't be restricted to "official" religions at all. Even in the calculus example, we can imagine there could be homeless people who are religiously opposed to calculus, and I agree that the calculus shelter shouldn't be counted as a place to go, for such people.
I don't mind if charities are provided by religions, but I find it detestable that they would force you to listen to a sermon before you could eat if you are hungry.
I use to donate to a large homeless feeding / sheltering place here in town. When I was told by someone who was asking for food money (that I told about the free food at the mission in which I donate to) - that the place forced you to listen to religious sermons before you can have a plate, I was flabbergasted.
I no longer donate to that place.
To those who are all bent out of shape about 'why not religion charity' - hey I don't mind them doing whatever they want to do - but be transparent about it to everyone.
I think if your religion group is good enough, you can give free food and offer another room for sermons if you want to check it out, another area with pamphlets about your gods, whatever, if it's good - have religious counseling available, that's all fine - but don't force people to listen to your cult leader espouse some kind of brainwashing, magical spells, incantations or whatever to starving people in order for them to get some bread.
Have another room for the kool aid, if it's good and welcoming, people will go there. No need to force it.
imho.
No offense intended by outrageous characterizing - from what I have seen, some places are offering both without going overboard - and that's great.
I've seen this said here in many different ways, but not all religiously driven charities are built equally. To paint with such a broad brush is a disservice.
I've seen really good organizations that just do good and don't have expectations. The Catholic and Jewish religions tend to have more open charities from what I've seen. They frequently try to solve problems without an expectation or requirement on membership.
In particular Catholic nuns teach in the fringes of society. Where people aren't able to get funding by the state. The cycle is, they go to the fringes, teach those fringes get big enough for state sponsored education and they move further out. I've worked with these amazing people and to put them in the same category as others is a disservice to their work.
On the flip side there are religions that only help if you are an active member. Which is why I think it's important to recognize that MANY religious organizations aren't bad. But that some are, so we can differentiate between them.
I'd also like to say, not even all charities within a given religion are bad/good. When you get down to an individual charity it's run by a person or people and we have to weigh each on on it's own merits.
If we want more secular charities, we have to find a way for people to organize outside of religion. I'd strongly suggest everyone here look at something such as First Robotics or another secular charity.
not to discount the good being done by religious organizations, but their charitable services are certainly not purely altruistic. they've been used for evangelization (i.e., marketing) for centuries, even if immediate conversion is not required.
> I really dislike that so many of the US domestic charities are religiously driven.
I'm an atheist myself, but this speaks volumes about the people who aren't religious and their propensity to be charitable.
As much as secularists like to fall into the ego trap of hating on religious institutions, once you separate out the dogma, there's probably a lot to learn from them in terms of fostering desirable behavior like charitable giving.
Until you realize that even churches themselves state that typically six per cent or less of religious giving is charitable.
If you factor that in to 'charitable giving as a whole', then secularists are doing more than fine with their propensity to be charitable.
> As much as secularists like to fall into the ego trap of hating on religious institutions, once you separate out the dogma, there's probably a lot to learn from them in terms of fostering desirable behavior like charitable giving.
I sense a certain hypocrisy there. It's an ego trap to hate on religion, but religious folk have the upper hand and "much to teach" about charity? (Which, as previously stated, is a highly suspect argument foundation).
By and large, religious giving is only (relatively) larger when you include the entirety of religious giving, which can include everything from soup kitchens to "erecting the world's biggest cross, because the next town has the world's now second biggest cross" to helicopters for your pastors to ferry between churches "because traffic".
"Elevation Church does post some financial records on its website, reporting that the church took in $33.5 million in offerings last year and gave away about $3.8 million in outreach, spent $9 million on personnel and reported $13.9 million in cash assets."
(this after their pastor purchased a 'not that great' 16,000 sq ft home on 19 acres, and said that would be 'against Christ's teachings' to disclose what he was paid).
A study by ECCU (http://web.archive.org/web/20141019033209/https://www.eccu.o...) stated that churches use 3 percent of their budget for children’s and youth programs, and 2 percent for adult programs. Local and national benevolence receives 1 percent of the typical church budget.
Irrelevant. The point is at least the religious are operating homeless shelters/soup kitchens. OP lamented the lack of secular (presumably non-governmental) options, which makes about as much sense as lamenting why any private organization doesn’t spend on $cause
Please don't post religious flamebait to HN. We end up with religious flamewars, which we definitely don't want here.
Edit: I'm referring to this bit: "As an aside, I really dislike that so many of the US domestic charities are religiously driven". The bulk of your comment was interesting and fine. Unfortunately, flamebait dominates discussion regardless of intent, so your subtle point was lost.
"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread."
-- Anatole France
What is the solution then? All I know is my city (Denver) is being destroyed by it. I have a disgusting camp on my block full of trash, puke, and needles. I can no longer actually use of of the public spaces my tax dollars pay for because we’ve fully given them over to the homeless.
Everyone will post that article about Utah but Denver instituted the very same program at the very same time with far less effective results.
I try really hard to maintain my compassion but I see a problem with seemingly no solution and am just not sure what we can even do at this point.
Maybe research why Denver's program is not working is the solution?
This SC decision seems pretty clear in saying that if shelters are provided but not used, that can be illegal. It is only not possible to say people cannot sleep outside if there is no other options.
I used to live in a city (Portland) with a pretty sizeable homeless population. Last time I went back there, I was astonished at how the homeless population has grown. Tent cities everywhere. It really is shocking.
I want to remain compassionate, too. What it comes down to for me is, I can't be too angry at the people living in these tent cities -- that's no one's first choice (barring, of course, that in any population some very small percentage of people want an itinerant life like that; certainly not this many).
So I wondered, how has society broken down that this is it for so many people? How has the city, the state, and the federal government skewed the great societal playing field, that so many people must live like this? The safety net has a lot of holes, more than it seems like it used to, and who gains? For whom is this status quo the preferred one?
I don't have answers (outside the usual economic stuff like, real wages haven't risen alongside the big three economic sinks for most people, education, health care, housing; a lot of attainable jobs have been sent overseas or replaced by technology), but where my compassion goes is, it can't be this many people's bad choices that got them here -- or, if it is, how has society been restructured that bad choices get people here, where falling this far didn't used to be such a readily available option?
I do know that, doing the same thing we've been doing isn't going to get things to be better. And, intuitively, I don't think that smashing up tent cities (like they frequently do in Portland, in "sweeps") or jailing these people is going to solve the problem.
I like what Utah has done. It's unfortunate that that hasn't worked in Denver; I wonder why. I don't like what Portland does (sweeps, moving people from encampment to encampment, tossing out what little stability and possessions they have). But I don't know what else we could do, locally or nationally.
My wife works at a library. The homeless are a problem that the city and the county refuse to address because the library is "open to all" but does bad behavior have to be acceptable? Public drunkenness, abuse of other patrons, messes in the restrooms, smelly, nasty people sleeping in the chairs, just constant problems. They basically turn the library into a place nobody wants to visit in order to not offend a particular demographic. That's not fair to the community any more than the opposite is.
I prefer the old days when the cops would show up and roust them out of there and tell them to go be a pain in the ass someplace else. I feel the same way about crime, too--the cops should be busting heads, instead we have muggers at the mall parking lot because "racism."
This has happened in my small city as well. The main library is no longer a safe place to visit, and has become a homeless shelter of sorts (with the accompanying smells and infestations).
The good news, I guess, is that kids now have the Internet to learn from, and libraries are no longer a foundation of civic life.
It's my feeling and a widely felt sentiment among the locals. Certainly the surrounding 300m area is a higher-crime area.
A few weeks ago, I had to walk through and witnessed a woman pull down her pants and defecate on the sidewalk, about 50m from the library entrance. This wasn't in an alley or something--it was the main sidewalk, easily visible from the library entrance.
Wouldn't giving these people a place indoors with a shower and a bathroom resolve that particular issue?
Hell public restrooms with showers like at a truck stop would actually resolve most of these issues. Most of them are there for the free bathroom facilities and the ones that came to use the chairs and internet wouldn't stink.
"The justices left in place a 2018 ruling by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that fining or jailing homeless people for staying outside or in unauthorized places if a bed at an emergency shelter is not available is unconstitutional"
It is no secret that San Francisco has a homelessness crisis and if they can't prosecute how are they expected to clean up their city of homeless people?
Edit: This is a legit question why all the down votes?
Hrmm, what is a way to solve the problem of HOMElessness, other than throwing people in jail? Trying to think here, just brainstorming. Here's my list of top solutions to HOMElessness:
1) Zone 90% of the city for detached single-family homes?
2) Mandatory decade-long design review for every new home?
3) Lots of parking lots?
4) Designate every extant building a "historical resource"?
Some combination of those policies should eventually solve the housing crisis, I think.
You're confusing the underhoused with the homeless. The underhoused cannot find affordable housing near their places of work. This is a serious problem in CA, and even with the intense residential building of the last 3 years CA is not making much headway.
But homelessness of the kind at issue in this case is a very different thing. The vast majority of these homeless are mentally ill, drug addicts, or both. Re-zoning single-family lots won't do anything to address this problem, because most of them have families with homes who've simply given up on trying to take care of them.
So they need supportive housing. I endorse building a lot of housing of all kinds, everywhere, as fast as we can. SF has by far the highest municipal revenues per capita in the nation and it can afford to build.
Wait, I only just noticed where you said “intense residential construction”. You must be joking. Current rates of construction across the state are far below historic norms. The only people who think this is a building boom are those who haven’t glanced at a fifty-year housing starts chart.
CA is a huge place. Yes, across a gigantic state housing starts aren't great.
But within 7 miles of me in any direction, more than 100,000 new units have come online in the past 2 years, and more than another 100,000 are expected to come online in the next 2. Across LA, there are a few hundred thousand more units in the pipeline, some of which would already be built and occupied if not for NIMBYs in single-family houses opposing the construction.
And quite frankly, even if we could build at the speed of historic norms, there simply isn't the available land. You'd end up with housing tracts hundreds of miles from their associated job centers.
I'm sorry but there is no way your characterization is accurate for any given point on the map. The entire Los Angeles metropolitan statistical area only authorizes about 2500 new dwellings per month, and not all of them get built. Prior to 1990, the rate was normally above 5000 dwellings per month. This is despite the fact that Greater LA has grown more than 22% in population since 1990.
Across the street from me are 3 new apartment buildings which collectively house 1500-2000 people.
Down the street are two new apartment buildings which house another 1000-1500 people.
Two blocks away from that are a cluster of apartment buildings which collectively house more than 10,000 people.
And quite frankly, you are simply wrong about the statistics you are citing.
The pre-1990 figure is primarily residential single-family homes, so each structure was on average capable of housing just 4 people. Current residential construction is primarily multi-unit residences, so each structure represents residential capacity, on average, of several dozen people.
So my point stands, and I would strongly recommend you take a statistics course.
Permits for single and multi-unit buildings are reported separately. The report I cited above is all UNITS i.e. the sum of all apartments in all buildings.
As you can see from the total, this is not anywhere near 50000 units per year, as you initially claimed. These 30000 units are also spread across an area with diameter far greater than the 14 miles you started with.
Also, in addition to being wrong about every other aspect of this debate, you are quite wrong about this one. By FAR the majority of PERMITS go to single-family homes.
When you are very ignorant about a topic, it would be helpful to type less and read more.
I don't know, by solving their rent problem with better tax structures and/or more development? Under what possible ethical or legal argument could you make it illegal for someone to be homeless?
How about we rehabilitate them, teach them skills that are needed in the workplace in order for them to be a productive member of society and stop enabling.
In you first post you say prosecute, in the follow-up you say rehabilitate. Providing people with stable basic needs and like housing and education is a prerequisite for rehabilitation. It's not "enabling" in the negative sense of enabling bad behavior, rather it's enabling people to make something of themselves. Or at the very least, keep them of the streets and out of criminality.
Prosecution only leads to more problems, as people cannot adequately gain the skills they need in US prison and are then shunned by US employers.
We could do what the Midwest does with their homeless, but in reverse: we buy them bus tickets back to home and let their home states deal with it.
I don't know what the situation is like in SF or Boise, but in LA more than half of the homeless aren't even from California. They're just here because they were given a free bus ticket and told they would get free food and drugs and good weather if they rode all the way to the end.
Texas and the Midwest represent the biggest non-local sources of the homeless in Southern California. Combined, the Midwestern states generate more of LA's homeless than California itself. It was the openly stated policy of Texas for more than a decade to deal with the homeless by buying them tickets to Los Angeles, and it is still their official (but unstated) policy with respect to addressing homelessness. Their governor has admitted as much on television.
I heard both Nashville, TN and Key West, FL does this too. Homeless people aren't good for tourism, so have to hide it from view. There's a little mini documentary on YouTube I seen before discussing this. Then if you accept the bus ticket, and end up coming back you are on some blacklist to not be able to receive any more services.
It's one of the most affluent cities in world history. That is exactly the obvious solution that SF has intentionally avoided implementing.
If it was a matter of 25,000 people, sure, I understand that would be a huge problem for a city of that size. It's a matter of closer to 5,000 people that need housing (out of SF's 8k to 10k homeless, some are long-term homeless, some are short-term homeless, so you end up with a lower tally of how much housing you need at a given time than the max figures). They have no excuse for the grotesque human rights abuses going on there.
I'm overwhelmingly in favor of the Federal Government stepping in and doing some very unpleasant things - as necessary - to the city in order to force their hands on fixing homelessness there. If they won't fix it, bring the full weight of the US Government down upon their collective heads until they squeal and capitulate (as they are guaranteed to do). The Feds have dozens of ways to beat on the city until it does by forced measures what it should have been more than happy to do on their own.
I'm overwhelmingly in favor of the Federal Government stepping in and doing some very unpleasant things - as necessary - to the city
I get what you're saying here but you're expressing it poorly, and without regard to the fact that the overwhelming unpleasantness is likely to fall on the vulnerable rather than the excessively comfortable, as exemplified by the proliferation of bad policy choices currently taking place at the federal level.
not the federal government, it should be the state government.
pass a version of sb50, one that especially forces SF and LA to open up large tracts (but not all) of the city to immediate housing construction.
in LA, mayor garcetti tried pushing through the construction of shelters in each of the council districts and got so much push back that only like 2 have gotten anywhere. we need to put local political pressure on the mayor and the council. the federal government is not the right political body for this effort.
they can't prosecute how are they expected to clean up their city of homeless people
Prosecute what? Simply being homeless? I'd rather buy the homeless some apartments/shelters than put them in jail. Jail is more expensive. It's dangerous. It prevents them for working their way out of homelessness.
Jailing people for the crime of being too poor for your tastes is shitty policy.
I don't think it's worth asking for explanations on votes because a negative comment is often due to a <handful> of voters, and there's no insight into the makeup of these voters and whether they're as representative as you hope. IMO just make your comment and let the reactions come; some comments will be upvoted and some won't. Some reactions are helpful and some aren't.
The 9th Circuit court of appeals is a federal court that just happens to be based in San Francisco. It has no direct influence over the governance of the city (and county) of San Francisco, other than that the jurisprudence it establishes is federal law for all of California and the other states in the 9th circuit.
Also, what is prosecuted is a crime. The homelessness crisis is not a crime per se (as established again by this very ruling), so it cannot be prosecuted--only actions that are actually crimes.
SCOTUS and 9th Circuit judges would feel (and rule) quite differently if they were confronted with unbathed, tweaking drug users jerking off in front of them and their children every morning, refusing treatment and shelter because they'd rather be high than housed.
The best solution is probably to redirect a number of the homeless to their tony neighborhoods. We would likely have rulings overturning shit decisions like this one in days.
In its infinite wisdom, the 9th Circuit has also decreed that we cannot force homeless drug users into rehab against their will, or to commit mentally ill homeless for treatment unless they represent an immediate danger to themselves or others...though the first sign of that is usually when they kill themselves or some innocent bystander, like has happened a dozen times in the past year.
They’re often people who simply refuse to participate in society in a very basic way... which is fine but I also think that I have some
right to personal safety as much as they do. LA has experienced Typhus outbreaks in their homeless camps. They absolutely trash huge sections of most cities. Crime and disease are a huge issue in those populations.
Homelessness should be combated with compassion and understanding. We have a responsibility to provide shelter, food, and ways out of homelessness for people.
Vagrancy on the other hand should be met with something else. We have the right as a society to ensure that our cities and public spaces work for everyone.
I'll remember that the next time a homeless guy tries to attack me on a run, like one did this past weekend. I should give him flowers and kisses instead of punching him in the face.
Considering there are more than half a million homeless in the United States, the sound of that many people furiously masturbating must truly be deafening!
Not to mention the vast underground supply chains necessary to keep that many people constantly high and on drugs. For next to no money! How efficient!
I might spend a few weeks in the US to witness this unbelievable spectacle when I use up the remainder of my paid leave.
The title is inaccurate and makes it sound like homeless can't be prosecuted for any small or petty crime. It seems biased in making the ruling seem ridiculous. That is not the case.
The ruling is hardly a huge win for civil liberties. It's pretty narrow and specific. A better title would be:
"States can't jail people for sleeping in public if there's no homeless shelters."
Of course such a title would seem reasonable and normal and wouldn't produce a click-bait news title that stokes the flames of national division.
It is actually even narrower, "States can't jail people for sleeping in public if there's no homeless shelters and they can prove they had no funds to provide alternative arrangements."
If you can pay for a hotel room or other accommodation you the city/state can make it illegal for you to sleep outside.
As I understand the issue, it's not fining someone who is indigent which is the constitutional issue.
The core issue is punishing someone for something they are, vs punishing them for their behavior. The courts have said its cruel to prosecute someone for not having a home, when you're pretending that it's their behavior which is under attack.
I posted this in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21796211), but the ruling is specific to sleep much more than homelessness, let alone camping on streets indefinitely.
Here’s most of my other comment:
The decision was that because sleep - not camping, but sleep - is a biological necessity, there must be a practical way for homeless people to obtain it.
If that method isn’t shelters (because they’re full or inaccessible), then there needs to be places and/or times when sleeping is allowed and practical. The justices explicitly noted that this doesn’t mean municipalities can’t enact and enforce significant restrictions on when, where, and how (for example, no multi-day camping or no erecting structures) this can happen, including when no shelter beds are available. There needs to be a viable way to obtain sleep, though, whatever that way is.
> Naturally, our holding does not cover individuals who do have access to adequate temporary shelter, whether because they have the means to pay for it or because it is realistically available to them for free, but who choose not to use it. Nor do we suggest that a jurisdiction with insufficient shelter can never criminalize the act of sleeping outside. Even where shelter is unavailable, an ordinance prohibiting sitting, lying, or sleeping outside at particular times or in particular locations might well be constitutionally permissible. See Jones, 444 F.3d at 1123. So, too, might an ordinance barring the obstruction of public rights of way or the erection of certain structures. Whether some other ordinance is consistent with the Eighth Amendment will depend, as here, on whether it punishes a person for lacking the means to live out the “universal and unavoidable consequences of being human” in the way the ordinance prescribes.
> The Ninth Circuit panel then walks through several important cases that touch on this question of what can be made criminal. Those cases highlight distinctions between criminalizing “status” and criminalizing “conduct,” beginning with a 1962 case, Robinson vs. California, in which the Supreme Court found that the State of California could not criminalize the state of being addicted to the use of narcotics (as opposed to the actual use of narcotics)
> Naturally, our holding does not cover individuals who do have access to adequate temporary shelter, whether because they have the means to pay for it or because it is realistically available to them for free, but who choose not to use it.
What if they have the ability to earn the means to pay for shelter, but choose not to do it? Or they have the means to relocate to somewhere where they could afford to pay for shelter but choose to remain in an area with a higher cost of living? IMHO it's a mistake to focus solely on the the current state and not the choices which led there.
> the formation of encampments that can lead to unsanitary conditions and crimes such as drug dealing and gang activity
Yes indeed, because of those ruthless gangs of homeless drug dealers, what with their effective means to procure and transport expensive products without being noticed, and their total lack of any profit from said enterprise keeping them homeless.
You’re railing against a straw man. Homeless people are vulnerable and many have drug habits. How could a homeless encampment NOT draw drug dealers and related criminal activity?
I'm hardly railing. In response to your question, they aren't a steady source of income for drug dealers, and drug dealers aren't just wandering the streets trying to sell drugs to people with no money. They stay on their turf and sell to people who come to them. And "related criminal activity"? Homeless people aren't criminal masterminds who collect all the city's neer-do-wells. They're just broken down people who need a place to lie down.
I don’t think you have any experience with one of these encampments. They bring crime, perpetrated both on and by homeless people. These are facts. No one has implied that homeless people are criminal masterminds operating vast syndicates.
> They bring crime, perpetrated both on and by homeless people. These are facts.
There is crime anywhere there are lots of people who have needs they can't meet, but even so, the crime rates aren't significant compared to other populations. Analysis such as this one by the Guardian show that the existence of homeless encampments don't have a direct link to crime rates: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/23/homeless-vil... Sometimes crime rates may increase slightly, and sometimes they decrease slightly. Reports like these go back decades: http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=200...
You objected to the city of Boise talking about crime related to these encampments. Now you’ve accepted the crime happens, but you’re moving the goalposts to say the crime isn’t any worse. The crime is happening. A lot of the crime that occurs is against homeless people. It often goes unreported. It won’t affect crime rates. For a variety of other reasons it is not, in the general sense, a simple thing to measure. In no case are you going to convince the people with actual experiences that their experiences didn’t happen by waving a study at them.
All the money spend to fighting for this legislation could have gone into actually housing people; real permanent housing for those too poor.
Utah has shown that housing people first alleviates a lot of stress. It takes away that fear of not having a basic, consistent place to sleep and be somewhat secure. Cities that implement housing first programs save a lot of money, as it's easier for those people to get to find work and get themselves out of the system.
Will some people abuse it and stay in government housing forever? Sure. But even with those people, municipalities still save money because a good chunk of the people can build their way out once their basic needs are met.
All of the money would then be spent fighting the NIMBYs who would prevent any homeless shelters from being built anywhere close to their neighborhoods...and indeed several tens of millions have been spent in courtrooms fighting off NIMBY lawsuits to the more than 2-dozen potential shelters that could have been built since the passage of Measure H.
The fundamental failure of Measure H was that while there is the money to build the necessary housing, and the general political will to build somewhere....there is intense political opposition to any specific place that gets proposed as the location for homeless or transitional housing.
> All of the money would then be spent fighting the NIMBYs who would prevent any homeless shelters from being built anywhere close to their neighborhoods
If this is an expected outcome, I would consider it fiscally irresponsible to propose building housing shelters in NIMBY neighborhoods and instead choose other places where money won't be wasted on litigation. There's no good reason for homeless shelters and other charitable services to be located on extremely valuable real estate and in NIMBY neighborhoods.
If the mere perception that people might sue was sufficient to dissuade one from building at such a location wouldn't every neighborhood be a nimby neighborhood? At that point where do you build?
Those who can afford the legal costs should pursue such litigation if they think it's worth doing so. Organizations addressing homelessness are among the least able to afford such litigation. As someone who has donated to solve this problem, knowing that money is going to be wasted on litigation makes me less likely to support organizations who are going to waste it.
When I donated money last year to address this issue, I donated to an organization in Texas, despite living in San Francisco, because I knew the money was going to be wasted on the problem in San Francisco. When people making 6-figures right out of college have difficulty finding stable living arrangements in a place, it's futile to try and keep people in that same place that don't have nearly the same capacity to support themselves in an extraordinarily expensive market. For many homeless people, keeping them in SF is tantamount to keeping them homeless in perpetuity because almost none of them have a chance of escaping homelessness in that environment.
> There's no good reason for homeless shelters and other charitable services to be located on extremely valuable real estate and in NIMBY neighborhoods
There are tons of good reasons. The primary reason is that "place" is a huge determination of societal outcomes for individuals. Homeless individuals in a nicer neighborhood will on average have better outcomes (rehabilitation, returning to normal life, seeking mental health treatment) than homeless individuals in rougher neighborhoods.
I never said anything about putting them in rougher neighborhoods. You're projecting.
There are plenty of places in the US where you're less likely to meet costly legal resistance where people can get rehabilitation, returning to normal life and seeking mental health treatment.
Furthermore, even those services, such as rehabilitation and mental health treatment should be moved to lower cost of living markets where each dollar goes much further than in San Francisco. The salary of a social worker in SF is approximately 30% higher than some place like Dallas, TX.
Not sure why you're being downvoted; this is exactly what is happening in SF right now. Many/most neighborhoods are fighting tooth and nail to prevent Navigation Centers from being built near them.
Quite a few of these are planned for areas that already have a sizeable homeless population. It's beyond me how people think they're less safe with a Nav Center rather than just a bunch of people on the streets nearby, defecating on the sidewalk and ranting at the sky all day. (And before I get accused of stereotyping, this is literally what I see on my walk to work.)
Utah has shown that if you have a small city with lots of cheap land, freezing cold winters, mostly-white population and a religion that expects everyone to do community service you can have a much lower homeless rate. This doesn't hold many lessons for California.
Oh, I think the lesson to be learned is accountability of spending. California is now famous for spending billions on homelessness with very little to show for it. In one San Fransisco trial, ~$100k per homeless participant was spent, with none of them being housed at the end. The program could have literally paid for them to take a bus to a cheaper city off the coast, bought them a year in a nice furnished condo, then given them cash vouchers for tens of thousands of dollars, and been a cheaper more effective program.
And yet no one will dare admit complete incompetents are in charge of solving this problem.
As much as I'd like all able-minded and able-bodied people to try to be productive in society to whatever extent feasible, if that's not an option, I would much rather they "abuse" government housing instead of living on the streets being a public nuisance and health hazard, as is often the case.
I really have no problem with the concept of "criminalizing homelessness" -- as long as we can provide sufficient housing for everyone, regardless of their financial state.
I wonder if this will effect van life. In some cities sleeping in your car is illegal even if in a valid parking spot minding your own business. Some places even illegal to take a break and sit on the ground. I think living in a van would be cramped, but maybe a RV would be nice but watched some of the van life channels and think it's insane sleeping in your van is a crime. I think some cops want to ID people who live different lifestyles because maybe they assume you are a criminal on the run for living in a van. But still insane you could go to jail or get your car impounded for sleeping in a parking spot... In some places sleeping on a bench too, putting people in Jail over sleeping which is a needed human function.
Then many states won't let you have a license if you are homeless, unless you get help from a shelter and also try to make it harder to vote too. So you have to pretend you live with a relative or go to Texas or South Dakota to setup a mail forwarder and declare domicile since they recognize full time RVing. Plus heard some shelters won't help you if you still own a car, got to sell it first to receive services.
I have heard though South Dakota only lets you vote for federal and state elections though, not local(city and county) but not sure how true that is... For example one of the counties doesn't have a "Wheel Tax", which would effect people registered there if ever passed, so RVers would vote no of course on it. Yet they say you can still be called for Jury Duty as mentioned on the affidavit, but heard the popular county for mail forwarders exempt those addresses, so you won't get picked in the first place but even if you do just call and tell them you are traveling full time to be exempted... But kinda interesting you are like a resident but not really a resident. I guess no states really considered people could retire and RV full time or younger people could live in a van and work remotely online.
I guess kinda the same with college though... If you lived in California but your parents retired early and moved to Florida or Nevada, yet you wanted to stay in California to go to school with your high school friends then California would consider you a resident for DMV, taxes but no longer a resident for tuition since they go by your parents domicile until a certain age, yet until after a full year or two FL or NV wouldn't consider you a resident for school either, so I guess you could technically not be a resident of any state for tuition proposes.
> In some cities sleeping in your car is illegal even if in a valid parking spot minding your own business.
It should be illegal. Parking spaces are by and large meant to primarily serve the needs of legal, taxpaying residents. When they get taken over for use as housing, it diminishes the ability for others to travel and visit friends/family/businesses. And street parking is taken away from those who live locally who may need to park overnight.
All this is still leaving aside the fact that it is super creepy to have someone living out of an RV on your block, watching everyone's arrival/departures, casing their joints. Especially because a number of these RV dwellers are permanently-nomadic drug-addicts who engage in property crime to fuel their habits.
Would you accept a compromise where affordable housing is subsidized if the person is a long-term tax-paying/law-abiding resident of that area (5+ years) but not otherwise? I think there has to be a disincentive for people to move to expensive and desirable locations like SF and expect to be able to make ends meet. If they're a newcomer to an area, they should know the costs and what it takes and bear the responsibility instead of imposing themselves upon existing residents IMO.
What you describe is essentially rent control. From what I understand (and I am far from an expert), most of these people have lived in SF/LA for a long time, surviving due to rent control. But it's greatly in the landlord's interest to get them to move out, and eventually it happens, and then they are stuck.
Based on your summary, the comment you're replying to would be a better solution as there wouldn't be a perverse incentive. Do you think a replacement of rent control with such a policy could happen?
And if laws against vagrancy were better-enforced, businesses wouldn't find it possible to employ people for poverty wages. They'd have to raise wages to the point that people can afford housing. This idea that we need to allow people to camp all over public space because the employment market is malfunctioning in some way is indicative of a "caring" mindset that's making it impossible to actually solve the real, underlying problems of resource misallocation.
Our inability to address the homeless problem is a direct result of "caring" and "nurturing" eclipsing all other values. We've become incapable of enacting any policy that someone might call "harsh", even if that policy would be better for everyone in the long term. Sometimes the right approach really is tough love.
I'm not trying to suggest a solution. I think this is an incredibly complex problem and not something I have expertise in. I'm merely pointing out there is some recent evidence to suggest the make up of homeless people may be shifting.
> It sounds very unlikely that the reason for stagnant and too low wages is inadequate prosecution of the most vulnerable people in society.
That's a pretty loaded statement presented without evidence. Vagrants are aren't "the most vulnerable people in society'. They're criminals. If we punish them like criminals, they'll stop their criminal behavior or spent time in prison where they can't cause problems for everyone else.
Vagrants are breaking the law, by definition, because vagrancy is a crime. When someone commits a crime, we call him a criminal and remove him from society for a while. I see no reason to abandon this tradition now.
> When someone commits a crime, we call him a criminal and remove him from society for a while.
Wow. I've received 3 speeding tickets, and 2 right on red tickets in my life. I committed a crime. I paid fines. I was not removed from society.
That is the case with a huge number of crimes, today, otherwise we would have an even worse prison problem.
> I see no reason to abandon this tradition now.
We've already abandoned it, and we are reducing the sizes of prisons as you prattle on about the problems of vagrancy.
Let's get mental health care facilities, rehab, and more, to the levels that existed before Republicans gutted them starting in the 50's. I don't know, like institute new-deal type things so people aren't wanting for basic needs, and maybe vagrancy will go away.
Well, it did the last time we did that.
Why wouldn't we do the exact same thing that worked last time?
What happens when people refuse to use these new rehab facilities, preferring a life of drugs on the street? I'm all for improved mental health care, but at some point, we need to involuntarily remove vagrants from the street and put them in places where they can get help overcoming their problems.
So give them that chance to say no. Right now, you're advocating for paying $81k/year (average for CA prisons) to keep people in prison, instead of trying to fix the underlying causes. Estimates put the number of homeless people in California at roughly 120k+, including families, children, etc.
So if we solve the problem as you are proposing, by putting them in prison right now, that's $9.7 billion / year. It would more than double the current California prison population, from current 115k people, to 235k+, and we'd need new child prisons, because a lot of those homeless folks are families with children.
Putting "vagrants" and other "homeless" people in prison is stupidly expensive, pointlessly punitive, and doesn't solve the underlying economic or social problems. It doesn't stop people from being poor, it just makes being poor suck worse than it already does. All you've done is put a bunch of vulnerable people in prison.
There is no economic problem. We're in the best job market in half a century, perhaps the best ever. If a able bodies person isn't working, it's because he doesn't want to work. I'm under no obligation to support street drug addicts merely because you cast them as victims. They are not victims. They are criminals.
Is prison expensive? Sure. I bet it doesn't have to cost that much to lock people up. But even if it does, locking people up is a much better use of public funds than endless and equally expensive homeless "services" that enable bad behavior.
Basically every family of 2+ adults have 2+ jobs in order to make things work today. Not 1, like the 50's when taxes on the wealthy was high, but 2+. More adults live at home today than ever before. We're in the worst job market in aggregate, as all real wages for the middle class are below starvation-level.
> I bet it doesn't have to cost that much to lock people up.
You are talking out of your ass. If you can do better, then run a business housing prisoners, and make a pile of money. Instead, you've provided literally nothing to the conversation aside from "things can't be that bad, these are bad people".
You've got no information, you've just got bad, hurtful, and hateful opinions. Take a class or read a book on social justice, find a way out of your edgelord shitposting. I'm done wasting my time on you.
Especially because a number of these RV dwellers are permanently-nomadic drug-addicts who engage in property crime to fuel their habits.
Property crime is already a crime, hence the term. Assuming your stereotype is accurate, the police will arrest them for their actual crimes soon enough. Until then, the pre-crime of living in an RV isn't sufficient cause.
> Assuming your stereotype is accurate, the police will arrest them for their actual crimes soon enough.
No this does not happen. Property crime ends up being the bottom priority in many cities because of limited staffing/resources/competing priorities.
> Until then, the pre-crime of living in an RV isn't sufficient cause.
Sure it is. Should a city allow everyone to do whatever they want? If not, why is it out of scope for them to create rules that minimize the likelihood of crimes in the first place? You are asking tax-paying law-abiding residents to rely on a low-probability outcome when there are better ways to avoid being in that position in the first place. The city government exists to support its tax-paying, law-abiding residents. Otherwise why would those residents live there and pay taxes?
Yeah. There's some professionals that do this lifestyle. There's some guy who's a web developer from Tennessee who works remotely and his wife home schools the kids... But trying to balance both work and play sounds like a challenge since not a daily schedule. Also there's some accountant who does this lifestyle too. Very jealous of the lifestyle. I know I rather be somewhere warm right now like Orlando or Texas haha. They go to Disney World ever year too.
Seems like some people RV by choice, and some people are forced into it. Like in some expensive places some people might take their last paycheck and buy a RV that barely runs so they still have some sort of shelter, still working locally, etc. I guess it's stereotyped for being homeless, or being retired while there are normal families who decided on this lifestyle. Some people even live on boats too. Some do it to try to save money, while some end up spending more than living in a house or apartment. Then the experience part, more of a adventure than the same boring same over and over.
I think if I did it, I'd probably stay a week or two in a area as I think moving every day would be stressful but a lot of neat stuff to see. Some people try and see every state in their first year... but if doing this full time can always come back to a place. But I guess planning and deciding on things can be hard since so much to see and do in this country. But I'd probably stick to campgrounds, rv parks, approved spots for boondocking... Sleeping on random streets just seemed odd to me, and I'd want the peace of mind of not being woken up by someone in the middle of the night.
Even some of the national forests seem to not be friendly towards people camping anymore. Coconino national forest I've heard complaints of, and as someone who studied a bit about civil rights I seen one story which I suspect the forest ranger totally broke the law, and not sure what the PC was... Someone had a truck camper, not the prettiest thing but he said the ranger was banging on his door and demanding all his info questioning him even though it was a legal spot on the map, sounds like the ranger was super rude and aggressive even though no law was broken he just wanted to know who was in "his forest" before leaving them alone. but apparently that forest is full of homeless people and not just people on vacation too.
Then some forests are understaffed, was reading reviews for one forest not too far from here and someone got their car broken in at a trailhead and no one even came to take a report, not sure what they did in that case since you need a report for insurance company. Then the forest fires out west has been a big drain on the budget too.
Some people want to privatize the national forests and parks. I'm kinda conflicted on that idea though. I feel like private companies would manage things better with more services, better hospitality, better made websites with information but probably be more expensive too. Then commercializing things take a bit away from nature, relaxing and disconnecting... I guess one of the ideas is to add WiFi, food trucks and same day Amazon package deliveries to the national parks as one of the proposed plans by the new administration to modernize the parks, which does seem convenience but I know people are against it too. Can see both the pros and cons of that idea.
I do feel the focus is more on the national parks though, seems like the national forests are being abandoned and some even want them shutdown or sold off completely which is pretty sad since some are being neglected. I guess the National Parks get higher priority when it comes to funding, probably since more popular too compared to the National Forests.
Property crime de facto is only a crime if you commit felony theft. Cops in CA don't care if you have a pile of bike parts and pieces of rideshare scooters.
The van life (well, mostly RV life) is really taking over Silicon Valley. Many streets now have a row of RVs parked at the curb. For example, El Camino right in front of Stanford. The wealth disparity is dramatic, but so is the rent in the area...
Palo Alto tried to accommodate the RVs with a parking lot in the civic center, but stopped after a couple of incidents at the nearby school.
We did a great disservice to the mentally ill when we closed (rather than reform) our mental institutions. The mentally ill would greatly benefit from compassionate custodial care. For those who merely make bad personal choices then enforcement of no urban camping laws by disposing of unoccupied campsites along with the availability of low cost simple barracks type shelters for overnight use should ease the situation without resorting to arrests or fines. Society can be firm and compassionate at the same time. The current situation in some of our cities is intolerable to all concerned.
"make bad personal choices" - somehow, people in the US make bad personal choices in direct correlation to government economic policy. And in many other countries almost nobody "makes bad choices". I guess public welfare inspires astute personal choice-making!
What option was there to reform? The Supreme Court said people who weren't a danger to themselves or others couldn't be held against their will. I'm all for trying to figure out how to help the mentally ill, but that often comes in the form of treating chemical addiction, which seems to have a long term success rate of around ~10%, a number so low that in a hierarchy of responsible spending, treatment wouldn't make the top of the list.
Living on the street is a danger to yourself. Mental illness get worse without treatment, and coupled with a life on the street without intervention, will end up with your death.
Mental illness has been on display in the media 24/7 for quite some time, so functional crazy is not a pipe/pill dream after all....
If any hardworking individuals were given the same accountrements in a high-cost city (permanent housing with housekeeping), there would be a huge waiting list. With a possible impending retirement crisis, able-bodied may not be the best term for qualification.
As an aside, recycling is not profitable anymore, but the pre-existing obligations prevent dramatic or even drastic change on that front. This is no different.
If I were to throw something on the wall for homelessness, I'd say keep it simple and build 3 new regional cities in the west, central and east with a clean slate design and throw up a sign that says "give us your tired, your poor" and see what happens. That way, several states, cities and counties are pooling their resources/budgets, you give everyone a red/white/blue moment, but in the true American Spirit, you make it someone elses problem overnight (aka. Make it disappear) for something you were going to pay for anyway.
If we limit "extreme economy/political/welfare/climate experiments" to only these 3 regional areas, we may actually get lucky and build something resilent enough to be a runway for future generations, while being strong enough to be a safety net for the current gens.
I say all of this in jest, but if it becomes a question of millions of old people dying with dignity, instead of homeless in the streets, there will be enough "zeros" to build it (nimby lingo).
This is a terrible decision by the Supreme Court. People do not have a right to sleep wherever they want, whenever they want. If they cannot join a community and be a productive/contributing member, there has to be a disincentive for that. Right now, many cities like Seattle and SF have law-abiding tax-paying residents who have to see their beautiful cities ruined by tents/trash/needles, put up with unsafe conditions, see their property value diminish, and amenities take over (like parks with tents).
No one has a right to live where they want at whatever price point they want. This is the strongest economy of all time. Unemployment is at an all time low. And there are many locations where someone can do a job (not necessarily the one they want) and earn a living, instead of picking the more desirable locations. I believe every jurisdiction should be able to set its own rules governing where/when people can sleep. And taxpayers should not be obligated to pay for someone else's life due to their lack of personal responsibility.
The refusal to hear the challenge here is simply enabling the permanently-nomadic to take over land they do not own at no cost and with no consequence.
> People do not have a right to sleep wherever they want, whenever they want.
Indeed, and this court ruling doesn't say that. The limitations of the circuit court ruling are described in the article, which I'm sure you've read. Second paragraph.
The US Supreme Court is infamous, especially in recent years, for favoring the interests of the powerful, the moneyed and the landed over those of, well, other people (see: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22715946-injustices).
So, at least we know there is some bar - albeit very low - beyond which they're not willing to let local authorities victimize the poor. That is - you are at least allowed to sleep outside on the cold hard floor. Thanks SCOTUS.
Have you considered that it is rather the constitution and the laws that favor the interests of the powerful, and the courts (by design) rule according to the laws?
There is, but I'd rather the courts go with the most obvious interpretation of the law, then start from a premise of what should be done (as they see it), and then try to stretch the law to fit. Courts are not for making policy, and when they're appropriated for that purpose, it quickly spirals out of control.
If the problem is with the laws and the executive policies - and it really is - then let's fix those.
289 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadHad the lower court's decision involved criminalizing hundreds of thousands of people's daily lives, that might create the sort of controversy the court would consider vital to resolve.
But: Sometimes doing nothing is the best answer. Sometimes, it takes enormous wisdom and personal restraint to act on that fact by doing nothing. It's why sayings like "The only way to win is not to play" are popular.
(Entire blog post about that right here: https://raisingfutureadults.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-hand-li...)
> The 9th Circuit noted that those facilities could still refuse to shelter homeless people who exceed limits of the number of days they can stay or who object to mandatory religious programs.
It'd be quite problematic for folks to be jailed for refusing mandatory religious programs - even if those people were homeless. I'm happy to see that this group of people managed to stand up for their rights against Boise - and maybe the city just needs to put out a bit more money toward health and safety by supplying adequate secular shelter options[1].
1. As an aside, I really dislike that so many of the US domestic charities are religiously driven.
A significant portion of homeless people are actually 'invisible' homeless people- people living out of their cars, or sleeping on couches. They arguably do have things, up to and including a sense of identity and self for which any attempt of indoctrination must erode. I don't think someone who is sleeping on a friend's couch would be down for sleeping on a bed instead for the low low price of conversion therapy.
(FTR: I don't think religion is brainwashing/conversion therapy or whatever. I also just think this take is also very bad.)
If the reason you help someone is because you want to sell them something or use them, you're doing help wrong.
I suppose you could argue that religion is harmful.. but even as an atheist, that’s a stretch for me to agree with.
How is that a stretch for you? Have you ever heard of conversion therapy. Do you know how that came to be and similar to slavery. I know a lot of LGBT+ friends that had religious parents throw them on the streets because of God wouldn't make them not be normal.
Catholic Charities had consistently good programs. In my experience, they did not ever require you to listen to a sermon to get the help you needed.
Yes, I chose to go hungry rather than attend shitty services with lousy food that put my welfare at risk with their shitty policies. Some so-called "help" is worse than nothing.
And not all homeless have literally nothing. Some have income, just not enough to support a middle class life. Some have regular jobs and live in fear of being fired if their employer learns of their situation.
The thing that bothers me now about the homeless is how many of them appear to have their basic shit together.
Hmm? I think there's a typo in there. Did you mean that it bothers you about homelessness (not the homeless people) that people with "shit" together still have trouble getting housing?
But unlike others, I don't agree that religious charities should not do any proselytizing. A genuine religious person believes their doctrine, not just in being a good person like anyone can be. Christians believe there are eternal issues at stake.
The point is that basic services should not be conditional and proselytizing should invitational, not mandatory.
In fairness, many of them are very good. The Mormons, for example, have always impressed me. I had a friend who grew up in Menlo Park, fell on hard times, and ended up in Utah. The Mormon community there was very supportive in substantial ways, and although they did evangelize, I hear it was pretty mild.
But yeah, it's...evil when a religion gets transactional with it's charity.
Getting transactional with charity is the whole point. That's why religious organizations often fight against public programs instead arguing that religiously affiliated charity should take its place (receiving public funding to do so in many cases).
Utah in particular loves to under-fund programs, and let the church pick up the slack. The benefit to them is that it is both transactional, and allows them to exclude as they desire.
The Mormons might be nice, but they shouldn't be getting public money to provide public assistance. They should be cut out entirely and taxes should fund these programs directly and fairly.
But does Utah give that money to the church programs instead? It’s not clear from your comment.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finances_of_The_Church_of_Jesu...
Mormons as a rule are very generous with the church, and often with church affiliated charities. If the deduction for charitable giving was removed, the Mormon church would do fine, and likely so would many of their charitable activities, and it would seem more like separation of church and state to me.
If the charitable giving deduction were removed, I guess I agree that at that point there wouldn't be a way to argue (from a constitutional perspective) against Mormons in Utah voting for low levels of government support.
As it happens, I'm not convinced the "all charity should be provided by religious institutions in Utah" narrative for Utah voters is actually accurate; Salt Lake City at least is fairly generous with the homeless, at a government level.
But spirituality is quite real, and there are those who really believe in selfless giving without expectation of anything in return. Lots of people. They exist in the "cooperate/cooperate" equilibrium, and honestly, it's better there. It's not that you don't see the cheating, the greed, especially in the name of charity, its just that you're choosing to do something different, something that feels more wholesome. (I say this as someone who's served a bunch of meditation courses, and really enjoyed it.)
Why are religious organizations fighting public assistance programs? Why are their members arguing that a church should provide these same services instead? Your "criticise the crique" strategy isn't actually a retort, just an argument that religious affiliated organizations should be above criticism wholesale.
If religions want to stay out of politics, I'm all for leaving them be. But as it stands they're a major power broker, particularly at a local level, and therefore cannot be ignored (particularly when they're arguing for religious discrimination of public services).
My other point was noting the cynicism behind your view, and why I think there are better options.
The church is engaged in a giving action that is subsidized in part by their ability to get paying members. So in a sense, the church is a two legged business. One is to genuinely help people. The other is to find people that are willing to assist in the continuation of that goal.
(Thanks for the downvote. I've always noticed that the most heartless people downvote the most.)
Not all religions do. Catholic Charities, for example, doesn't care what religion you practice and does not try to convert people who seek its help.
I guess another way of looking at it is why aren't there more atheist charities? What is it about religion that makes people help other people so much more?
He was wanting to put together a program where students would go volunteer to help NGOs do software projects in India.
Something he was surprised by was that NGOs in India are almost all oriented around lobbying the government to do things (particularly that they'd already promised to do) and not around provisioning social services themselves.
My understanding is that in some religions, we are living today in the "afterlife" of a previous life, and subject to karma based on what we've done.
If one has bad karma that has put one in an undesirable social position, it's not a stretch that Earth is a hell for those people, and we're supposed to be the demons that make life miserable for them.
Can you name those religions for me. I view everything as deterministic and see the world as either heaven/hell. Although the idea of karma doesn't make sense when understanding determinism. Since everyone is destined to do bad or good depending on the life they're born into.
edit: whoever downvoted me, I'm asking a simple question and stating what I observe. Please let me know why you find the need to downvote for that.
It's offensive.
Treat others as you want to be treated. And if I was poor I'd want someone to feed me.
...unless they're gay, atheist, or some other out-group.
The best churches to me are the ones who believe that church is for the "sinners" not the in-group. This means accepting everyone and not excluding anyone.
But we also have to recognize that churches are centered around people and people are very flawed. Organizations tend to be too.
I have to say, I fall much closer to atheist than theist now but that's mostly due to doctrine not practices within the church.
Also, as a side effect of how I was raised I was on the out-group of two religions. 90% of people in both churches treated me with respect and dignity. It was up to me to see that the 10% had no power in either church or over me.
My guess is that there are simply fewer atheists.
I don't see how this follows. There are punishments for committing crimes that don't come from a vengeful god, like punishment from a legal system.
i.e. "The government should replace charity, and only the millionaires and billionaires should be the ones paying for it".
I'm atheist myself, but I've definitely seen this reasoning make it easy for fellow atheists to explain away their lack of charity.
Religous groups account for "31% of all donations", so that leaves a lot for other groups.
https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&...
https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...
That 31% is donations to churches (from what I'm reading). Not donations to charities organized separately from the churches.
So if there is a catholic charity which focuses on Haiti, then that would be excluded from the 31%.
1. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
Black swan effect? It may just be that the charity and/or atheism isn't reported.
> that makes people help other people so much more?
I think that's reading a lot more into both motivations and actions than is possible from here; or, in other words: I think you're anecdotally on to something - my religious neighbors definitely feel more kind / charitable than my other neighbors - but science would need to be done. For example, perhaps it's not the "religious" part but the "community" part that drives participation in charity efforts. I also wonder about the role that tax exemption plays into all of this.
It's also worth noting that in the US, there still exists a fairly strong bias against any openly atheistic people or organizations[1], so it would make sense to direct the public's attention towards what they're doing and therefore away from what they don't believe.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_against_atheist...
When people say atheist charities, what they are trying to say is secular charities lacking any religious affiliation. They aren't trying to say charities that are actively "affiliated" with being atheist.
I can think of 2 reasons why the religious want to help others:
I guess another way of looking at it is why aren't there more atheist charities?Why pick on atheists? What about secular charity or otherwise irreligious charity? Many such charities/aid groups exist. Doctors Without Borders, ACLU, Unicef, Goodwill, Oxfam, Rotary International, etc.
More importantly, what about social security?
I think the US government is too conservative when it comes to relying on outside entities for help getting people up on their feet. It really should be a government's prerogative to proactively help people enter society as a productive member, earning a wage, staying healthy, spending money and paying taxes, no?
But by studies performed by religious organizations themselves (who if anything are likely to skew the numbers more positively), across the board, "Local and national benevolence receives 1 percent of the typical church budget", and an additional 5% goes to "church run programs" (be it after school care, social or group activities).
If a secular charity - and lets go back to Charity Navigator here - Top Ten Inefficient Fundraisers (https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=topten) we see some of the worst charities spending 15% of their donations on "program expenses" (i.e. doing what they are being given money to do).
I'm not familiar with the monitoring of 501(c)3 groups, but I suspect if charities were to regularly spend only one per cent of their givings on what they got to enjoy tax exemption to do, they'd likely have such a status revoked.
And, if you factor in this average percentage (even the six per cent combined, which is generous, as as much fun as social and youth activities are, they're not necessarily serving a critical need), and start to question 'how much money is being spent on 'spreading the word', patting themselves on the back, competitions in Texas to see who can built the world's biggest cross just down the road from where the world's previously biggest cross was built at costs of millions, there comes more and more skepticism of just how highly you can value "giving to your church" on the scale of charitable contributions.
A study by ECCU (http://web.archive.org/web/20141019033209/https://www.eccu.o...) stated that churches use 3 percent of their budget for children’s and youth programs, and 2 percent for adult programs. Local and national benevolence receives 1 percent of the typical church budget.
So I -do- place some skepticism on the idea of blanketing 'religious giving' as 'charitable contribution'.
Depending on your definition, pretty much all activist organizations could fall into this. Red cross, project eden, engineers without borders, etc. Honestly I'm stumped as to what constitutes "atheist charity" vs any non profit whose goal is not "spread the word of $deity".
it's then a smaller step to use some of those organizational resources for evangelizing in the form of charitable acts.
(Notably, it’s not like less religious places have devised secular replacements for religious charity. As a percentage of income, people in San Francisco donate just half of what people in Alabama and Mississippi do.
until it's used to keep people apart in "mandatory religious programs"
That said, I really despise hypocrites and the biggest ones I can see today are Prosperity Gospel preachers and that Evangelical voting block that support the "good christian" in office today. I have no problem with faith and churches, but when they start getting political or taking advantage of the needy then they've got to go. Lastly, it's getting a bit weird with religious institutions fighting against women's health organizations - and that discussion is a pile of snakes so let me just say I understand where both sides come from and don't really care to discuss the topic.
It is highly likely that the religious institutions you're thinking of aren't these partisan televangelists or con-men but those guys have left a sour taste in my mouth for religious institutions in general - I default to spurning and distrusting them until I've seen an organization act in a beneficial and ethical manner. I trust them more slowly then I trust secular charities.
But that's not what was happening, right?
> I have no problem with faith and churches, but when they start getting political
I disagree with the notion that religion must be a private matter. Religion is not only a matter of personal belief. Its a framework for organizing communities and raising children. Forcing people to keep religion private amounts to an infringement on "the free exercise thereof."
Notably, religion in the U.S. has always been political. Many of the original colonies were founded by religious people who were too radical for Europe. They didn't create a Constitution where the right to "free exercise" implied banning the very religious communities they had come to America to establish. Rather, religion has always been a part of peoples' politics. It played an outsized role in everything from abolition to women's suffrage to the civil rights movement.
Directly? No.
"If there is a homeless shelter open, we can cite and jail you for sleeping outdoors".
"But one of the shelters has a policy of always being 'open', even if there are no beds. They also require mandatory religious activity and participation."
"If there is a homeless shelter open, we can cite and jail you for sleeping outdoors".
Is a fairly strong indirect link.
> Boise said it does not issue citations if the city’s three homeless shelters are full. The plaintiffs said that the two Christian-based shelters have policies to never turn away anyone for lack of space, and so police have continuously enforced the ordinances. > > The 9th Circuit noted that those facilities could still refuse to shelter homeless people who exceed limits of the number of days they can stay or who object to mandatory religious programs.
As to your other point
> I disagree with the notion that religion must be a private matter. Religion is not only a matter of personal belief. Its a framework for organizing communities and raising children. Forcing people to keep religion private amounts to an infringement on "the free exercise thereof."
That's fair, it definitely needs to be a balance, it's my opinion that things like Prosperity Gospel not being outright illegal and pundits like Pat Robertson are good examples that it has gone too far, but I definitely see and understand concerns about going too secular. I'm privately faithful and secular in nature, but that's just me and I understand that other folks have their own understandings of faith and religion.
Other places in the US, you mean. They have done this elsewhere, they call it socialism.
If person A takes from person B by coercion to give to person C because person D voted for it. Neither person A nor person B nor person D can claim to be engaging in charity.
Charity is voluntary giving.
That said, a better example is that 'socialist' countries seem to give less to charity for those abroad. The biggest donating countries per capita are Myanmar, the USA and Australia, the most likely to help strangers appear to be Iraq, Libya and Kuwait. Even in Europe, it's topped by the UK which, while it is in possession of a social safety net, I would not call Socialist.
Mississippi and Alabama need religious services because religious people suffocated the government. I'd much rather be poor in San Francisco and enjoying public services than be poor in Mississippi hoping for religious services.
It’s not really voluntary, which brings in the question of if it’s really charity.
> I'd much rather be poor in San Francisco and enjoying public services than be poor in Mississippi hoping for religious services
Which public services do you think SF has that aren’t available in Mississippi? I think you’ll find that the real difference is tolerance of homelessness in general and programs that allow continued drug use while receiving benefits.
Medicaid expansion.
My speculation: nothing, but perhaps call for higher taxes on everyone, "generously" calling for higher taxes on yourself included. No real skin in the game, but hey, you get to feel better than religious people!
If your grand vision is to wait for progressive politicians to substitute for religious charities, don't tear down the charities before that happens. What is supposed to happen to the poor people in the meantime?
I agree we should not tear down the charities first, but I don't think that we should pretend the charities are successfully solving the problem. They are making the problem less bad than it otherwise would be, and that's valuable, but they're not actually solving it. People have been saying "Private charity will solve the problem" since Judas wanted to sell that one bottle of ointment, and the poor are still with us.
The parent poster did not say that religious or secular charities could "solve the problem"; nothing can solve the problem. What the parent poster did say is that religious charities are expending far more effort in helping the homeless.
I'm not disputing whether religious charities are working more effectively now. I'm disputing whether that is the right strategy. If, in 2000, you were to argue that an open-source web browser is the right thing for the world, "Most people use IE, which is closed-source" (though true) would not be not a counterargument.
It is not obvious to me that nothing can solve the problem. (To be clear, I take Jesus' words about "you will always have the poor with you" as a statement addressed to the people there at the time, not to humanity forever, but even if not, a passing comment from God still seems like an inappropriate basis for public policy in a non-theocratic society.) Even if nothing can solve the problem, it's also not obvious to me that we're anywhere close to doing as good a job as we can at reducing the problem.
That was one of the keys - "the City said it wouldn't cite people when shelters weren't open", but the plaintiffs said that one of the religious shelters had an "always open" policy, even if they didn't actually have beds, and they did require religious participation, so the city's point was effectively moot.
At the time Massachusetts ratified the First Amendment, everyone was required to belong to a church and State tax money was used to support those churches: http://www.statelegalhistory.com/home/1-new-england-legal-hi.... Several New England states had government-supported churches well into the 1800s.
And the opposite view: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/06/constit...
1) It's full of invective and straw-man arguments. It accuses Christine O'Donnell of not having read the Establishment Clause, for example. And it makes a completely irrelevant reference to "old antebellum slave oligarchies," even though it was the free New England states that were the ones that had state-supported churches.
2) It makes tenuous arguments. The "words 'separation of church and state' are not in the text," the article concedes. But "the idea of separation is" present. Of course! In support of that view, it points to the fact that the Constitution prohibits religious tests for office. "If government can't require its officials to support a church," it reasons, "is there a serious argument that church and state are not separate?" Of course, the prohibition on religious tests is entirely consistent with the existence of a plurality of public religions.
It also pulls a "??? Profit!" over the most significant issue: what does "no law respecting an establishment of religion" mean? The article states that it "mean[s] that not only no church but no 'religion' could be made the official faith of the United States." That reads the phrase as "no law establish[ing] [a] religion." But if that's what the Framers meant, they would have written that. That's how they wrote the rest of the first amendment "no law ... prohibiting ... or abridging ...."
3) As with the present Supreme Court precedent on the subject, the article rests almost entirely on the letter of Thomas Jefferson. But Jefferson (a) was not a Framer; and (b) was a radical wingnut. What he thought about things carries some weight, but not all that much. (I would add that almost everyone who invokes Jefferson's view to interpret the First Amendment would recoil in horror at invoking his views to interpret the Second.)
This is, by definition, a law respecting an establishment of religion. It was permissible only because the Bill of Rights was not applied to the States until the passage of the 14th Amendment.
If you look at the first amendment, the Establishment Clause stands out:
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
For the other rights, Congress used verbs: "prohibiting" the free exercise of religion, and "abridging" the freedom of speech, etc. But "an establishment of religion" is a noun. What is an establishment of religion? In 1789, "an establishment of religion" was a known thing: the established churches of the states. So the First Amendment can be interpreted to mean that Congress can't mess with the established churches of the various states.
Turning to incorporation: remember, its not automatic, and incorporation of each amendment must be justified on its own terms. Not all of the Bill of Rights makes sense as applied to the States--for example the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, because those set forth a separation between State and Federal power, not individual rights. There is a natural reading for incorporation of the Free Exercise Clause. But whether it makes sense to incorporate the Establishment Clause turns on what you interpret the Establishment Clause to mean. If the latter, then its really setting forth a separation of State/Federal power, not an individual right, and it makes no sense to apply that to the states.
It means neither.
"Respecting" means "with reference to", and this definition is the same as it was when the Constitution was written. Ergo, "respecting an establishment of religion" means "with reference to an establishment of religion". "Establishment of religion" means "an organization of religion", including both lay churches all the way up to the Anglican Church and the Vatican. So the first half clearly states that Congress shall make no law "with reference to an religious organization."
This is where the separation of church and state comes from. That, and Thomas Jefferson saying explicitly that this was the purpose of that clause and the commonly understood meaning of the Constitutional Congress when they voted on the language...
For the second half: "thereof" means the thing just mentioned, and "exercise" meant "practice" (as in practice a religion, from the original Latin meaning). So "prohibiting the free exercise thereof" means "prohibiting the free practice of religion."
Reading "establishment" synonymous with "organization" would be anawkward and un-idomatic even today. Would you call the ACLU a "civil rights establishment?" Would you call NARAL a "women's rights establishment?"
There are good reasons to believe that's not the sense in which the word is used. The Constitution repeatedly uses the word "establish" in the sense of "to make official." It uses the word "establishment" in one other place, referring to the requirements "for the Establishment of this Constitution.” I.e. the requirements to make the draft constitution the official law of the country.
And historically, "establishment" was used precisely in that sense--a religion that had been made official. The Church of England was an "establishment of religion." The Colonies had had "established" churches, and many, but not all, had "disestablished" their churches. “An establishment of religion” is not a weird way to say “religious organization” but a legal thing that existed at the time that made sense to talk about. And what the First Amendment does is prohibit the federal government from making laws with reference to those "establishment[s] of religion."
Within that framework, Congress was probably prohibited from establishing a national church. But why? Is the answer: because established churches were bad in the same way that cruel and unusual punishment is bad? That would be an odd reading given how many of the original 13 colonies had some form of government supported religion. The other interpretation is that the amendment endeavored to protect these establishments from federal interference. That’s what makes the most sense given the structure of the colonies at that time.
Within that framework, incorporation doesn’t make sense. You take a provision that was intended to protect states' rights to maintain their established religions free from federal interference, and turn it into a provision that eliminates the very right the amendment sought to protect. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
Lastly I wanted to mention the parallel term you draw here because it's also a drifted phrase
> to make official
Is actually a highly accurate synonym for establishment, but only in archaic word usage, official (the adjective) is actually just a corruption of official a noun, it's sort of like "the influencer lifestyle" or "that's an influencer hat". Technically all "off-*" words originally related to religion, but that's gone by the wayside quite a bit by now.
Quite frankly, I don't care what the words mean today, since we have a body of court cases that has expanded the application of the First Amendment beyond the strict scope of the words as they were written.
There are good reasons to believe that's not the sense in which the word is used. The Constitution repeatedly uses the word "establish" in the sense of "to make official."
You keep trying to make linguistic arguments while ignoring the linguistic means of the words at the time they were originally written, especially when one of the men responsible for actually writing the Bill of Rights explicitly stated what the words of the First Amendment were intended to mean at the time they were written.
The First Amendment was explicitly intended to create separation of church and state at the Federal level. Like the rest of the bill of Rights, it wasn't intended to apply to the states at the time, so your arguments about state churches are entirely irrelevant.
Jefferson wrote this in 1802:
> Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their "legislature" should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and State.
Madison wrote repeatedly about the separation of church and state, as anchored in the 1st Amendment. It was one of the issues that he was particularly passionate about.
As for the states passing legislation regarding religion, the 1st Amendment was originally only a limit on what the Federal government could do. The 1st-Amendment separation between church and state was extended to the states through the 14th Amendment (which led to several of the liberties in the Bill of Rights being extended to the state level).
So in conclusion, the idea of the separation of church and state goes back to the founding generation of the United States. That's not to say it hasn't evolved over time and become stronger. It was a novelty at the time, so you wouldn't expect it to have sprung from Zeus' forehead fully formed.
There is, in fact, a church in northern San Diego county that has a free meal open to anyone on Friday nights, no questions asked. It does involve listening to a sermon. It's one of the best free meals I attended while homeless and I wrote it up on one of my websites as a model program that should be copied because it was so well done.
No sermon, no lecture, just unconditional -- and very good -- food as part of a deeply held sense of community. They have leapt to help in disasters, kept going through riots a few years back, and keep sticking to those principles as numbers keep rising. Rising because the UK government created a need for food banks out of nowhere over ten years, and more and more now need free food... I keep hearing of quiet Sikh efforts across the country as our government deconstructs the benefits system and safety net.
I'm life-long atheist, but I feel much warmer toward our Sikh communities than the UK's formerly christian heritage - where charity so often seems to come with a catch, or a sales pitch, or worse is conspicuously absent. The Sikh sense of community feels far stronger, and more of a true belief as a result.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21805859
I think the Sikh community probably was the source of the absolute best homeless meal I ever got, but I wasn't offended at listening to them share their Christian faith at the program mentioned above and it was a good meal, far better than most homeless meals.
There is zero contradiction in saying "Don't hold homeless people hostage for a meal" and saying "Offering a free meal as part of sharing something you love -- be it Calculus or Christianity -- with whomever wishes to join you is not the same as holding homeless people hostage." They are entirely different points and they in no way conflict.
But that's a darn good example because free food with a lecture (or timeshare opportunity, or conference on industry tool) is a really common occurrence marketing wise and it raises a question that I can't answer in terms of legal and moral right - those lunch and learn conferences, do some people feel pressured to attend because it's subsidizing the cost of their lunch that day? How much time do they lose to engaging in such things and how many of them missed better job opportunities because of it.
I don't understand your sentence. "separation of religion" with what? Is there a law stating religion needs to be separated from everything else?
This case (partially) answered "Can the government jail you for being homeless?" The answer being "No, not generally, but perhaps under a certain set of circumstances that are outside the scope of this case."
Much of the discussion here is "Can a charity compel you into indoctrination in return for bed/food/etc?" The answer to which is "No, not if they are receiving state funding." (They probably shouldn't regardless of funding, but that's a moral question, not a legal one)
Omitting that addendum I agree this is more clear cut legally - I still think there may be moral questions about feeding people conditional on their attendance to a lecture religious or otherwise, but honestly... there are some moral questions about refusing to feed someone in need in any circumstances that our society has mostly moved on from acknowledging so I think most of my objections (excluding the potential arresting scenarios) are academic and beyond the common ethics.
Neat thread though, lots of fun stuff in it.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
this has generally been opined to imply a separation of church and state since any state endorsement of a religion (any directly stated ties) would support the establishment[1] of one religion[2] while also curtailing the establishment[1] of another religion.
1. The usage of the word establishment is pretty archaic language-wise, I think it's fair to conceptually substitute organization, enrollment and participation.
2. Generally, traditionally we haven't minded supporting religious organizations unless that support is unequal, this is why a lot of religious organizations are tax free and have some other fun benefits.
People were, essentially, arrested for not attending religious ceremonies - there is a lot more interesting nuance here, but suffice to say that the 1st Amendment is absolutely relevant if people are potentially being jailed by the state due to a failure to attend religious ceremonies.
That kind of separation.
Should not the state stop this practice?
What if shelter A says I will close if you don't allow me to practice religion?
But the shelter's policy can and should limit what the city is allowed to do. Saying "I have a 'choice': to go to your religious shelter or be arrested for sleeping outside" is a problem.
What the ruling says is that you cannot prosecute a person for sleeping on the street if they have nowhere to go, and that a room that comes attached with a lecture about your life choices doesn't count as a place to go.
They happen to be more motivated to provide services. If you wish there were more alternatives, more secular people should start their own charities.
I use to donate to a large homeless feeding / sheltering place here in town. When I was told by someone who was asking for food money (that I told about the free food at the mission in which I donate to) - that the place forced you to listen to religious sermons before you can have a plate, I was flabbergasted.
I no longer donate to that place.
To those who are all bent out of shape about 'why not religion charity' - hey I don't mind them doing whatever they want to do - but be transparent about it to everyone.
I think if your religion group is good enough, you can give free food and offer another room for sermons if you want to check it out, another area with pamphlets about your gods, whatever, if it's good - have religious counseling available, that's all fine - but don't force people to listen to your cult leader espouse some kind of brainwashing, magical spells, incantations or whatever to starving people in order for them to get some bread.
Have another room for the kool aid, if it's good and welcoming, people will go there. No need to force it.
imho. No offense intended by outrageous characterizing - from what I have seen, some places are offering both without going overboard - and that's great.
I've seen really good organizations that just do good and don't have expectations. The Catholic and Jewish religions tend to have more open charities from what I've seen. They frequently try to solve problems without an expectation or requirement on membership.
In particular Catholic nuns teach in the fringes of society. Where people aren't able to get funding by the state. The cycle is, they go to the fringes, teach those fringes get big enough for state sponsored education and they move further out. I've worked with these amazing people and to put them in the same category as others is a disservice to their work.
On the flip side there are religions that only help if you are an active member. Which is why I think it's important to recognize that MANY religious organizations aren't bad. But that some are, so we can differentiate between them.
I'd also like to say, not even all charities within a given religion are bad/good. When you get down to an individual charity it's run by a person or people and we have to weigh each on on it's own merits.
If we want more secular charities, we have to find a way for people to organize outside of religion. I'd strongly suggest everyone here look at something such as First Robotics or another secular charity.
I'm an atheist myself, but this speaks volumes about the people who aren't religious and their propensity to be charitable.
As much as secularists like to fall into the ego trap of hating on religious institutions, once you separate out the dogma, there's probably a lot to learn from them in terms of fostering desirable behavior like charitable giving.
If you factor that in to 'charitable giving as a whole', then secularists are doing more than fine with their propensity to be charitable.
> As much as secularists like to fall into the ego trap of hating on religious institutions, once you separate out the dogma, there's probably a lot to learn from them in terms of fostering desirable behavior like charitable giving.
I sense a certain hypocrisy there. It's an ego trap to hate on religion, but religious folk have the upper hand and "much to teach" about charity? (Which, as previously stated, is a highly suspect argument foundation).
"Elevation Church does post some financial records on its website, reporting that the church took in $33.5 million in offerings last year and gave away about $3.8 million in outreach, spent $9 million on personnel and reported $13.9 million in cash assets."
(this after their pastor purchased a 'not that great' 16,000 sq ft home on 19 acres, and said that would be 'against Christ's teachings' to disclose what he was paid).
A study by ECCU (http://web.archive.org/web/20141019033209/https://www.eccu.o...) stated that churches use 3 percent of their budget for children’s and youth programs, and 2 percent for adult programs. Local and national benevolence receives 1 percent of the typical church budget.
Edit: I'm referring to this bit: "As an aside, I really dislike that so many of the US domestic charities are religiously driven". The bulk of your comment was interesting and fine. Unfortunately, flamebait dominates discussion regardless of intent, so your subtle point was lost.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." -- Anatole France
https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/politics-and-government/l...
Hopefully this will convince cities that putting people in jail is not a solution to homelessness.
Everyone will post that article about Utah but Denver instituted the very same program at the very same time with far less effective results.
I try really hard to maintain my compassion but I see a problem with seemingly no solution and am just not sure what we can even do at this point.
This SC decision seems pretty clear in saying that if shelters are provided but not used, that can be illegal. It is only not possible to say people cannot sleep outside if there is no other options.
I want to remain compassionate, too. What it comes down to for me is, I can't be too angry at the people living in these tent cities -- that's no one's first choice (barring, of course, that in any population some very small percentage of people want an itinerant life like that; certainly not this many).
So I wondered, how has society broken down that this is it for so many people? How has the city, the state, and the federal government skewed the great societal playing field, that so many people must live like this? The safety net has a lot of holes, more than it seems like it used to, and who gains? For whom is this status quo the preferred one?
I don't have answers (outside the usual economic stuff like, real wages haven't risen alongside the big three economic sinks for most people, education, health care, housing; a lot of attainable jobs have been sent overseas or replaced by technology), but where my compassion goes is, it can't be this many people's bad choices that got them here -- or, if it is, how has society been restructured that bad choices get people here, where falling this far didn't used to be such a readily available option?
I do know that, doing the same thing we've been doing isn't going to get things to be better. And, intuitively, I don't think that smashing up tent cities (like they frequently do in Portland, in "sweeps") or jailing these people is going to solve the problem.
I like what Utah has done. It's unfortunate that that hasn't worked in Denver; I wonder why. I don't like what Portland does (sweeps, moving people from encampment to encampment, tossing out what little stability and possessions they have). But I don't know what else we could do, locally or nationally.
Definitely open to hearing options.
I prefer the old days when the cops would show up and roust them out of there and tell them to go be a pain in the ass someplace else. I feel the same way about crime, too--the cops should be busting heads, instead we have muggers at the mall parking lot because "racism."
They definitely still are:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Philando_Castile
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Freddie_Gray
The good news, I guess, is that kids now have the Internet to learn from, and libraries are no longer a foundation of civic life.
Is this born out by an increase in crime at the library? Or are you just not feeling safe?
A few weeks ago, I had to walk through and witnessed a woman pull down her pants and defecate on the sidewalk, about 50m from the library entrance. This wasn't in an alley or something--it was the main sidewalk, easily visible from the library entrance.
I would not bring kids there.
Hell public restrooms with showers like at a truck stop would actually resolve most of these issues. Most of them are there for the free bathroom facilities and the ones that came to use the chairs and internet wouldn't stink.
It is no secret that San Francisco has a homelessness crisis and if they can't prosecute how are they expected to clean up their city of homeless people?
Edit: This is a legit question why all the down votes?
1) Zone 90% of the city for detached single-family homes? 2) Mandatory decade-long design review for every new home? 3) Lots of parking lots? 4) Designate every extant building a "historical resource"?
Some combination of those policies should eventually solve the housing crisis, I think.
But homelessness of the kind at issue in this case is a very different thing. The vast majority of these homeless are mentally ill, drug addicts, or both. Re-zoning single-family lots won't do anything to address this problem, because most of them have families with homes who've simply given up on trying to take care of them.
Citation? That's a much repeated trope, but I've yet to see actual numbers to support it.
Thousands of homeless live on or travel to Skid Row each day, but most people who attempt this challenge don't get to double digits.
But within 7 miles of me in any direction, more than 100,000 new units have come online in the past 2 years, and more than another 100,000 are expected to come online in the next 2. Across LA, there are a few hundred thousand more units in the pipeline, some of which would already be built and occupied if not for NIMBYs in single-family houses opposing the construction.
And quite frankly, even if we could build at the speed of historic norms, there simply isn't the available land. You'd end up with housing tracts hundreds of miles from their associated job centers.
So, my point stands. The only people who believe this is a boom haven't looked at this graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LOSA106BPPRIVSA
Down the street are two new apartment buildings which house another 1000-1500 people.
Two blocks away from that are a cluster of apartment buildings which collectively house more than 10,000 people.
And quite frankly, you are simply wrong about the statistics you are citing.
The pre-1990 figure is primarily residential single-family homes, so each structure was on average capable of housing just 4 people. Current residential construction is primarily multi-unit residences, so each structure represents residential capacity, on average, of several dozen people.
So my point stands, and I would strongly recommend you take a statistics course.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LOSA106BP1FH
The breakdown of permits issued in 2018 in Los Angeles was as follows:
1 Unit: 10042 2 Units: 1528 3-4 Units: 522 5+ Units: 17432 Total: 29524 Source: https://www.census.gov/construction/bps/txt/tb3u2018.txt
As you can see from the total, this is not anywhere near 50000 units per year, as you initially claimed. These 30000 units are also spread across an area with diameter far greater than the 14 miles you started with.
Also, in addition to being wrong about every other aspect of this debate, you are quite wrong about this one. By FAR the majority of PERMITS go to single-family homes.
When you are very ignorant about a topic, it would be helpful to type less and read more.
Prosecution only leads to more problems, as people cannot adequately gain the skills they need in US prison and are then shunned by US employers.
I don't know what the situation is like in SF or Boise, but in LA more than half of the homeless aren't even from California. They're just here because they were given a free bus ticket and told they would get free food and drugs and good weather if they rode all the way to the end.
Expect a lawsuit.
Both Newark and Elizabeth, New Jersey are suing New York City for busing its homeless over the Hudson River.
California has a long history of doing the same. It wasn't that many years ago that Los Angeles agreed to stop busing its homeless people to Nevada.
This is blatantly false. SF and LA were sending the homeless back to their cities of origin. Their is a great deal of reporting on this in the NYT and LAT. (See, e.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/us/homeless-busing-seattl...)
Texas and the Midwest represent the biggest non-local sources of the homeless in Southern California. Combined, the Midwestern states generate more of LA's homeless than California itself. It was the openly stated policy of Texas for more than a decade to deal with the homeless by buying them tickets to Los Angeles, and it is still their official (but unstated) policy with respect to addressing homelessness. Their governor has admitted as much on television.
It's one of the most affluent cities in world history. That is exactly the obvious solution that SF has intentionally avoided implementing.
If it was a matter of 25,000 people, sure, I understand that would be a huge problem for a city of that size. It's a matter of closer to 5,000 people that need housing (out of SF's 8k to 10k homeless, some are long-term homeless, some are short-term homeless, so you end up with a lower tally of how much housing you need at a given time than the max figures). They have no excuse for the grotesque human rights abuses going on there.
I'm overwhelmingly in favor of the Federal Government stepping in and doing some very unpleasant things - as necessary - to the city in order to force their hands on fixing homelessness there. If they won't fix it, bring the full weight of the US Government down upon their collective heads until they squeal and capitulate (as they are guaranteed to do). The Feds have dozens of ways to beat on the city until it does by forced measures what it should have been more than happy to do on their own.
I get what you're saying here but you're expressing it poorly, and without regard to the fact that the overwhelming unpleasantness is likely to fall on the vulnerable rather than the excessively comfortable, as exemplified by the proliferation of bad policy choices currently taking place at the federal level.
pass a version of sb50, one that especially forces SF and LA to open up large tracts (but not all) of the city to immediate housing construction.
in LA, mayor garcetti tried pushing through the construction of shelters in each of the council districts and got so much push back that only like 2 have gotten anywhere. we need to put local political pressure on the mayor and the council. the federal government is not the right political body for this effort.
Prosecute what? Simply being homeless? I'd rather buy the homeless some apartments/shelters than put them in jail. Jail is more expensive. It's dangerous. It prevents them for working their way out of homelessness.
Jailing people for the crime of being too poor for your tastes is shitty policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals...
Also, what is prosecuted is a crime. The homelessness crisis is not a crime per se (as established again by this very ruling), so it cannot be prosecuted--only actions that are actually crimes.
The best solution is probably to redirect a number of the homeless to their tony neighborhoods. We would likely have rulings overturning shit decisions like this one in days.
Regardless of if they are annoying you, you shouldn't try to treat this like a pest-control situation.
I urge you to re-think your position, with the understanding that they are real in the same way you are.
Homelessness should be combated with compassion and understanding. We have a responsibility to provide shelter, food, and ways out of homelessness for people.
Vagrancy on the other hand should be met with something else. We have the right as a society to ensure that our cities and public spaces work for everyone.
Considering there are more than half a million homeless in the United States, the sound of that many people furiously masturbating must truly be deafening!
Not to mention the vast underground supply chains necessary to keep that many people constantly high and on drugs. For next to no money! How efficient!
I might spend a few weeks in the US to witness this unbelievable spectacle when I use up the remainder of my paid leave.
The ruling is hardly a huge win for civil liberties. It's pretty narrow and specific. A better title would be:
"States can't jail people for sleeping in public if there's no homeless shelters."
Of course such a title would seem reasonable and normal and wouldn't produce a click-bait news title that stokes the flames of national division.
If you can pay for a hotel room or other accommodation you the city/state can make it illegal for you to sleep outside.
"Each had been fined between $25 and $75. Five of them were sentenced to time served, while one twice served a single day in jail."
The core issue is punishing someone for something they are, vs punishing them for their behavior. The courts have said its cruel to prosecute someone for not having a home, when you're pretending that it's their behavior which is under attack.
Shelter is essential to life.
Here’s most of my other comment:
The decision was that because sleep - not camping, but sleep - is a biological necessity, there must be a practical way for homeless people to obtain it.
If that method isn’t shelters (because they’re full or inaccessible), then there needs to be places and/or times when sleeping is allowed and practical. The justices explicitly noted that this doesn’t mean municipalities can’t enact and enforce significant restrictions on when, where, and how (for example, no multi-day camping or no erecting structures) this can happen, including when no shelter beds are available. There needs to be a viable way to obtain sleep, though, whatever that way is.
https://sccinsight.com/2019/04/08/what-the-9th-circuit-actua... has an excellent unbiased explanation, though the core part of the decision is not that long. Here’s the footnote which explicitly carved out this stuff:
> Naturally, our holding does not cover individuals who do have access to adequate temporary shelter, whether because they have the means to pay for it or because it is realistically available to them for free, but who choose not to use it. Nor do we suggest that a jurisdiction with insufficient shelter can never criminalize the act of sleeping outside. Even where shelter is unavailable, an ordinance prohibiting sitting, lying, or sleeping outside at particular times or in particular locations might well be constitutionally permissible. See Jones, 444 F.3d at 1123. So, too, might an ordinance barring the obstruction of public rights of way or the erection of certain structures. Whether some other ordinance is consistent with the Eighth Amendment will depend, as here, on whether it punishes a person for lacking the means to live out the “universal and unavoidable consequences of being human” in the way the ordinance prescribes.
> The Ninth Circuit panel then walks through several important cases that touch on this question of what can be made criminal. Those cases highlight distinctions between criminalizing “status” and criminalizing “conduct,” beginning with a 1962 case, Robinson vs. California, in which the Supreme Court found that the State of California could not criminalize the state of being addicted to the use of narcotics (as opposed to the actual use of narcotics)
What if they have the ability to earn the means to pay for shelter, but choose not to do it? Or they have the means to relocate to somewhere where they could afford to pay for shelter but choose to remain in an area with a higher cost of living? IMHO it's a mistake to focus solely on the the current state and not the choices which led there.
Yes indeed, because of those ruthless gangs of homeless drug dealers, what with their effective means to procure and transport expensive products without being noticed, and their total lack of any profit from said enterprise keeping them homeless.
There is crime anywhere there are lots of people who have needs they can't meet, but even so, the crime rates aren't significant compared to other populations. Analysis such as this one by the Guardian show that the existence of homeless encampments don't have a direct link to crime rates: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/23/homeless-vil... Sometimes crime rates may increase slightly, and sometimes they decrease slightly. Reports like these go back decades: http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=200...
Utah has shown that housing people first alleviates a lot of stress. It takes away that fear of not having a basic, consistent place to sleep and be somewhat secure. Cities that implement housing first programs save a lot of money, as it's easier for those people to get to find work and get themselves out of the system.
Will some people abuse it and stay in government housing forever? Sure. But even with those people, municipalities still save money because a good chunk of the people can build their way out once their basic needs are met.
The fundamental failure of Measure H was that while there is the money to build the necessary housing, and the general political will to build somewhere....there is intense political opposition to any specific place that gets proposed as the location for homeless or transitional housing.
If this is an expected outcome, I would consider it fiscally irresponsible to propose building housing shelters in NIMBY neighborhoods and instead choose other places where money won't be wasted on litigation. There's no good reason for homeless shelters and other charitable services to be located on extremely valuable real estate and in NIMBY neighborhoods.
When I donated money last year to address this issue, I donated to an organization in Texas, despite living in San Francisco, because I knew the money was going to be wasted on the problem in San Francisco. When people making 6-figures right out of college have difficulty finding stable living arrangements in a place, it's futile to try and keep people in that same place that don't have nearly the same capacity to support themselves in an extraordinarily expensive market. For many homeless people, keeping them in SF is tantamount to keeping them homeless in perpetuity because almost none of them have a chance of escaping homelessness in that environment.
There are tons of good reasons. The primary reason is that "place" is a huge determination of societal outcomes for individuals. Homeless individuals in a nicer neighborhood will on average have better outcomes (rehabilitation, returning to normal life, seeking mental health treatment) than homeless individuals in rougher neighborhoods.
There are plenty of places in the US where you're less likely to meet costly legal resistance where people can get rehabilitation, returning to normal life and seeking mental health treatment.
Furthermore, even those services, such as rehabilitation and mental health treatment should be moved to lower cost of living markets where each dollar goes much further than in San Francisco. The salary of a social worker in SF is approximately 30% higher than some place like Dallas, TX.
Quite a few of these are planned for areas that already have a sizeable homeless population. It's beyond me how people think they're less safe with a Nav Center rather than just a bunch of people on the streets nearby, defecating on the sidewalk and ranting at the sky all day. (And before I get accused of stereotyping, this is literally what I see on my walk to work.)
And yet no one will dare admit complete incompetents are in charge of solving this problem.
I really have no problem with the concept of "criminalizing homelessness" -- as long as we can provide sufficient housing for everyone, regardless of their financial state.
Then many states won't let you have a license if you are homeless, unless you get help from a shelter and also try to make it harder to vote too. So you have to pretend you live with a relative or go to Texas or South Dakota to setup a mail forwarder and declare domicile since they recognize full time RVing. Plus heard some shelters won't help you if you still own a car, got to sell it first to receive services.
I have heard though South Dakota only lets you vote for federal and state elections though, not local(city and county) but not sure how true that is... For example one of the counties doesn't have a "Wheel Tax", which would effect people registered there if ever passed, so RVers would vote no of course on it. Yet they say you can still be called for Jury Duty as mentioned on the affidavit, but heard the popular county for mail forwarders exempt those addresses, so you won't get picked in the first place but even if you do just call and tell them you are traveling full time to be exempted... But kinda interesting you are like a resident but not really a resident. I guess no states really considered people could retire and RV full time or younger people could live in a van and work remotely online.
I guess kinda the same with college though... If you lived in California but your parents retired early and moved to Florida or Nevada, yet you wanted to stay in California to go to school with your high school friends then California would consider you a resident for DMV, taxes but no longer a resident for tuition since they go by your parents domicile until a certain age, yet until after a full year or two FL or NV wouldn't consider you a resident for school either, so I guess you could technically not be a resident of any state for tuition proposes.
It should be illegal. Parking spaces are by and large meant to primarily serve the needs of legal, taxpaying residents. When they get taken over for use as housing, it diminishes the ability for others to travel and visit friends/family/businesses. And street parking is taken away from those who live locally who may need to park overnight.
All this is still leaving aside the fact that it is super creepy to have someone living out of an RV on your block, watching everyone's arrival/departures, casing their joints. Especially because a number of these RV dwellers are permanently-nomadic drug-addicts who engage in property crime to fuel their habits.
No thanks.
Our inability to address the homeless problem is a direct result of "caring" and "nurturing" eclipsing all other values. We've become incapable of enacting any policy that someone might call "harsh", even if that policy would be better for everyone in the long term. Sometimes the right approach really is tough love.
That's a pretty loaded statement presented without evidence. Vagrants are aren't "the most vulnerable people in society'. They're criminals. If we punish them like criminals, they'll stop their criminal behavior or spent time in prison where they can't cause problems for everyone else.
That's a pretty loaded statement presented without evidence.
Wow. I've received 3 speeding tickets, and 2 right on red tickets in my life. I committed a crime. I paid fines. I was not removed from society.
That is the case with a huge number of crimes, today, otherwise we would have an even worse prison problem.
> I see no reason to abandon this tradition now.
We've already abandoned it, and we are reducing the sizes of prisons as you prattle on about the problems of vagrancy.
Let's get mental health care facilities, rehab, and more, to the levels that existed before Republicans gutted them starting in the 50's. I don't know, like institute new-deal type things so people aren't wanting for basic needs, and maybe vagrancy will go away.
Well, it did the last time we did that.
Why wouldn't we do the exact same thing that worked last time?
So give them that chance to say no. Right now, you're advocating for paying $81k/year (average for CA prisons) to keep people in prison, instead of trying to fix the underlying causes. Estimates put the number of homeless people in California at roughly 120k+, including families, children, etc.
So if we solve the problem as you are proposing, by putting them in prison right now, that's $9.7 billion / year. It would more than double the current California prison population, from current 115k people, to 235k+, and we'd need new child prisons, because a lot of those homeless folks are families with children.
Putting "vagrants" and other "homeless" people in prison is stupidly expensive, pointlessly punitive, and doesn't solve the underlying economic or social problems. It doesn't stop people from being poor, it just makes being poor suck worse than it already does. All you've done is put a bunch of vulnerable people in prison.
Is prison expensive? Sure. I bet it doesn't have to cost that much to lock people up. But even if it does, locking people up is a much better use of public funds than endless and equally expensive homeless "services" that enable bad behavior.
Wow, you have no idea what you're talking about.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2018/01...
Basically every family of 2+ adults have 2+ jobs in order to make things work today. Not 1, like the 50's when taxes on the wealthy was high, but 2+. More adults live at home today than ever before. We're in the worst job market in aggregate, as all real wages for the middle class are below starvation-level.
> I bet it doesn't have to cost that much to lock people up.
You are talking out of your ass. If you can do better, then run a business housing prisoners, and make a pile of money. Instead, you've provided literally nothing to the conversation aside from "things can't be that bad, these are bad people".
You've got no information, you've just got bad, hurtful, and hateful opinions. Take a class or read a book on social justice, find a way out of your edgelord shitposting. I'm done wasting my time on you.
Property crime is already a crime, hence the term. Assuming your stereotype is accurate, the police will arrest them for their actual crimes soon enough. Until then, the pre-crime of living in an RV isn't sufficient cause.
No this does not happen. Property crime ends up being the bottom priority in many cities because of limited staffing/resources/competing priorities.
> Until then, the pre-crime of living in an RV isn't sufficient cause.
Sure it is. Should a city allow everyone to do whatever they want? If not, why is it out of scope for them to create rules that minimize the likelihood of crimes in the first place? You are asking tax-paying law-abiding residents to rely on a low-probability outcome when there are better ways to avoid being in that position in the first place. The city government exists to support its tax-paying, law-abiding residents. Otherwise why would those residents live there and pay taxes?
Seems like some people RV by choice, and some people are forced into it. Like in some expensive places some people might take their last paycheck and buy a RV that barely runs so they still have some sort of shelter, still working locally, etc. I guess it's stereotyped for being homeless, or being retired while there are normal families who decided on this lifestyle. Some people even live on boats too. Some do it to try to save money, while some end up spending more than living in a house or apartment. Then the experience part, more of a adventure than the same boring same over and over.
I think if I did it, I'd probably stay a week or two in a area as I think moving every day would be stressful but a lot of neat stuff to see. Some people try and see every state in their first year... but if doing this full time can always come back to a place. But I guess planning and deciding on things can be hard since so much to see and do in this country. But I'd probably stick to campgrounds, rv parks, approved spots for boondocking... Sleeping on random streets just seemed odd to me, and I'd want the peace of mind of not being woken up by someone in the middle of the night.
Even some of the national forests seem to not be friendly towards people camping anymore. Coconino national forest I've heard complaints of, and as someone who studied a bit about civil rights I seen one story which I suspect the forest ranger totally broke the law, and not sure what the PC was... Someone had a truck camper, not the prettiest thing but he said the ranger was banging on his door and demanding all his info questioning him even though it was a legal spot on the map, sounds like the ranger was super rude and aggressive even though no law was broken he just wanted to know who was in "his forest" before leaving them alone. but apparently that forest is full of homeless people and not just people on vacation too.
Then some forests are understaffed, was reading reviews for one forest not too far from here and someone got their car broken in at a trailhead and no one even came to take a report, not sure what they did in that case since you need a report for insurance company. Then the forest fires out west has been a big drain on the budget too.
Some people want to privatize the national forests and parks. I'm kinda conflicted on that idea though. I feel like private companies would manage things better with more services, better hospitality, better made websites with information but probably be more expensive too. Then commercializing things take a bit away from nature, relaxing and disconnecting... I guess one of the ideas is to add WiFi, food trucks and same day Amazon package deliveries to the national parks as one of the proposed plans by the new administration to modernize the parks, which does seem convenience but I know people are against it too. Can see both the pros and cons of that idea.
I do feel the focus is more on the national parks though, seems like the national forests are being abandoned and some even want them shutdown or sold off completely which is pretty sad since some are being neglected. I guess the National Parks get higher priority when it comes to funding, probably since more popular too compared to the National Forests.
Palo Alto tried to accommodate the RVs with a parking lot in the civic center, but stopped after a couple of incidents at the nearby school.
Will RV/van parking become compulsory?
If any hardworking individuals were given the same accountrements in a high-cost city (permanent housing with housekeeping), there would be a huge waiting list. With a possible impending retirement crisis, able-bodied may not be the best term for qualification.
As an aside, recycling is not profitable anymore, but the pre-existing obligations prevent dramatic or even drastic change on that front. This is no different.
If I were to throw something on the wall for homelessness, I'd say keep it simple and build 3 new regional cities in the west, central and east with a clean slate design and throw up a sign that says "give us your tired, your poor" and see what happens. That way, several states, cities and counties are pooling their resources/budgets, you give everyone a red/white/blue moment, but in the true American Spirit, you make it someone elses problem overnight (aka. Make it disappear) for something you were going to pay for anyway.
If we limit "extreme economy/political/welfare/climate experiments" to only these 3 regional areas, we may actually get lucky and build something resilent enough to be a runway for future generations, while being strong enough to be a safety net for the current gens.
I say all of this in jest, but if it becomes a question of millions of old people dying with dignity, instead of homeless in the streets, there will be enough "zeros" to build it (nimby lingo).
No one has a right to live where they want at whatever price point they want. This is the strongest economy of all time. Unemployment is at an all time low. And there are many locations where someone can do a job (not necessarily the one they want) and earn a living, instead of picking the more desirable locations. I believe every jurisdiction should be able to set its own rules governing where/when people can sleep. And taxpayers should not be obligated to pay for someone else's life due to their lack of personal responsibility.
The refusal to hear the challenge here is simply enabling the permanently-nomadic to take over land they do not own at no cost and with no consequence.
Indeed, and this court ruling doesn't say that. The limitations of the circuit court ruling are described in the article, which I'm sure you've read. Second paragraph.
So, at least we know there is some bar - albeit very low - beyond which they're not willing to let local authorities victimize the poor. That is - you are at least allowed to sleep outside on the cold hard floor. Thanks SCOTUS.
If the problem is with the laws and the executive policies - and it really is - then let's fix those.