City dwellers need safe and clean streets and public transportation. Kids should be able to walk to school by themselves.
These two things don’t need to be in conflict.
> Homeless need shelter and help. It is inhumane that we let them rot on the streets.
The issue being argued was not that homeless should be able to camp where ever and whenever they want. This issue was that if you don't provide shelter then you cannot kick them out of public spaces.
If that was the law, then it would mean you need to build shelters if you don't want homeless in the streets.
What this new verdict means is:
- You can forcibly remove homeless people who have nowhere else to go
- Thus homelessness can be effectively illegal
- The only realistic solutions now are:
- Put the homeless in prisons
- Move them to cities and towns that don't have the resources to remove them.[1] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/sf-supre...
lel
That's expensive, of course, so cities will have the incentive to do what the city of Chico did when it provided an outdoor shelter facility for the homeless. A district court refused to allow Chico to enforce it's ban on camping even though it had that facility, because it was an outdoor facility not an indoor one. This ruling gives cities the ability to say "you can camp here, not there".
Agree. But is it cruel and unusual? The court says no.
It rules that the Eighth Amendment doesn’t substantially restrict what constitutes a crime, just the punishment. (It restricts criminalising status. So the court mostly focussed on whether the law criminalises homelessness, versus specific actions, which it found it does not.)