The debate over how US cities can respond to America’s spiraling homelessness crisis reached the supreme court this week, as justices heard arguments over the constitutionality of local laws used against unhoused people sleeping outside.
The justices on Monday considered a challenge to rulings from a California-based appeals court that found punishing people for sleeping outside when shelter space is lacking amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.
The case stems from a 2019 camping ban enacted by city officials in Grants Pass, a small mountain town in Oregon where rents are rising and where there is just one overnight shelter for adults. Debra Blake, who had lost her job a decade earlier and was unhoused, was cited for illegal camping. After being convicted and fined, she soon joined other unhoused residents in suing the city.
The city has passed three ordinances that target sleeping and camping in public streets, alleyways and parks. Under those laws, violators can face fines […]
What a wonderful story. This fight has been going on for over forty years since Ronald Reagan’s cuts to public housing. It demonstrates quite clearly the contradictions inherent in the current capitalist system, which is more of a corporate socialism model than true capitalism. This is the natural consequence of corporate concentration in multiple sectors of the economy, the artificial suppression of wages, tax cuts to the wealthy, and the slashing of State and local budgets. Combine these with a bloated military budget, and here we are. Are the workers willing to give up their fear to act? All of the individuals you see are workers. The system will not allow them to make it. Media would portray this as a local or individual problem. As you connect the dots it becomes clear this has been and continues to be a structural set of problems engineered by neo-liberal economic policy, and a neo-liberal foreign policy which views the world as its play thing. Stop supporting the empire, redirect the resources to home, and this problem is solved.
Well said!