More cities make homeless encampments a crime, leaving low-income people with few options
Timothy P. Carney
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“Camping bans” are trending on the West Coast these days. Before the 2010s, this might have caused some head-scratching. These statutes might some day cause a future historian to cock an eye. But if you live in a temperate U.S. city these days, you know exactly what’s going on.
Portland and San Diego, two cities advancing camping bans this summer, are swamped with an epidemic of homelessness. COVID lockdowns turned Main Streets into ghost towns, which made them ripe for takeover by homeless encampments.
HIGH SCHOOL OR HOMELESS SHELTER?
Then, the riots after George Floyd was killed by police turned parts of Portland into post-apocalyptic hellscapes. Throw in the urban doom loops in many cities where crime and abandonment cause more abandonment, which causes more crime, etc.
“There are currently hundreds of unsanctioned, sometimes dangerous, and often squalid homeless camps across the 146 square miles of Portland,” Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler said. “These homeless camps represent nothing short of a humanitarian catastrophe.”
Wheeler has advanced a daytime camping ban in Portland. It would allow homeless people to set up a tent in a park after 8 p.m., but by 8 a.m., they would need to pack up camp. Opponents deride this as forcing the unhoused to carry all their belongings on their backs for 12 hours.
San Diego’s camping ban, which passed June 13, would be 24 hours and would apply on sidewalks, parks, and in canyons, where campfires pose a real risk of sparking wildfires.
Gilroy, in the San Francisco Bay area, voted on June 5 to ban outdoor camping near schools and in its main park, among other places.
These West Coast lawmakers have to thread a needle on these laws, given a 2019 decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that governments can’t ban homeless camping unless they provide a housing alternative.
These are hotly contested matters. The public meeting at which San Diego’s City Council passed its camping ban included about 7 hours of public comment, some for, some against.
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The debate is this: Is the harshness of clearing out a homeless encampment and forcing its residents into a homeless shelter justified by the disorder caused by the camps that are spreading throughout the city?
Or, if you go back to the days of the George Floyd protests, you could sum up the debate in one question: Whose streets?