On May 12, California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, demanded that cities throughout the state adopt anti-camping ordinances that would effectively ban public homelessness by requiring unhoused individuals to relocate every 72 hours.
While presented as a humanitarian effort to reduce homelessness, the new policy victimizes California’s growing unhoused population—approximately 187,000 people—by tying funding in Proposition 1 to local laws banning sleeping or camping on public land.
In his announcement, Newsom pushed local governments to adopt the draconian ordinances “without delay.”
I definitely get what you’re saying here, but I think you’ve overblown what you see as the issue.
Housing is DEFINITELY the issue itself. Many homeless people get started on the path to mental and drug abuse issues when that paycheque doesn’t go far enough to pay the bills. Student Loans. Car Notes. Rent. Food. All get more and more expensive, making it harder to be a productive member of society, and meanwhile, pay stays criminally low. Until you watch as your landlord kicks you out, with a few dollars to your name and hundreds or even thousands of dollars of bills screaming for those few bills, and watch as everything you ever owned gets thrown out on the lawn and then stolen because you can’t protect any of it, and then some shadowy figure offers you a hit of the good stuff to make you just forget the fact that society considers you a failure, you can’t know how hard it is to deal with this situation unless you have a tiny bit of empathy.
I’m not saying we should tolerate this. I’m saying that we need to address the real root causes: costs are so high while pay is so low, and get people into housing again, with the understanding that drugging up and being a ‘free spirit’ on the back of somebody else’s labour isn’t an option. But saying housing isn’t an issue shows you don’t actually understand the problem. Please rethink that.