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.”
To be fair, the articles I’ve read about this have also indicated he wants to allocate three billion dollars to address homelessness, and that’s actually a good thing, as the current policy of rampant vagrancy addressed by policing and imprisonment is not only ineffective, but vastly more costly.
But even so, it’s still a ghoulish thing to say, and buckle up, because this motherfucker’s going to be the next Democratic candidate for president.
It will be 3 billion for hostile architecture and police crackdowns probably.
Sadly, history would suggest that’s eventually what happens. Democrats, for all their lofty rhetoric, love elevating the police as a militarized, licensed gang.
Yeah. Actually housing everyone needing it (and not in a shelter or concentration camp) would even cost less than the huge amount of hostile architecture and funding police harrasment*, cruelty is the point, and it is firmly in capitalist logic because this system need the visibly heavily opressed pariah class to discipline workers.
*It’s not some nebulous “already spend on police” cathegory as some people claim every time the topic surfaces. Manpower, supplies and time used by police for that are clearly calculable.