Criminalizing Homelessness Will Not End Homelessness

It seems pretty obvious to me, but what do I know?

Home doesn’t look the same for everyone. | Photo by Lea Böhm on Unsplash

Imagine you’re sitting in your home. Perhaps you’re making dinner. Maybe you’re watching a movie on your big screen TV. Maybe you’re cuddling with your dog or your cat, kicking your feet up with a book in your hands.

Now imagine hearing shouting outside. You feel nervous, uncertain, but you have an inkling of what might be happening. You leap up and start scrambling to pack, getting your most important belongings together in a bag.

You know you only have a couple of minutes at best, and you kick yourself for not preparing for this to happen to you.

Sure enough, soon your door is smashed open. Uniformed police officers burst in, and you find yourself being bodily pushed outside — your bag clutched in your hands, your pet being hauled out of your arms and taken away.

It’s illegal to live here, they tell you. You’ll be arrested if you kick up a fuss. Your home will be destroyed, and goodness knows what’s going to happen to your pet.

Sounds unbelievable, right? That’s because you have a roof over your head.

But if you live in a tent like many homeless people do, this is their reality. It may not look like much to us, but a tent and a campfire is their living situation. They cook dinner there, cuddle with their pets there, sleep there, and enjoy leisure time there when they have it.

It’s not a house, but it is shelter. It’s home.

Having it ripped down, destroyed, and being treated like a criminal for being there is an awful experience.

For the homeless, sleeping on the street is often their only option. They can’t just go inside, hotels cost too much, shelters are often full and underfunded, and many of them don’t allow pets.

Some of them don’t even allow spouses to stay together, forcing couples to choose between sleeping rough or sheltering apart.

So when Johnny Law comes down and breaks up their camp and forces them to move on, what are they supposed to do? What options are left?

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This is home for somebody. They may not have anywhere else to go. | Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

California is currently buckling under the weight of a crisis; the number of residents who are currently unhoused is steadily rising, and the shelter and assistance system is quickly getting overwhelmed.

Homelessness is on the rise in the State, and is currently smashing records as a confluence of factors wind a tight knot that’s proving difficult to unravel. There’s the rising cost of living, loss of home insurance, rampant natural disasters — including wildfires — and numerous other issues all contributing to the mess.

And of course, there are all the usual causes as well; discrimination, mental health struggles and substance abuse disorder.

Housing costs in California are outrageous, and people are left with very limited options on where to go. It’s so bad that a State lawmaker put out a proposal to allow college students to sleep in their cars on campus to make up for a lack of available housing.

As is the case pretty much everywhere, the homeless population in California is mostly made up of marginalized people, such as people of colour, disabled people, and LGBTQ+ individuals.

Now, you’d think that the compassionate response to this would be to increase access and funding for assistance and build more afforable housing — preferably outside of the expensive zones and in locations less prone to wildfire damage.

The actual response we’re seeing doesn’t cut it. It doesn’t even come close.

Gavin Newsom — of ‘Make American Film Again’ fame — is out stomping around, demanding the cities in his State ‘do something’, including a request to ban people from camping in one place for three consecutive days.

There’s no enforcement power behind his statements, so he can bluster all he likes. On top of that, the cuts he’s making to other vital services to ‘help with the homeless epidemic’ will exacerbate the issue, not solve it.

“But if the situation doesn't improve before the primaries in 2028, Newsom may be forced to explain to a national audience why his state, with the fourth-largest economy in the world, has the largest homeless population in the U.S., with about 187,000 people living on the streets, in cars and in decrepit RVs on any given night.

“It’s pure triangulation,” said Democratic strategist Max Burns, referring to Newsom's attempt to appeal to both the right and the left. “This is Gavin Newsom trying to enact this theory that the reason we lost last year was because we were just too progressive."

Newsom's call to clear encampments and roll back services for undocumented immigrants and reproductive health care have left many voters wondering where his priorities lie.” — NBC article by Alicia Victoria Lozano

It should be a no-brainer, but reproductive healthcare is important to help keep women — anyone who can become pregnant, really — out of poverty. Especially in a country where medical care is costly, and the maternal and infant mortality rate is so high.

As for services for undocumented immigrants, the issues with it should also be clear. When you make it harder and more expensive for people to meet their basic needs, you increase poverty.

Specifically, Newsom is proposing a cap on healthcare services for ‘people with unsatisfactory immigration status’ and adding premium charges.

Undocumented immigrants, like it or not, do live in California — and many are part of the homeless population. Making it harder for them to get help doesn’t make them go away, it just leaves them trapped in a situation with no easy solution.

As shocking as it sounds, making it borderline impossible for people to survive through legal means does not reduce poverty or crime. I know, it sounds far-fetched.

This is, quite simply, a political campaign stunt for Newsom. And what’s more, given the disparity between what counties are responsible for, what cities are responsible for, and what non-profits are able to do, there just isn’t a cohesive plan in place for how to mitigate the homelessness problem in California.

This article provides a great breakdown of the issues with California’s assistance systems as they currently stand.

Nobody is homeless because they want to be. They are human beings who need help. | Photo by Jose Thormann on Unsplash

Applying laws to control homeless people, without providing them with better options, does not help.

It doesn’t help any more than the hostile architecture measures in other parts of the States do — making it painful or impossible to sleep on a bench doesn’t magically get people off the street.

Don’t worry, I have plans to cover the topic of hostile architecture in another article. It’s needlessly cruel, and you know that makes it a pet peeve of mine!

All it does is make them less visible, relegating them into the fringes where they don’t show up on camera, and they can be safely ignored. Disregarded. Treated like cockroaches, only paid attention to when they scuttle out into the light.

We shouldn’t be treating human beings — people who need help, not disgust — like vermin.

And the worst part of all of this is, we don’t need to. Other countries have figured this out and solved it already, and there is no reason that one of the world’s largest economies — California is insanely wealthy, remember — can’t do better.

And while I don’t live in California, as a Canadian, I have a similar beef with our government’s poor handling of the situation, too. We can all do better.

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So, no. Criminalizing homeless encampments and making it harder for them to live does not make the problem go away.

It makes it worse. It makes it harder for people to claw their way out of the deep hole of poverty, and it adds extra worries and instability at a time when what they really need is compassion and a hand up.

More restrictions ain’t it. Better solutions exist. We know damn well what they are; we just need to convince the powers-that-be that they’re worth spending money on.

Solidarity wins.

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