Downtown Portland experimented with its own tiny home community.
The homes were cute, I wouldn’t have minded one myself.
However reportedly due to drug use and violence it became too dangerous for the community service workers to enter the area. The situation quickly turned into a tiny home slum.
The city not long after demolished the little time home community and moved the residents “elsewhere”.
I sincerely hope Austin has a better plan and studies the failed attempt in Portland.
Cities have learned this the hard way over and over again. You can't just concentrate your homeless population in a single camp or shelter. You need to put them up in normal homes and apartments. It's almost a fundamental law of community policing. You need to surround your vulnerable and dangerous persons with communities that will help police themselves.
2021 - Republican state legislature rams through a bill to make it a crime to be homeless on state land.
2023 - Austin voters criminalized being homeless with Prop B.
When you take people from one place, and offer them a Hobson's choice of jail or a housing not nearby in another place, it has a specific term: "concentration camp".
In the meantime, APD is critically understaffed, underfunded, morale is very low, and non-life-threatening service calls are largely ignored. APD officers are there to collect a paycheck and do as little as possible. As an ex-APD officer said: you take your life into your hands living or visiting Austin because it's unsafe by design of political extremists in the DA's office who refuse to prosecute repeated violent crime and property crime.
This is objectively false. Offering less-than-ideal free housing isn’t even remotely comparable to imprisonment in harsh conditions.
If you are going to be a burden on society, you shouldn’t be surprised when society makes decisions about how to care for you in a way that puts their needs before yours. Those who find this situation intolerable are, of course, invited to care for themselves as they see fit.
To me, it seems the homeless may actually be a burden of society. Might widely-held definitions of "burden on society" be specious, at best? Like, I'm sure there's data that could convince many people they are right about what constitutes societal burden, but these are not necessarily people looking for answers; yes, these are people looking for problems, which is needed to an extent, but they are more likely simply confirming their own biases, which is not all that necessary.
> When you take people from one place, and offer them a Hobson's choice of jail or a housing not nearby in another place, it has a specific term: "concentration camp".
So just let people live outside indefinitely? You can offer help but a lot of them will turn it down, then what? Now consider that a lot of these people are hurting themselves and insisting on continuing down that path, which inevitably leads to their death. In other words, doing nothing means people destroy themselves, and doing something requires force because many these people are not in the right state of mind to help themselves.
> When you take people from one place, and offer them a Hobson's choice of jail or a housing not nearby in another place, it has a specific term: "concentration camp".
Texas' interpretation of Martin v. City of Boise is as good-faith as California or New York's interpretation of the 2nd amendment.
If you're homeless, there are social services and community groups that want to provide care, food, shelter, and importantly rehabilitation and reintegration back into the community. The way the roads are setup in Austin meant most of the campers were adjacent to highways, and it's very dangerous with these campers leaving carts and boxes in the road when drivers have to go 50 mph around turns. And for what - to give some people some inalienable right to public land so they can slowly wither away, slaves to their vices? Austin has all of the social safety nets that have been known to work for thousands of years when people are down on their luck or are special and need additional assistance.
So if you don't like it: nobody in Texas, nor Austin cares either. The United States Marshals Service does not have the resources to actually do anything in practice to enforce the Ninth Circuit's ruling.
Concentration camps are some of the worst atrocities ever in human history.
You should genuinely be embarrassed and ashamed of yourself for demeaning the words.
> In the meantime, APD is critically understaffed, underfunded, morale is very low, and non-life-threatening service calls are largely ignored.
Mayor Kirk Watson welcomed 25 new officers to the Austin Police Department just a few days ago.
> APD officers are there to collect a paycheck and do as little as possible. As an ex-APD officer said: you take your life into your hands living or visiting Austin because it's unsafe by design of political extremists in the DA's office who refuse to prosecute repeated violent crime and property crime.
Did the ex-APD officer also tell you they were there to collect a paycheck and do as little as possible? Sounds like a really sweet deal. Why would anyone leave a job like that, especially when you get a badge and gun.
The Housing First initiative was hugely successful.
The idea being all of the causes of homelessness are easier to treat when someone has a home: mental illness, drug addiction, health conditions etc
Turns out you don’t have to force people to have a home. If you provide it they’ll take it. And you can provide treatment once they had an address to visit. Treating them in the home is 5x more cost effective than treating them on the street and in emergency rooms and cleaning up the streets and dealing with the fallout of living outdoors.
The house first initiative was hugely successful, but got defunded by people who ideologically didn’t believe it could work and didn’t bother to check the evidence that it was working smashingly. That language about “tough love and junkie degenerates” is an example of exactly the ideology that killed the most successful effort we’ve ever had to combat homelessness.
Here's the retort: "If this program is so successful, why do I still see all these degenerates?"
You can house 50% of the homeless and the average voter won't give one iota of damn unless they see a decrease in the homeless in their surroudings.
The most visible homeless are those who will be kicked out of these kinds of programs--often for substance abuse (as was, in fact, pointed out in the article).
Even if they are "successful", these programs will keep getting defunded unless you somehow decrease the quantity of the most visible homeless.
https://www.koin.com/local/multnomah-county/portland-oregon-...