The Homeless Bill of Rights, the name applied to a new bill that recently soared through the California Assembly’s Judiciary Committee on a 7-2 vote, is the latest in a long line of California legislation that has grabbed national attention for its sheer lunacy. At the current rate, California’s “differently sheltered” will be the only residents left with any rights.
Its worst provisions have been stripped away and I doubt the governor will sign something that so thoroughly offends city officials, but the proposal does epitomize the mock-worthy nature of so much of the thinking that dominates this state’s government. Legislators in all states introduce crazy stuff to make a point. But in California, these strange bills can actually make it to the governor’s desk.
The homeless bill’s author, Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco), deserves credit for at least identifying a real problem, which is an oddity in a Legislature that usually avoids reality. Homelessness is rampant in California, and the troubled people who wander our streets often have nowhere to go as they get chased from one location to the next.
Homelessness is a vexing problem, but the solution is not to make the homeless a protected class of citizen with a constitutional right to urinate on sidewalks and accumulate piles of vermin-infested clothing in city parks. Instead of giving the homeless a place to live, the state government wants to give them taxpayer-subsidized lawyers.
The bill features overstated civil-rights-oriented language. It notes that California has “a long history of discriminatory laws and ordinances that have disproportionately affected people with low incomes.” The language refers to Jim Crow laws and anti-Okie laws.
Cities here struggle – sometimes clumsily and unfairly – with throngs of people who camp out in city parks and sleep on sidewalks and in doorways. There is a legitimate public issue here.
When I worked in a downtown Sacramento office building, my colleagues and I joked about being in a scene from a zombie movie. As we walked down the street, homeless people would limp toward us, hands out, demanding money. One of my reporters was assaulted by one. In a well-publicized incident near my old office, a homeless woman shot a man in a wheelchair after he told her to get a job. It’s not always unreasonable to try to shoo them away.
The homeless – many of whom are mentally ill or have substance-abuse issues – need compassion and social services (preferably ones provided by non-profits, rather than by government bureaucracies more interested in creating big pensions for their employees). Instead they are used as pawns for a politician’s political posturing.
The most objectionable language has already been removed. Critics have mocked the now-deleted provision that guaranteed homeless people “the right to engage in life sustaining activities that must be carried out in public spaces.” That includes eating, congregating, collecting personal property, and urinating. I’ve known non-homeless people who have received a citation for peeing in public, but a homeless person would have been exempt had the original language remained intact.
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http://reason.com/archives/2013/05/03/homeless-bill-of-rights-showcases-califo
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