Posted on 01/13/2024 2:34:50 AM PST by Libloather
The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to weigh in on whether homeless individuals have the right to camp on public property. The issue is the biggest SCOTUS case in decades on the rights of the homeless, and the decision has the potential to impact how cities across the U.S. handle the homelessness crisis.
Grants Pass, located in southwestern Oregon with a population of nearly 40,000, requested that the high court review a lower court decision that ruled it unconstitutional to punish homeless residents for camping on public property when no shelter alternatives are unavailable.
According to court filings, there are there are no homeless shelters in the city and the two privately operated housing programs in town “serve only a small fraction” of the homeless population. The plaintiff’s lawyers wrote how in 2013, Grants Pass “began aggressively enforcing a set of ordinances that make it unlawful to sleep anywhere on public property with so much as a blanket to survive cold nights.”
The filing added, “The Ninth Circuit correctly concluded that the City’s efforts to punish involuntarily homeless persons for simply existing in Grants Pass transgress the Eighth Amendment’s ‘substantive limits on what can be made criminal and punished as such.'”
The issue has brought together liberal and conservative leaders in an unlikely position of urging the Supreme Court to overturn the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, and other Democratic leaders in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Honolulu, have asked the high court to review the restrictions on homeless encampments — joining conservative Arizona legislators, and district attorney offices backing the appeal.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
According to the modernist, Marxist clown-tard mentality, homeless, junkies and scumbags are owed shelters and handouts.
Yes
Involuntary conservatorships.
With such safeguards as ombudsmen, appeal rights and yearly review.
And the mentally ill housing complexes can be in remote locations. Not prime real estate areas. No one has a “right” to live in down San Francisco or etc.
“homeless” and “residents” are impossible. No one is a resident when they do not have a home as they do not reside anywhere.
Cities and towns were created to protect against the vagrants.
Exactly—when housing is expensive people double up, triple up, quadruple up—whatever they can afford—if they choose to live in expensive areas.
That is how the rest of the third world does it.
“...these families don’t have the means or the ability to do so”
Many families have exhausted lots of their savings trying to help their relations on the streets. Some succeed but many fail. It takes many families a LONG time to realize the futility of trying to help those who do not really want help and then having to finally give up after exhausting everything. The mental exhaustion and anguish heaped on supportive families is as devastating as the monetary exhaustion. Then there is the endless grief and self-incrimination — “if only I had NOT done ABC” or “if only I HAD done XYX.”
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