Earlier this year I began to notice clumps of adults sleeping on the sidewalks of downtown San Diego and that’s when I discovered that sleeping on the city’s sidewalks had recently been decriminalized.
Earlier this year I began to notice clumps of adults sleeping on the sidewalks of downtown San Diego and that’s when I discovered that sleeping on the city’s sidewalks had recently been decriminalized.
It was always absurd to ticket homeless people for sleeping on city property and so this news, which comes as the result of a lawsuit ruling stipulating that it is unconstitutional to ticket the homeless when adequate shelters to house them don’t exist, makes sense. Still, in contrast to the state of affairs in downtown San Diego where folks can be discovered huddled under blankets in the 80-degree midday heat, the legal right to sleep on the sidewalk is not complete: “Starting immediately, people can sleep on city property from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. without fear of police citations. That is unless they are doing something illegal, such as being drunk or fighting.”
It’s a progressive (if not legally mandated) response to the settlement, but it’s sure to perpetuate the discussion over homelessness downtown. Ever since the new ballpark was installed in the continuously gentrifying eastern area of downtown San Diego, business owners seeking to capitalize on money flowing into and out of the ballpark each game day have been complaining about the homeless population there. They’ve also been looking for somewhere to build a homeless shelter, but it’s a hard thing to house when no one wants to live next door.
Federal stimulus money may help in some small way with the homeless problem, if a location for one can ever be agreed on. Shelters are supposed to be better ways of spending money on homelessness than the usual ignore-and-prosecute methods, and the $6 million promised San Diego for its homelessness problem would be a good start in that direction. As one editorial in the Union-Tribune recently pointed out, shelters save cities money over the other methods and the editorialists offer their own establishment as an example:
For example, in the 1990s, a statewide study revealed that the Rescue Mission alone saved taxpayers about $50 million a year because its residents did not end up in emergency rooms or the county mental health system, nor were they defacing property or committing crimes.
And this, I suppose, is what I find interesting about the issue: it typifies a political discussion where little forward-thinking is employed because the most marginalized citizens are the easiest to expediently deal with. Whereas it makes fiscal sense to build homeless shelters, it’s a politically difficult task to do so, and thus the political incentive is to do what is logically absurd: keep ticketing these people and hope they’ll go somewhere else.
(See other photos of San Diego taken by flickr user tallcj by following the photo above to his flickr page)
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