The high court’s ruling is already having a ripple effect on cities across the country, which have been emboldened to take harsher measures to clear out homeless camps that have grown in the aftermath of the pandemic.
Many US cities have been wrestling with how to combat the growing crisis. The issue has been at the heart of recent election cycles on the West Coast, where officials have poured record amounts of money into creating shelters and building affordable housing.
Leaders face mounting pressure as long-term solutions - from housing and shelters to voluntary treatment services and eviction help - take time.
“It’s not easy and it will take a time to put into place solutions that work, so there’s a little bit of political theatre going on here," Scout Katovich, an attorney who focuses on these issues for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told the BBC.
"Politicians want to be able to say they’re doing something,”
Then deal with the drug problem. But I’ll tell you right now that most homeless people do not have the money or time to do drugs unless they’re homeless because of drugs. The majority of homeless people work as many hours as they can and are constantly trying to become not homeless.
Oh, we are NOW. Finally! It took a repeal of our drug legalization law first. That was when the problems started:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Oregon_Ballot_Measure_110
Yeah they did that policy completely backwards. The Portugal experiment works, but you have to actually do what they did and Oregon did none of the follow up work the Portuguese did.
But you shouldn’t be punishing homeless people for that, at best it’s some sort of venn diagram and critics want to make it look like a circle.
Oregon’s problem was assuming the drug addicted want assistance. They don’t. All they wanted was clean needles.
