The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has drawn a line on homelessness, voting 3-2 to support a challenge to an expansive 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that forbids local governments in nine Western states from enforcing laws against camping or sleeping on sidewalks or in other public places unless overnight shelter is available.

That ruling came in September 2018. In invalidating a Boise, Idaho, law against sleeping on public lands, Judge Marsha Berzon wrote that “just as the state may not criminalize the state of being ‘homeless in public places,’ the state may not criminalize conduct that is an unavoidable consequence of being homeless — namely sitting, lying or sleeping on the streets.’” Berzon wrote for a three-judge panel.

Ted Olson, the former U.S. solicitor general who won the Bush v. Gore case before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000, is among the attorneys working with the city of Boise on an appeal. Los Angeles County will file an amicus brief in support of the appeal.

Republican Supervisor Kathryn Barger and Democrat Supervisor Janice Hahn co-sponsored the resolution to file the brief. Democratic Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, a member of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s state homelessness task force, surprised some observers by being the third vote for the resolution. Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and many big-city Democrats have endorsed policies that emphasize helping and sympathizing with the homeless. Garcetti has called homelessness “the moral and humanitarian crisis of our time.”

Supervisor: Don’t accept ’emergency’ as ‘new normal’

But Ridley-Thomas said in a statement that he was “fed up. The status quo is untenable. … We need to call this what it is — a state of emergency — and refuse to resign ourselves to a reality where people are allowed to live in places not fit for human habitation. I refuse to accept this as our new normal.” Los Angeles County has nearly 60,000 homeless people, according to official estimates, more than double the numbers seen 20 years ago.

Supervisors Sheila Kuehl and Hilda Solis, both Democrats, voted no on the resolution, saying homelessness should not be criminalized. Kuehl also said she feared what a “terrible” U.S. Supreme Court might decide in its ruling.

Activists blasted Barger, Hahn and Ridley-Thomas not only for lacking compassion but for reinforcing the narrative of President Donald Trump that homelessness is out of control in coastal California.

“We can’t let Los Angeles, San Francisco and numerous other cities destroy themselves by allowing what’s happening,” Trump said last week.

The president has used Twitter to depict leaders of these cities as hapless and paralyzed in responding to declining quality of life caused by homelessness. He also dispatched Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson to visit Skid Row in Los Angeles last week and said he wanted to help California deal with its homeless problem.

But the nature of possible federal help is unclear. Trump has suggested that homeless people might be rounded up and housed on federal property or military bases, but civil-rights lawyers say the president has no authority to forcibly relocate individuals who have not committed federal crimes. 

The Associated Press reported that Carson might link federal housing grants to local governments’ efforts to make it easier to add housing by limiting regulations. That approach would parallel efforts by Newsom and lawmakers led by state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, to weaken local zoning rules that they say enable NIMBYs to block new housing.

A ruling this month by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals which holds it is unconstitutional to ban homeless people from sleeping on the streets is likely to complicate the attempts to crack down on homelessness problems by local governments in California.

While the ruling involved a 2009 law adopted by Boise, Idaho, it is binding on California, which is one of the states under the 9th appellate court, which is based in San Francisco.

“[J]ust as the state may not criminalize the state of being ‘homeless in public places,’ the state may not ‘criminalize conduct that is an unavoidable consequence of being homeless — namely sitting, lying, or sleeping on the streets,’” Judge Marsha Berzon wrote for a three-judge panel.

The finding that the law is a cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment was welcomed by activists who have long argued that such restrictions make being poor a crime.

Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, told the Idaho Statesman that “criminally punishing homeless people for sleeping on the street when they have nowhere else to go is inhumane, and we applaud the court for holding that it is also unconstitutional.” Her group provided an attorney to the handful of Boise homeless men and women who sued over the city’s law.

If Boise does not appeal the ruling, the 9th Circuit will have expanded on the protections for the homeless that it created in 2007. The appellate panel ruled then that Los Angeles could not ban people from sleeping outside when shelters were full.

Legality of living in cars is next battleground

Meanwhile, the next fight over homeless rights in California has already emerged. It involves regulations in many cities that have the de facto effect of banning people from sleeping in their vehicles, even if the practice is not specifically singled out.

In Los Angeles, for example, a city ordinance that bans overnight parking in residential areas and a growing number of such restrictions in commercial areas have made it increasingly difficult for vehicle dwellers to find anywhere to sleep. This has made life difficult for the estimated 15,000 people who live in their cars, trucks or recreational vehicles in the city. The policy prompted sharp criticism from some quarters this spring over a perception that City Hall was insufficiently sympathetic to those without shelter.

City officials in San Diego and Santa Barbara are going in the opposite direction, starting trial programs in which car dwellers are allowed to use a handful of designated parking lots overnight – so long as they meet a handful of rules meant to preserve public safety and to minimize littering and public defecation and urination.

But San Diego may have to expand its program or develop other new policies as well. Last month, federal Judge Anthony Battaglia issued an injunction banning the city from ticketing people for living in their vehicles.

Unlike in the other high-profile federal cases involving city laws and homelessness, Battaglia’s argument wasn’t based on the idea that penalties which appeared to single out the homeless were cruel and unusual.

Instead, he concluded that “plaintiffs have shown a likelihood of success on the merits of their claim that the ordinance is vague because it fails to alert the public what behavior is lawful and what behavior is prohibited.” He noted that some people were given tickets merely for reading books in their cars.

The injunction is not permanent, but Battaglia indicated he is likely to make it so in coming months.

On June 30, 2004, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom won national headlines when he

Newsom said he wanted a “dramatic shift” from reactive policies used to deal with those without shelter who often suffer from addiction, mental illness or both. He promised that the aggressive transients seen in downtown areas harassing storekeepers, residents and tourists would get indoor housing; that the newly homeless would have access to immediate help to prevent them from going on downward spirals; and, perhaps most remarkably, that emergency homeless shelters eventually would have to close because they would have no transients left to serve.

Fourteen years later, Newsom’s promises seem like fantasies – or cruel jokes – in a city where the quality of life and the tourism industry feel under siege from 7,500 or more homeless people. Despite spending more than $2 billion on the problem since 2004 – vastly more than big cities with similar homeless issues – San Francisco officials sometimes convey the sense of feeling overwhelmed.

The notion that the problem is out of control is frequently illustrated by visiting journalists who make parts of the city seem like obstacle courses covered by feces, used needles and surly, erratic individuals ready to intimidate passers-by into giving them money.

Yet San Francisco’s problem is actually in some ways both better and worse than in similar cities. Despite a brutal housing crisis that makes paying rent difficult even for those making $100,000 or more, the total number of homeless has been flat in recent years, unlike other large California cities. San Francisco has also managed to avoid the emergence of mass encampments of transients seen in neighboring Oakland and elsewhere in urban areas.

Disturbed, disruptive homeless more common in city

So what is driving the perception that the homeless problem is worse than ever in the city? An article in the June 1 issue of The Economist made the case that San Francisco had an intense concentration of the most disturbed, disruptive homeless – individuals who generally make up a relative handful of the homeless in much of Southern California.

“[The] rates of mental illness and addiction among the homeless have increased. Use of more potent mind-bending drugs, like fentanyl and methamphetamine, has risen, too. Nearly 70 percent of psychiatric emergency-room visits by the homeless are the result of methamphetamine-induced psychosis,” The Economist wrote.

This psychosis may be driving a public health crisis spurred by open defecation in the streets. Complaints about human feces in the city nearly tripled from 2009 to 2017, reaching 21,000 last year.

Tourists are noticing. On July 2, the city’s convention and visitor bureau announced that it had lost one of its biggest accounts – an unnamed medical group which had a long tradition of regularly bringing 15,000 free-spending conventioneers to the Bay Area. Given tourism – not tech – remains San Francisco’s biggest industry, city officials were alarmed.

Long before that announcement, London Breed – the Willie Brown protege who took over as mayor on July 11 – said reducing homelessness’ impact on the city was her top priority. So far a key focus has been on giving the city new authority to use conservatorship laws to allow interventions into the lives of the most troubled individuals.

Newsom plans ‘granular’ approach to issue if elected

As for Newsom, the lieutenant governor is now the heavy favorite to succeed Gov. Jerry Brown. Undaunted by what’s happened in San Francisco since his 2004 pledge, he’s touting the most aggressive efforts yet by the state government to reduce homelessness.

If he defeats Republican John Cox in November, Newsom told the Sacramento Bee that he’d “get deeply involved at a granular level where most governors haven’t in the past.”

“I want to be held accountable on this issue, and I want to be disruptive of the status quo,” Newsom said. “I’m willing to take risks. I’m not here to be loved. What’s going on is unacceptable, and it is inhumane.”

But advocates of Senate Bill 676, a new bill that would ban police from fining or arresting people for sleeping outdoors, is facing a tough reception.

Sen. Carol Liu, a La Cañada Flintridge Democrat who is a sponsor of the bill, depicts it as being about human rights. The language of the measure says it “would afford persons experiencing homelessness the right to use public spaces without discrimination based on their housing status and describe basic human and civil rights that may be exercised without being subject to criminal or civil sanctions, including the right to use and to move freely in public spaces, the right to rest in public spaces and to protect oneself from the elements.”

It would also allow homeless people to sue authorities if these rights were abrograted and would mandate that all local communities take steps to minimize the “criminalization of homelessness.”

Bill called counterproductive, poorly conceived

However, the administration of Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson and local business groups in the state capital call the proposal poorly conceived and warn it could have huge potential unintended consequences.

The Downtown Sacramento Partnership, a community assessment district of Sacramento merchants, approaches the issue from an entirely different direction.

 

Allowing people to sleep inside cities not only creates a public safety hazard, but it undermines current efforts to permanently house people because it signals that a city is comfortable with people sleeping on the sidewalk, said Dion Dwyer, who oversees homeless outreach efforts for the partnership.

 

“I want to provide a social safety net that can lift up that person off the sidewalk and into services and ultimately into sustainable housing,” said Dwyer.

That is from an article in the Sacramento Business Journal.

Mayor Johnson has won backing from Sacramento Councilman Jay Schenirer. “We fully recognize the good intent of this measure; however, we do not feel that it will make a positive impact in the effort to reduce and address chronic homelessness,” he wrote last month in a formal letter of opposition to Liu’s measure.

Is Sacramento really ‘criminalizing the homeless’?

Meanwhile, Sacramento Bee metro columnist Marcos Breton is pushing back against some of the tactics and generalizations of those who feel Sacramento is callous toward the homeless. On Jan. 9, he wrote that it was a great misconception that …

… the city is “criminalizing the homeless.” This is a claim often made by people with political agendas. Some are seeking to abolish Sacramento’s anti-camping ordinance, which is designed to prevent people from setting up camps anywhere they wish.

 

The ordinance is about protecting people and property within the city limits. Protesters camped at City Hall for more than a month, however, are challenging the law, saying it unfairly discriminates against the homeless.

 

This being Sacramento, where political slogans are hatched and exported statewide, the “criminalizing” concept is being aggressively promoted, an incomplete narrative spread around a liberal city often flummoxed by its homeless problems.

The tension between the views of Liu and those of Breton and the Sacramento establishment appears to be one more example of the intractability of the homeless debate. Those who argue in an abstract that governments should do much more to help the homeless are countered by those who have been on the front lines of trying to directly address the problem. Many of the latter group maintain that because so many homeless people are mentally ill, the problem isn’t open to simple solutions involving using more government resources.

Liu’s bill is likely to showcase this argument and launch a statewide debate over whether local laws against sleeping in public areas are reasonable attempts to promote public safety and public health or are tantamount to criminalizing the behavior of some of the poorest, most troubled people in California.

The bill has yet to be subjected to a Senate committee vote. Liu has already amended the measure once to address concerns its language was unnecesarily broad.

“Three-quarters of California’s paroled sex offenders previously banned from living near parks, schools and other places where children congregate now face no housing restrictions after the state changed its policy in response to a court ruling that said the prohibition only applies to child molesters,” the Associated Press reported, citing statewide data compiled at its request.

“The rate is far higher than officials initially predicted. The state expected half of the 5,900 parolees would have restrictions on where they can live or sleep lifted when the corrections department changed its policy following the March ruling. Instead, data shows that 76 percent of offenders no longer are subject to the voter-approved restrictions.”

The pronounced shift underscored the structural dilemmas policymakers have faced in dealing with the state’s significant population of sex offenders. “In some more urban jurisdictions offenders can’t legally live anywhere so they’re forced to live on the streets in some cases,” the Eureka Times-Standard noted — a domino effect that has led to fears of greater crime and recidivism.

But the new policy has already been accused of dramatically overcompensating. “[E]ven some whose offense involved a child no longer face the 2,000-foot residency restriction, officials disclosed in explaining the higher number,” the Times-Standard added. “That’s because the department’s new policy requires a direct connection between where a parolee lives and the offender’s crime or potential to re-offend. Only rarely is the assailant a stranger to the victim, the type of offender whose behavior might be affected by where he lives.”

Extralegal punishment

Although elected officials have shown an understandable unwillingness to appear soft on sex crime, attention has turned in recent years to the ways in which the state’s array of punishments can expose sex offenders to threats and risks well in excess of the law itself. Last month, convicted Vallejo predator Fraisure Earl Smith was ejected from a Motel 6 after having been released from a psychiatric hospital. Homeless, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Smith wound up “living out of a vehicle somewhere in the Vallejo area under the watchful eye of security officers for Liberty Health Care Corp., the contractor that the state hired to handle his release.”

Sex offenders have also faced sharp difficulties in prison. This month, a report issued by the state Inspector General revealed systematic abuses against inmates, with sex offenders singled out for extralegal harm. Investigators found “rising violence statewide in special housing units designed to protect vulnerable inmates, including sex offenders, gang dropouts and prisoners with physical disabilities,” ABC News reported. “Guards can now use an electronic state database to easily see which inmates have an ‘R’ coding that designates a sex offender. Some spread that information, knowing sex offenders are often marked for retribution, the inspector general found.”

Persistent problems

Other recent anecdotes, however, have told a different story. “A sex offender with a stolen boarding pass got through airport security in Salt Lake City and checked in at a gate for a flight to California before he was caught” this November, as the Associated Press observed. A recent three-day sweep of Sacramento’s American River Parkway found many transients there to have run afoul of the law. “Sixteen people were arrested for outstanding warrants,” KCRA recalled; “another 12 were not properly registered as sex offenders.”

The sheer number of offenders has grown large enough to pose a bureaucratic problem, making it harder to determine which are more likely to re-offend than others. Sizing up that challenge, the state board overseeing California’s sex offender registry rolls recommended to state legislators last year “that only high-risk offenders, such as kidnappers and sexually violent predators, should be required to register for life,” as the San Francisco Chronicle noted. “Others could be removed from the registry 10 to 20 years after the offense.”

“Secretary Julian Castro will be in Los Angeles on Tuesday to meet with Mayor Eric Garcetti, City Council members and county supervisors, HUD spokesman George Gonzalez said,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Hoping for cash

Despite the crisis, which has drawn unfavorable media attention amid L.A.’s recent boom in homeless-heavy areas like the city’s downtown, expectations were set low. “No major announcement was expected to come out of the meeting. Gonzalez said it was intended as an ‘exchange of ideas’ on the state of homelessness in Los Angeles,” the Times added.

City leaders hope the agency’s concern could manifest in additional funds to fight what Mayor Eric Garcetti has declared a public emergency around homelessness, as Los Angeles city and country governments both prioritized the issue. As the New York Times reported last month, the announcement marked the first time a U.S. city had made such a proclamation. “National experts on homelessness say Los Angeles has had a severe and persistent problem with people living on the streets rather than in shelters — the official estimate is 26,000,” noted the Times.

Uncertain goals

After announcing his initiative, Garcetti said, “he received a call from Castro, who had toured Skid Row earlier this year,” as the Los Angeles Daily News reported.

“The focus on homelessness came after a count conducted this year by Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority showed that the number of homeless people in the county increased by 12 percent since 2013. More than 44,000 people are homeless in Los Angeles County and about 70 percent of them live on the streets, in vehicles or in make-shift encampments.”

Questions remained as to what exactly Castro intended to accomplish through his visit. “He did indicate several times that HUD approved of the way that local elected officials were tackling homelessness,” Southern California Public Radio observed; in remarks, Castro noted that “more than anything else, I’m here […] to listen,” while insisting that “criminalizing homelessness is not the best approach. That is something that HUD has recognized very firmly.”

Despite the focus on L.A.’s significance to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, city officials appeared to place their funding hopes in the Federal Emergency Management Administration. Although former Secretary of Labor and current L.A. Supervisor Hilda Solis recently invoked the agency, the Daily News observed, its spokesman for the area covering Los Angeles threw doubt on the idea. “For homelessness, I’ve never heard that as a cause of an emergency because that’s a local social issue that would generally be handled at the city or county or state level,” he said.

A big pledge

In the interim, Los Angeles has pledged to allocate substantial sums to curbing homelessness, which has become an especially galling problem among veterans. “Members of the City Council say they are working on a $100 million plan to combat homelessness,” SCPR reported. “County supervisors this month voted to boost spending on homelessness to $100 million for the year. Earlier, Mayor Eric Garcetti had said he would release a blueprint to end homelessness in August.”

Garcetti’s priorities around urban issues have not been without their critics. At a recent speech in South Los Angeles, the mayor was confronted by Jefferson Park protesters, some of whom pounded on his vehicle and demanded the resignation of the current Los Angeles Police Department chief Charlie Beck. “I am disappointed that our conversation was cut short when there is so much work for us to do together to make our neighborhoods stronger and safer,” Garcetti later remarked, according to CBS Los Angeles. “I believe in our city and my commitment to our shared concerns continues stronger than ever.”

Thomas Hawk / flickr

Nearly a year after California voters overwhelmingly agreed to lessen sentences and release inmates convicted of minor crimes, statistical and anecdotal evidence has cast doubt on the wisdom of Proposition 47.

A souring trend

Change has been swift, but results have been mixed, with little to suggest the dynamic is soon to shift. “In the 11 months since the passage of Prop. 47,” the Washington Post reported, “more than 4,300 state prisoners have been resentenced and then released. Drug arrests in Los Angeles County have dropped by a third. Jail bookings are down by a quarter. Hundreds of thousands of ex-felons have applied to get their previous drug convictions revised or erased. But along with the successes have come other consequences, which police departments and prosecutors refer to as the ‘unintended effects.'”

“It’s too early to know how much crime can be attributed to Prop. 47, police chiefs caution, but what they do know is that instead of arresting criminals and removing them from the streets, their officers have been dealing with the same offenders again and again.”

As early as August, the numbers painted an unflattering picture of change. “In San Francisco, theft from cars is up 47 percent this year over the same period in 2014,” noted Debra Saunders at the San Francisco Chronicle. “Auto theft is up by 17 percent. Robberies are up 23 percent. And aggravated assaults are up 2 percent, according to San Francisco police spokesman Carlos Manfredi. Burglaries are down 5 percent.”

Los Angeles, Saunders added, “saw a 12.7 percent increase in overall crime this year, according to the Los Angeles Times; violent offenses rose 20.6 percent, while property crime rose by 11 percent. Mayor Eric Garcetti says Prop. 47 may explain Los Angeles’ change in course from crime reduction to crime increases.”

Now, cities and municipalities have begun facing up to the problems. In Santa Barbara County, for instance, the Board of Supervisors heard that, in the wake of Prop. 47, “the average daily population of the county jail has since crept back closer to normal levels, and the burdensome court workload is holding steady,” according to Noozhawk.com.

“The law — crafted outside the state Legislature — is meant to save the state $100 million to $200 million by eventually reducing the criminal-justice workload and freeing up jail beds and probation resources. But that money isn’t coming until August 2016 at the earliest,” the site noted.

Holding out hope

Defenders of the measure insist that the wait is worth it. Writing in The Desert Sun, Indio public defender Roger Tansey called it “far too soon to declare Proposition 47 dead,” since “the second part of the proposition — the estimated $250 million in savings to be spent on rehabilitative services — has yet to be channeled to the counties.” Until that money rolls in, Tansey said, it’s too hard to tell whether repeat offenders are coaxed out of crime through rehab programs.

Other supporters shifted the grounds of the debate to Prop. 47’s impact on the next generation. “Children suffer most when we cavalierly incarcerate their parents,” cautioned San Diego Unified School District board member Richard Barrera in an editorial for U-T San Diego. “According to the Department of Health and Human Services, children of incarcerated parents are seven times more likely to be locked up one day. And according to the Women’s Prison & Home Association, one in 10 will have been incarcerated before reaching adulthood. Prop. 47 savings mean more money for schools. It means more money to invest in our communities’ health and safety. It means more students with stable homes, and more support for those looking to get their lives back on track.”

Momentum stalled

The initial wave of enthusiasm for Prop. 47 extended well beyond California, with the measure fitting the pattern of Golden State policies framed up as models for nationwide use. But in an editorial urging caution around the so-called Justice Reinvestment Act, Massachusetts’ answer to Prop. 47, the Boston Globe warned that many fewer addicts are agreeing to participate in drug court “while the homeless population has risen. Massachusetts lawmakers should examine California’s experience and find ways to avoid such unintended consequences.”

Federal legislation

At the center of the proposals is the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Los Angeles campus, located on the west side of town near the 405 freeway. As the Los Angeles Times reported, a January legal settlement paved the way for the campus to pivot toward housing vets — and away from lease arrangements extended in the past to “corporations, the private Brentwood school and other non-government entities.”

Under the new regime envisioned by Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, the VA would receive the authority to “enter into leases with local governments and nonprofit groups to provide veterans with shelter supplemented by medical and other services,” according to the Times. As Southern California Public Radio noted, education and training were among the additional services anticipated.

In recent years, the VA has been wracked by scandals offending Republicans and Democrats alike, with blame cast at the Obama administration, Congress and the VA bureaucracy itself. Now, however, the VA has put its own stamp of approval on the new bill; according to SCPR, it offers the VA — currently mired in a multibillion-dollar funding shortfall and juggling unfinished projects — an opportunity to “create new housing in West L.A. much faster than the agency could on its own.” In a statement, SCPR noted, the VA asserted that passing the Feinstein-Boxer legislation would “greatly enhance” its “ability to end Veteran homelessness in Greater Los Angeles.”

L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti has vowed to ensure all veterans are off the city’s streets by the end of this year. “In January, the mayor’s office announced 3,375 homeless veterans were housed in L.A. in 2014, and an estimated 3,154 homeless veterans remain on the street,” as the Los Angeles Daily News has observed.

Housing battles

California has recently become emblematic of increasing rates of homelessness in major urban areas, as the two Senators, along with Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, noted in their letter to the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate Veterans’ Affairs committees. “There is a critical need for long-term supportive housing on the West Los Angeles campus, and enhanced use leases would allow the department to work with community and state organizations toward the goal of ending veteran homelessness in Los Angeles,” they wrote, according to the Daily News. “As you may be aware, Los Angeles is home to the largest population of homeless veterans in the country, which is simply unacceptable.”

From Downtown to westside neighborhoods such as Venice, altercations involving homeless persons and police — sometimes resulting in death — have made headlines in Los Angeles. Recently, in San Pedro, controversy erupted over the appearance of small wheeled shacks designed to supply the homeless with shelter that could evade permitting regulations. L.A. City Councilman Joe Buscaino warned “that the city needs more permanent housing” instead of structures that would “ultimately become nuisances,” the Times reported.

In addition to the situation in Los Angeles, events unfolding in other Southland locales have also attracted attention. This month, formerly homeless veterans in Huntington Beach pressed ahead with a lawsuit challenging construction regulations they claim adversely affect prospects for housing. “The litigation comes in response to the Huntington Beach City Council on May 4 adopting an amendment that blocks the development of affordable housing in the Beach-Edinger Corridor,” as the OC Weekly reported. “The veterans, commission and their lawyers contend the Beach-Edinger Corridor Specific Plan is in direct conflict with the city’s own General Plan Housing Element, which was approved by the California Department of Housing and Community Development in 2013.”

The “right to rest” movement has picked up steam first on the West Coast, with similar bills under review in the Hawaii and Oregon legislatures.

Following suit, state Sen. Carol Liu, D-La Cañada-Flintridge, introduced Senate Bill 608, known as the Right to Rest Act. Using broad language written by the Western Regional Advocacy Project, the bill would enshrine such actions as eating in public and occupying legally parked cars as “basic human and civil rights.”

What’s more, SB608 would authorize someone discriminated against in the use of public space to sue to enforce their newly codified rights in a civil action.

In a statement, Liu described homelessness as a “social,” not criminal, issue. “Citing homeless people for resting in a public space can lead to their rejection for jobs, education loans and housing, further denying them a pathway out of poverty,” she said.

Last month, Berkeley Law’s Policy Advocacy Clinic released a report on “the growing enactment and enforcement of anti-homeless laws in the Golden State.” In a forceful denunciation of California’s current homeless policies, the Clinic pushed for the kind of changes WRAP helped draft into model legislation:

“Without state-level intervention, California cities have been engaged in a race to the bottom by increasing criminalization, hoping to drive homeless people elsewhere and make them someone else’s problem. Comprehensive reform must target the full range of state codes and municipal laws that criminalize homelessness.”

A pressure cooker

SB608 comes at a time when homeless issues in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles have gained a higher profile as a result of rising rents in urban cores.

As CalWatchdog.com reported, the Skid Row shooting of the man known as Africa drew sharp rebuke from community activists in downtown Los Angeles, some of whom pinned blame on the LAPD’s new Safer Cities Initiative. That effort targeted Skid Row — now at the frontier of downtown’s gentrification — with increased monitoring conducted in part by cops with beefed-up training in how to interact with the homeless and mentally unwell.

Critics noted that, although the initiative launched in 2006 by then-police chief William Bratton cut crime, it imposed an unending series of infractions on the homeless. Activists complained that more than half of Skid Row-area homeless had been arrested in the past year.

The problem seemed cyclical: one reason why Skid Row hosted one of the densest populations of homeless in America was because the surrounding areas had seen a robust influx of new renters and owners, raising housing costs.

Mainstreaming a worldview

Despite the fairly radical, social-justice approach taken by the activists who are shaping “right to rest” legislation, the agenda found an advocate in Liu, widely perceived as safely mainstream. On her official website, Liu recently touted her perfect legislative track record last year, when she went eight for eight of her bills enacted into law.

For Paul Boden, director of WRAP, activists’ appropriate ambitions reached nationwide. Himself homeless as a teen, Boden has volunteered and worked on homeless issues for 30 years.

Now he has sensed the stars are aligning for a push that extends far beyond the West Coast. Boden insisted, “From Hawaii to New York and from Maine to Texas, it’s time for this to stop.”

By Katy Grimes

The state of California is pushing welfare and food stamps very hard. They constantly advertise on the radio and television, and must have a huge public relations budget… paid for courtesy of taxpayers.

Here’s one ad for the “Women, infants and children” program:

Welcome to the WIC Show!
The show about WIC, for WIC and by WIC!

On our channel you’ll find five half-hour episodes made up of different segments that will interest everyone, especially parents of young children and pregnant women. 

The shows are designed to reinforce California’s Women, Infants and Children (WIC) education programs, highlight WIC service while at the same time entertain WIC clients.

Once you are in these programs, you get hooked into other programs: county health care, housing, school, daycare. Eventually, the government runs everything in the lives of those on government assistance. It’s no wonder President barack Obama got reelected.

CalFresh

The WIC ad says, “the food program is not a welfare program,” but you have a state case worker.

We can’t even call welfare what it is.

Food-stamp benefits usage is at an all time high. 46 million Americans are on welfare and use food stamps. One-third of all welfare recipients are in California.

The name of the California welfare food stamp program was changed to “CalFresh,” to take the stigma out of using welfare benefits. Recipients are given a debit card so they look like every other shopper when purchasing their items.

In Los Angeles County, more than one million people are signed up for the food stamp and welfare benefits, ranging from $200 to $1,500 a month.

In 2011, the federal Department of Food and Agriculture went all out on a national media awareness program. Here is a schedule of media buys in just L.A. County.

This was done because in some areas, welfare agencies believed that communities were “under served.” In Sacramento County, the Board of Supervisors even got involved, allowing the Sacramento Hunger Coalition to drive a campaign to expand the number of recipients.

“The Sacramento Hunger Coalition was founded in 1989 and now resides as a project of the Sacramento Housing Alliance’s Coalition on Regional Equity (CORE)’s food justice work,” the website says.

What a clever way to expand government. But welfare has become a giant ponzi scheme.

Even more interesting, is the list of publications below from the Sacramento Hunger Coalition… the links go nowhere. But this was what the entire hunger in Sacramento campaign was based on.

Hunger Hits Home 2012: Understanding & Combating Hunger in Sacramento County

A Primer on the Restaurant Meals Program in California: Preventing Hunger Among the Elderly, Disabled & Homeless in the Golden State

Homeless Nutrition Education Toolkit: A Resource for Nutrition Educators and Emergency Food Providers

Hunger and Homelessness in Sacramento: 2010 Hunger & Food Insecurity Report

I finally found one of the reports on hunger in Sacramento – I hope no one got paid to produce this.

Other government advertising

I hear government paid radio ads for bullying, FEMA, flood insurance,  Homeland security disaster preparedness,  the CA Earthquake Authority insurance, and ads about housing discrimination, paid for by the federal Housing and Urban Development department.

What a scam, all paid for by taxpayers.