For decades, cities all over the
country have worked to essentially criminalize homelessness,
instituting measures that outlaw holding a sign, sleeping, sitting,
lying (or weirdly, telling a lie in Orlando) if you live on the street.
Where
the law does not mandate outright harassment, police come up with
clever work-arounds, like destroying or confiscating tents, blankets and
other property in raids of camps. A veteran I talked to, his eye bloody
from when some teenagers beat him up to steal 60 cents, said police
routinely extracted the poles from his tent and kept them so he couldn't
rebuild it. (Where are all the pissed-off libertarians and
conservatives at such flagrant disrespect for private property?)
In
the heady '80s, Reagan slashed federal housing subsidies even as a
tough economy threw more and more people out on the street. Instead of
resolving itself through the magic of the markets, the homelessness
problem increasingly fell to local governments. READ MORE
