After the tents popped up in Modesto’s Graceada Park last Tuesday, the news traveled like lightning through neighborhood group email lists: “They’re allowing camping in the parks.” Whether, “they,” meaning the City of Modesto, are really allowing camping in all the city’s parks remains to be seen.
The confusion is the result of a ruling by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The court wrote, “a municipality cannot criminalize such behavior consistently with the Eighth Amendment when no sleeping space is practically available in any shelter.”
But “such behavior” in this case referred to sleeping, not camping. While it would seem there’s a clear difference between the two, online rumors included a purported conversation with a Modesto Police Officer, who said of the camping, “After the court ruling, there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Neighbors in the vicinity of Graceada and Enslen Parks were irate. They already generate a constant stream of complaints about homeless people in the two parks. The prospect of homeless camps suddenly springing up clearly had them rattled.
Following close upon a controversy over placing a temporary homeless shelter on Scenic Drive, about a mile east of the two parks, this latest flare up illustrates just how unprepared local authorities are to deal with an escalating homeless population that simply has nowhere to go other than popular public spaces, especially including libraries and parks.
The sudden appearance of the tents also suggests at least some homeless people are tuned in to current news events. It also reveals just how complex homeless issues really are.
The court ruling was based on the Eighth Amendment of the Bill of Rights. The Eighth Amendment reads simply,
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Most courts have ruled consistently that homelessness is not a crime. It would seem to follow that sleeping while homeless wouldn’t be criminalized either.
Camping is a stickier issue. Most of the crude necessities of living—food, water, toiletries, clothing—necessitate at the very least a place to keep them. For most homeless people, that “place” is a backpack, shopping cart, bicycle cart or homemade contrivance.
Modesto’s two largest homeless shelters, the Modesto Gospel Mission and the Salvation Army’s Berberian Shelter, offer little to no storage for belongings. They also require guests to leave their premises during daylight hours. That means that every day there’s an outflow of people from the shelters who have nowhere to go other than public spaces.
By Wednesday, someone at Modesto’s City Hall had made a remarkable decision to allow camping in Beard Brook Park, a long-favored location for homeless people that has no nearby residences, though it is bordered by the Gallo headquarters on one side and Stanislaus Foods on the other.
Because it is out-of-the-way and popular with homeless people, Modesto City Councilmember Kristi Ah You proposed allowing people to camp in Beard Brook as early as 2016. She’s brought the proposal up again and again since then, and always been rebuffed by a litany of excuses ranging from, “Why enable them?,” to “We won’t be able to control the crime.”
It took the catalytic effect of the court decision to force local authorities into action. But as the turmoil begins to settle before the next inevitable flare up, one thing’s becoming increasingly clear: They should have been listening to Kristi Ah You long before a court ruling brought about this general panic.
It seems so complicated but simple people need a home
Agree Shelly but housing is a key investment in which significant returns are expected. Housing is not a right and unless developers are somehow subsidized to build ‘affordable housing, it doesn’t get done. And if government won’t subsidized nearly enough, then who will?
We have never yet addressed the root causes of Mass Homelessness in America. The effects of that failure are all around us. The human effects are staggering, from the suffering endured by the homeless to the immense amount of resources wasted on insincere and inadequate “bandaid” policies, to the heartened hearts of the community who desperately want it to be someone else’s problem. Allowing camping at an abandoned park is a drop in the bucket but at least it’s a glimmering of humanity towards our ignored domestic refugees.
Over one third of homeless people suffer from untreated serious mental illness. Perhaps the city should spend less money on unused bike lanes and more on mental health and drug addiction and prevention without putting together a committee of overpaid yuppies.
I think a community can afford bike lanes AND mental health services. No need to fight over the crumbs. There are plenty of resources when there is ‘political will’.
Agreed! Also a good amount of homeless people are veterans with PTSD included in the mental illness besides those that are just mentally ill genetically or those that are drug abusers.
I think it would be better to “let them” stay in one or two parks legally vs having homelessness throughout the city. Pick your battles right? It’s not a perfect solution but it’s an option until more homeless shelters can be provided
Totally ridiculous.
But hey, society is in total and utter decline.. isn’t it..?
This city is a trash fire. Homeless drug addled mental patients camping in the parks where our children are supposed to be safe to play. Great.
Where I pay taxes to the city to maintain.
Have you seen what the homeless do to parks they squat in??
It’s not societies responsibility to take care of you because you refuse to.
The city needs to be cleaned up. Not turned into a toilet.
There are over 21 trillion dollars unaccounted for by the Pentagon since 2001 and the United States’ military budget exceeds that of the next 25 country’s military spending combined. The only thing we have to show for it are a bunch of multi-billion dollar failures like the F-35 and the Littoral combat ships, which, after 16 years of wasted time and billions, the Navy has finally admitted are a complete loss. That people can find time to complain about the homeless (many of whom are also victims of the Pentagon’s and the Military Industrial Complex’s greed and complete lack of concern for humanity), when they should be demanding to know why their tax money continues to get poured into the same black holes for decades, is beyond me.
Yes, a lot of homeless people are mentally ill. A lot of them are drug addicts. A lot of them do not know how to care for themselves, let alone a home, if they had one. That doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to be treated with dignity. That doesn’t mean we should ignore the REAL criminals who are walking away with trillions (yes, with a “T”) and treat people who commit relatively petty crimes like sub-humans.
Many of us—I’m homeless, too—are just victims of governmental theft. When I was staying at the Salvation Army shelter, there was one woman there who was finally awarded her Social Security Disability Insurance after 10 years of battling with them for the insurance she paid for her entire life. I’m in year 8 of my battle.
There are many very intelligent, wonderful people who have become homeless because the government has been looting the Social Security funds since the Clinton administration, and during the Obama administration, their was a silent policy issued that begat a program that retrained all of the Social Security Administrative Law Judges on how to deny claims rather than fairly investigate them. The average time for a disability claim is now 2–4 years, and the Salvation Army now only allows people to stay for 180 days per year. Ironically, that policy went into enforcement 180 days before November 11—Veteran’s Day. Unless we come together as a caring community and develop some solutions, there are going to be a flood of people out on the streets, in the cold and rain all night, every night, this winter.
I wonder if there is a possibility of making tiny villages of tiny homes with government services made available. The other homeless haven’t been mentioned Veterans, disabled, people dying of cancer, some families. Those that can do some work could be asked to be part of the clean up or checking on other residents as part of their habitation requirements. If we don’t make hygiene available to these people, we will be walking in their leavings and cleaning up after them. There will eventually be disease, and people will be breaking into homes not just to steal items for resale, but also for food. Just thoughts. My fear as being old and elderly and having health difficulty on many different fronts, is what happens when I no longer have enough money for rent.