HOMELESS.V.A.A

Last week, the city council of Manteca, CA unanimously passed two ordinances aimed at clearing out the homeless population.

One will ban people from sleeping or setting up encampments on any public or private property as of December 4, although the homeless won’t be jailed or fined. It will, however, allow the police to tear down any homeless sleeping areas as soon as they appear without having to be invited by the property owner, as was the case previously.

Explaining why the ordinance is necessary, Police Chief Nick Obligacion said, “The goal is actually to correct the wrong. So, if the correction is them leaving Manteca, then that’s their choice.” He also opposes any sort of shelter for the homeless.

The other ordinance bans public urination and defecation, but also comes after the city temporarily closed public restrooms in a park, a location often used by the homeless to relieve themselves in private.

Manteca is only the latest American city to respond to the problem of mass homelessness by criminalizing it. In 187 cities across the country, there has been an uptick in every kind of ordinance aimed at making it illegal to be homeless, such as banning people from lying down or having possessions with them as in Fort Lauderdale, FL; prohibiting people from sitting or lying down on sidewalks, such as in Honolulu, HI; or making it illegal to sleep in public, such as in Palo Alto, CA. Manteca’s ban on encampments is widespread, as 34 percent of cities have bans on camping in public, a 60 percent increase from 2011.

Some have even made it illegal to help the homeless: 13 cities have restricted where people can give them food, and one 90-year-old man in Fort Lauderdale has been arrested for doing just that. And others look as if they are trying to simply ship the homeless elsewhere, as in Waikiki, HI, where 120 homeless people will be given one-way plane tickets to the mainland, or San Diego, CA, which considered giving them one-way bus tickets.

But cities that have actually ended homelessness take a very different approach. Phoenix, AZ and Salt Lake City, UT have both ended chronic homelessness among veterans using a “housing first” approach that aims to get the homeless into a home before addressing other issues like mental illness, addiction, or job training. In fact, if the country either gave everyone who needed it adequate rental assistance and/or built enough affordable housing to fill the 5.5 million unit shortage, it could effectively end homelessness once and for all.

(KCBS) – Nearly 270,000 California public school students were homeless at some point during the last school year, according to a new report that finds the number of homeless students is growing at twice the national rate.

Data released Wednesday by the California Homeless Youth Project shows homelessness among school children has doubled since the 2010-2011 school year, from four percent to eight percent of all students enrolled at public schools. Director Shahera Hyatt said nearly 20,000 Bay Area school children homeless at some point in the last year.

“Homelessness is not localized,” she said, “just in Los Angeles and San Francisco. It’s really a problem

School districts need to put more money into programs that help families struggling with homelessness, Hyatt said, because California accounts for about one-fifth of all homeless school children in the country.

“Homeless liaisons that work in school districts can be stretched very thin, which makes it difficult not only to provide services for students experiencing homelessness, but also for data collection.”

The report considers any student as homeless if he or she did not have a fixed nighttime residence.

Finding services for school children who don’t have a place to live can be challenging, advocates said, because the Department of Housing and Urban Development does not recognize families as homeless unless they reside in a shelter.

“Regulations do not consider those children to be homeless. And that means they cannot receive HUD assistance designed for homeless people,” said Patricia Julianelle, an attorney at the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children.

“It’s surprising for many people that the federal agency responsible for providing services for homeless people does not provide services to these children.”

The report also notes the impact homelessness can have on academic performance and attendance.