Down On Mean Streets

What is a mean city? According to homeless advocates from the National Coalition For The Homeless, it is when city’s “criminalize” homelessness. Here's the article. That means they ban panhandling, sleeping on the streets, etc.

Los Angeles is the 18th meanest city in America, according to this study. Santa Monica, just west of L.A. breaks the top ten, by being the 9th meanest city.

I’ve stated many times that there needs to be a balance between providing enough services and housing in a community, while allowing the community to keep its streets safe and healthy.

We should not be allowing anyone to live on our streets. That’s a given. So when we provide enough services and housing, our community should have the right to ban sleeping on the streets. People—homeless or not—should not have the right to sleep on the streets. It is too dangerous. Violence and health risks can occur.

The big question is this… should cities have to wait until they provide enough services and housing for the homeless before they can enforce ordinances that affect the homeless?

Why not a progressive approach? If there are open beds in the system at a given time of the day, ordinances can be enforced. If the beds/services are all full, ordinances cannot be imposed.

We are all stuck in a funk… we all have the same goal—end homelessness—but we disagree on how to do it. So we are stuck not being able to keep our streets clean, and not being able to house all the people on the streets.

Some—out-of-the-box—thinking needs to prevail…