What if you come home and find strangers living in your house?
I assumed you order the squatters out, and if they resist, call the police, and they will kick them out.
Wrong.
Pro-tenant laws passed by anti-capitalist politicians now protect squatters. If a squatter just lies about having a lease, the police won't intervene.
"It's a civil matter," they'll say. "Sort it out in court."
Great. Court might cost $20,000. Or more. And courts are so slow, eviction might take years.
In my state, New York, homeowners can't even shut off utilities to try to get the squatter out. That's illegal. Worse, once a squatter has been there 30 days, they are legally considered a tenant.
This month, New York City police arrested a homeowner for "unlawful eviction" after she changed locks, trying to get rid of a squatter.
"Squatter rights," also known as "adverse possession" laws, now exist in all 50 states. As a result, evicting a squatter legally is so expensive and cumbersome that some people simply walk away from their homes!
Flash Shelton may have a better idea.
His mom wanted to sell their house after his dad died. But while they were selling it, squatters moved in.
Shelton did what I would have done—called the police. But the police said there was nothing they could do.
So he tried a new tactic: out-squat the squatter.
"I just felt, if they can take a house, I can take a house," Shelton says in my new video. "I could go in as the squatter myself, [and] gain possession of the property."
When the home invader left for a few hours, Shelton went in and changed the locks. Only then did the squatters leave.
Now Shelton's started a business, SquatterHunters.com, where he tries to help others get their houses back.
"People think of squatters as homeless, destitute," I say.
"They are not homeless," answers Shelton. "They're criminals…people taking advantage of the system."
In fact, one squatter he pushed out was Adam Fleischman, who started the Umami Burger restaurant chain. Fleischman told Shelton, "I'm a victim here." He even called the cops.
"He felt that since he had possession of the house," says Shelton, "that he had the right to call law enforcement and have me removed."
I tried to reach Fleischman to hear his side of the story. No luck.
"Where does he hear that he has this right to squat?" I ask Shelton.
"The city was telling him this," says Shelton.
But now Shelton was a squatter, too, so he was protected by the same pro-"tenant" law.
Still, only when Shelton threatened to bring friends to the house as backup did Adam Fleischman leave.
In Los Angeles, a woman claimed to be a "caretaker" for an elderly homeowner, who said she didn't want the woman in her home. So, she gave Shelton a lease. While the squatter was out, Shelton changed the locks.
"But the squatter is still there?" I ask Shelton.
"Still there," he says, "Climbing through the window because she doesn't have access to the main house."
She's now been there for two years!
Shelton says his team will move in and get rid of the squatter.
"How do you know that will work?" I ask.
"Because once I take possession," says Shelton, "then she'll have to fight in court to try to get back in. Most likely she won't do that."
Why do squatters feel entitled to other people's property?
Probably because people hate landlords. They listen to silly people like Marxist New School professor Miguel Robles-Duran, who calls landlords "parasites" who "provide no social value." Popular TikTok socialist Madeline Pendleton adds that landlords have "guaranteed forever incomes, without having to put in any labor."
No labor? Who does she think buys the land; pays lawyers to decipher the excessive regulations; hires architects, carpenters, plumbers, and electricians; pays the taxes; manages the property, etc.?
It's infuriating!
I'm glad people like Flash Shelton fight back.
COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
The post Squatters Invaded His Mom's House—so He Fought Back appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>ST. LOUIS—Rich LaPlume, 58, cracks his knuckles and leans back against a chipped door frame in the basement of St. Lazare House—a St. Louis community home for homeless youth with a history of mental illness. Taped to the wall behind him is a series of brightly colored motivational posters, with slogans like "I AM A FIGHTER" and "BELIEVE IN YOURSELF."
"When you're homeless and are dealing with a mental health condition, you lack so much more than a home," he tells me. "It's so hard to get on your feet, and you need so much support. And for so long, this population has been invisible. That's a problem." Around 30 percent of homeless individuals nationwide suffer from a mental health condition—a statistic St. Lazare aims to combat.
Yet LaPlume has problems of his own to worry about. As director of St. Lazare House, he has spent six years overseeing the full financial process of running the home, including the renewal of contracts and leases, the coordination with mental health care providers, and the allocation of grant money. Thanks to LaPlume and his team's programming, over 60 youth have been given a new life free from chronic homelessness.
But despite all of his hard work, as of this November, St. Lazare House is $155,000 in debt.
The problem, LaPlume tells me, isn't St. Lazare's, which by all measures is an exceptional success—offering stable housing to homeless St. Louisans, plus free mental health care and life coaching, all while maintaining nearly a 100 percent retention rate of its residents. Rather, the problem lies with the St. Louis office of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which failed to process St. Lazare's grant renewal in time for its upcoming fiscal year, which started May 1, 2023. Since then, St. Lazare has been forced to pile up thousands in debt while awaiting reimbursement from the city, which the HUD office could not guarantee it would provide.
But the city failed to renew St. Lazare's annual contract in time. The deadline for renewal from the city was November 1, but due to even more bureaucratic backlogging, St. Lazare's contract wasn't ready. Until they received their contract back from the city, St. Lazare couldn't apply for reimbursement for the lost grant money, and were left to fall deeper into debt while they waited. Just recently, they were informed the reimbursement money wasn't coming.
Left without essential funding, St. Lazare has been forced to rely on savings to pay their lease. LaPlume laments, "It is because of the city of St. Louis that we are able to exist. And yet, St. Louis is our own worst partner."
This isn't just St. Lazare's story. St. Lazare House is one of many nonprofits nationwide suffering from dilatory allocation of federal grant money for the homeless. Most of the funding for homelessness organizations comes from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's "Continuum of Care" grant program, which allocates funding to states for coordinated housing programs for homeless adults and children. Each year, the federal HUD sends around $3 billion to states in grant funding for distribution to their homelessness organizations.
Yet every year, millions of dollars are sent back.
In 2022, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) published an audit of Continuum of Care grantee spending levels—examining why, despite skyrocketing national homelessness, large portions of HUD grant money were left unspent. The findings were catastrophic. Between 2017 and 2020, OIG found that $454 million in Continuum of Care funding had gone unspent, or 9 percent of the program's total funding. Of those millions, $257 million had since been recaptured by the federal government during the period of the study. The rest was still missing.
How, amid a pervasive homelessness crisis affecting over half a million Americans, with the power to destroy the livelihood of major cities, can half a billion dollars in funding go unspent?
I ask LaPlume what happened to the missing HUD funds for St. Lazare, and how much the St. Louis city government had lost. His eyes light up: "You won't believe this." He pulls out his phone and dials the number for Shanna Nieweg, a woman he calls his "sister from another mister." Nieweg is the executive director of Horizon Housing Development Company, a homelessness nonprofit just down the street from St. Lazare.
Nieweg picks up immediately, and after a few sentences of prompting from LaPlume, she is rolling off numbers: From 2016 to 2019, the most recent period measured, St. Louis sent back $2.2 million in HUD Continuum of Care funding. This number jumps to roughly $2.7 million when including returned funds for planning grants—a sum greater than the four-year HUD budgets for both St. Lazare and Horizon Housing combined. For a city like St. Louis, with a homeless population of 1,100, the impact of this foregone money would be more than significant.
For community homelessness leaders like Nieweg and LaPlume, this bureaucratic ineptitude is personal. At 11:15 p.m. on October 2, St. Louis police entered a major homeless encampment near City Hall and ordered its residents to either clear out by midnight or be arrested. Images of the scene show armed police entering with flashlights and ordering confused and crying residents out of their tents. "They came in the middle of the night so they wouldn't be seen," LaPlume says. After a heated encounter with activists, the police abandoned the project around 1:30 a.m., telling the residents they could remain for the night. But the city's homelessness workers haven't forgotten.
LaPlume recalls quietly, "It was one of the most inhumane things I've ever seen in my life."
For the city's homelessness leaders, the financial waste and hasty dealings with encampments are a symptom of failed bureaucratic leadership. Even amid hard work and shrewd leadership, the disarray of city grant allocation and contracting can set local homelessness organizations up for failure. The problems in St. Louis, when compared to major West Coast cities like Los Angeles or Seattle, are relatively small: A journalist with the Los Angeles Times found nearly $150 million in federal homelessness funding for Los Angeles was returned from 2015 to 2020, as street camping exploded and the city's homeless population soared to over 40,000.
The investigators in the federal HUD audit probed into how and why federal grant money goes unspent in such massive proportions across the country. Their main finding was a number of issues in the tracking and monitoring of grantee spending. In the absence of clear and well-defined spending procedures for states and localities, they concluded, money is returned—or lost. They also noted the difficulty for grantees in finding affordable housing for their homeless—though affordable housing developers charge city governments with excessive bureaucratic red tape holding them back.
Unlike other agencies jostling for money in Washington, the Department of Housing and Urban Development struggles to spend enough. Halting its efforts at homelessness relief is a crisis of bureaucratic backlogging that withholds grant money from organizations in desperate need—not only setting such organizations up for failure but also forcing their home cities to seek out hasty and underfunded solutions to their housing crises. Funding for HUD is increasing next year by $116 million to cover funding increases for HUD homelessness assistance grants. But until HUD fixes its bureaucracy problem, it's unclear what effect the increase will have.
For now, organizations like St. Lazare that depend on HUD funds as a lifeline have no choice but to plow ahead. Many survive the bureaucratic chaos by working together, as do LaPlume and Nieweg. But even then, there are factors out of their control that threaten to shut them down. I ask LaPlume how he deals with all the uncertainty.
He responds, "We've been dealing with this for all our life. But everyone deserves a place to call a home and a stake in their community. So we're going to fight to keep them housed. No matter what."
The post The Feds Give States Millions To Fix Homelessness, but States Are Sending It Back appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A federal judge this week issued a preliminary injunction against the city of Houston blocking it from enforcing an ordinance that prohibits feeding more than five needy people anywhere—including public property—without permission.
In a ruling issued Wednesday, U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of Texas Andrew Hanen agreed with the Houston chapter of Food Not Bombs (FNBH), a volunteer group that distributes free food in cities worldwide, that the city of Houston's monthslong crackdown on food sharing was not likely to survive constitutional scrutiny.
"While [Houston's] efforts to unify and streamline an efficient end to homelessness and feed the hungry may make good policy sense," Hanen wrote. "being sensible does not always equate to being constitutional, especially when the consequence of that policy is restricting the expressive conduct of those that are protesting government policy."
Houston police began ticketing FNBH and other local activists using the 2012 ordinance last summer. City officials want them to move to an approved parking lot for all homeless services, but the activists say they have a First Amendment right to hand out free food in a downtown public park, where they had been operating without controversy for a decade, with or without the city's permission.
The Texas Civil Rights Project filed a First Amendment lawsuit in January on behalf of FNBH. The suit argues that Houston's anti–food sharing ordinance is unconstitutional both on its face and as applied to FNBH by imposing an invalid prior restraint on the activists' protected First Amendment rights.
According to the Texas Civil Rights Project, Houston police have issued 96 citations for violating the ordinance, which outlaws providing free food to more than five people "in need" at outdoor locations without permission, potentially totaling more than $192,000 in fines.
However, the city's attempts to enforce the ordinance have not gone well. One activist was acquitted, while other cases have been dismissed and delayed because prosecutors can't find jurors who are willing to fine people $500 for the crime of feeding the needy.
In issuing the preliminary injunction, Hanen found that FNBH's food sharing is expressive conduct under the First Amendment and that the group had a substantial likelihood of succeeding on its claims that Houston's ordinance, as applied, creates an unconstitutional prior restraint. Furthermore, Hanen agreed that the ordinance was not narrowly tailored enough, likely making it an unconstitutional time, place, and manner restriction as well.
The ruling is unsurprising; other federal courts have come to similar conclusions. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled in 2018 that distributing food was "expressive conduct" protected under the First Amendment. That decision was a response to a lawsuit by the Food Not Bombs chapter in Fort Lauderdale.
Randy Hiroshige, a Texas Civil Rights Project attorney, said in a press release that the injunction was "a huge win for our community."
"This is the first step in defending the First Amendment rights of food-sharing organizations in Houston and rejecting the City's cruel ordinance," Hiroshige said. "Feeding our neighbors should not be a crime—Food Not Bombs has done vital work in Houston, and it's time for the City to recognize the real harm this ordinance has caused. TCRP will continue working with Food Not Bombs and community members to ensure that the ordinance is struck down and that all Houstonians in need can access a warm, healthy meal."
Houston city attorney Arturo Michel says in a statement to Reason that Houston Mayor John Whitmire "is committed to working together to resolve differences and agree upon an ordinance that allows expression and provides a safe and healthy environment at the central library and elsewhere for the homeless and their neighbors."
"The judge's order recognized that there were competing interests," Michel says. "Food Not Bombs has a First Amendment right to express its views. The city has an equally important right to ensure public safety and safeguard public health."
The post Federal Judge Temporarily Blocks Enforcement of Houston Ordinance Against Feeding the Homeless appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For months, Houston police have been citing and arresting local volunteers for the radical act of feeding the needy. Now the city is facing a lawsuit alleging that its crackdown on charitable giving violates the First Amendment.
The Texas Civil Rights Project filed a federal civil rights lawsuit Wednesday on behalf of the Houston chapter of Food Not Bombs (FNBH), a volunteer group that distributes free food in cities worldwide. Since last March, Houston has been trying to force FNBH activists and other volunteers to move their charitable food services to a city-approved parking lot rather than near the downtown library where they had been operating with the city's consent for more than a decade. According to the suit, FNBH members have received over 89 citations from police so far, amounting to $178,000 in fines.
The suit argues that Houston's anti–food sharing ordinance is unconstitutional both on its face and as applied to FNBH by imposing an invalid prior restraint on the activists' protected First Amendment rights. The city is also violating FNBH's right to expressive association, the group argues, by attempting to force them to move to the parking lot, which happens to be next to a Houston Police Department building and is patrolled by several officers during events.
Randy Hiroshige, a Texas Civil Rights Project attorney, says the issue isn't just about handing out sandwiches; it's about the government trying to suppress political speech.
"They're a protest group," Hiroshige says of Food Not Bombs. "They want to be visible, and the reason they conduct their food sharing is to show the public what it looks like when a community looks out for each other's needs and really provides mutual aid to one another."
FNBH and other groups had been operating outside the library with the city's consent since the 2012 ordinance was passed, but city officials now say the situation is a health and safety issue. Former Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner suggested that the charity operations were driving families away from the library.
The city is not opposed to groups feeding those who are homeless. But doing it in front of the central library is discouraging families, children and others from using it. After people provide the food, they leave but those who are homeless camp around the library and stay. st
— Sylvester Turner (@SylvesterTurner) August 4, 2023
FNBH's lawsuit notes that they serve food at 7:30 at night, well after the library has closed.
The city's attempts to enforce the ordinance, which outlaws providing free food to more than five people "in need" at outdoor locations without permission, have not gone well. One activist was acquitted, while other cases have been dismissed and delayed because prosecutors can't find jurors who are willing to fine people $500 for the crime of feeding the needy.
The city of Houston may not fare much better in civil court either. In 2014, the city of Dallas was forced to rewrite its food safety regulations and pay two ministries $250,000 after the ministries won a lawsuit challenging restrictions on charitable giving.
Similar cases have popped up elsewhere. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled in 2018 that distributing food was "expressive conduct" protected under the First Amendment. That decision was a response to a lawsuit by the Food Not Bombs chapter in Fort Lauderdale.
As Reason has previously reported, crackdowns on good Samaritans began spreading across the country during the first decade of the century, and that trend has accelerated in recent years as the number of homeless people in the U.S. has surged to record highs. Anti-camping and anti-panhandling laws are also proliferating.
"The city is also sending a message that they don't want unhoused people to be visible to the public," Hiroshige says. "And so in addition to this crackdown on the protected activity of food sharing, there's also just this deeper trend of cities trying to remove unhoused people from the public sphere."
The Houston mayor's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The post Houston Faces First Amendment Lawsuit for Cracking Down on Feeding the Homeless appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Matthew Desmond is a Princeton University professor and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Pulitzer Prize, a PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, and a National Book Critics Circle award. His recent book Poverty, by America—a New York Times bestseller that was ecstatically well-reviewed in many mainstream outlets—attempts to reframe the national policy debate around poverty.
Like the muckrakers of the Progressive Era, Desmond is a master storyteller who gathers firsthand anecdotal material to illuminate social problems. But his novelist's eye for detail can cause readers to overlook the absence of big-picture analysis or useful solutions.
What causes poverty in America, according to Desmond? He answers with bland, awkwardly worded slogans, such as: "Poverty persists because some wish and will it to." He says we need "policies that refuse to partner with poverty, policies that threaten its very survival."
Desmond gets more specific about what doesn't cause poverty. He dismisses cultural explanations, such as single-parent households and declining marriage rates. He quickly dismisses the idea that the welfare state traps people in cycles of dependency, claiming that these arguments rely on anecdotal evidence, even though there's a vast systematic literature on the subject. Desmond doesn't take up political scientist Charles Murray's basic challenge to explain why it is that between 1949 and 1964 the American poverty rate dropped by 22 percentage points before the government did practically anything to help. After President Lyndon Johnson launched his war on poverty, the decline leveled considerably.
Desmond approaches his firsthand investigations with the preconception that poverty is a byproduct of capitalist exploitation. Prices aren't set in a competitive marketplace, in his view; they're just a projection of greed. It's "tempting," he writes, "to blame rising housing costs on anything other than the fact that more than a few of us have a god-awful amount of money and are driving prices higher and higher through bidding wars."
A chapter on the real estate market titled "How We Force the Poor to Pay More" argues that it's twice as profitable to be a landlord in the inner city. Desmond doesn't bother explaining why even more unscrupulous people don't tap into this lucrative business opportunity.
His evidence for this claim is a 2019 paper he co-authored in the American Journal of Sociology that uses data so crude that it really tells us nothing. It omits important costs—like return on equity capital—and benefits—like real estate appreciation—that strongly bias the results in the direction Desmond wants. It ignores how landlords in poor areas are shamed, sued, occasionally jailed, forced to go to court to evict families, and must routinely travel to dangerous areas.
Those headaches scare away most investors, which means that those who stick it out can charge more.
The way to reduce costs in poor areas is to do the opposite of what Desmond advocates and make it easier for landlords to do business, such as streamlining the process of evicting tenants who don't pay rent.
Another chapter attacks government welfare for the rich and middle class, and though he makes some valid points, again Desmond is sloppy with numbers. In 2020, he writes, "the federal government spent more than $193 billion on homeowner subsidies," mostly benefiting "white" people "with six figure incomes" as compared to "$53 billion" for "direct housing assistance for low-income families."
By limiting his tally of what low-income families get to "direct housing assistance," he leaves out the entire $260 billion budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. And by limiting it to "federal," he excludes roughly $70 billion in state and local housing subsidies. He also excludes tax breaks, tax credits, and other indirect federal low-income housing subsidies.
The largest share of the $193 billion figure that Desmond counts as "homeowner subsidies" is an income tax that doesn't exist—an estimate of what people who own their homes would pay if they were taxed on the imputed rental value of their real estate. The logic is that if you buy a house and rent it out, the rent you receive is taxable income, so if you live in the house yourself instead of renting it, you should pay tax on the rental value.
This policy change would do nothing to reduce poverty. If the government started taxing homeowners on imputed rental value, homeowning would be less attractive, and home prices would fall. This would reduce construction jobs and housing supply. Existing homeowners who switched to renting under the new tax regime would not stop occupying homes, so the reduced supply would mean more homeless poor.
Desmond has a tendency to juxtapose the hardship of the poor and the resources of the rich. But he also concedes that there's "no evidence that the United States has become stingier over time" and, in fact, "federal relief [for the poor] has surged" even under Republican administrations. He seems to want homeowners to pay more taxes simply because he thinks homeowners are rich and punishing them with higher taxes is a good in itself.
Desmond's initial celebrity came from his best-selling 2016 book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which was excerpted in The New Yorker. The book argues that eviction is a major cause and exacerbator of misery for poor people.
The evidence Desmond assembled actually shows that eviction is one thread in a skein of causes—and one of the less tractable ones to address.
Evicted concludes with an epilogue that pushes strident policy views completely at odds with the detailed stories about poor families forced out of their homes which fill the rest of the book. Desmond is an engaging storyteller who manages to convey the experience of his extensive personal interviews and observations—he just doesn't know how to interpret his own evidence.
"Eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty," is one of Desmond's most often quoted insights. None of the stories in the book support this contention. All the families he profiles had deep problems prior to their first evictions. Some are drug users or criminals; others are victims of crime; most are unemployed or have insecure low-wage employment without benefits; many have washed out of social programs like public housing and job training.
There are two heartwarming success stories driven by quitting heroin in one case and getting a good job in another. Neither was triggered by finding secure housing.
Desmond never grapples with the fact that housing is different from other forms of social welfare because it involves neighbors. Many of the tenants in his story are people no one is willing to live next to, so they get kicked out of shelters and public housing and turned down by landlords concerned with their effect on neighborhoods.
If Desmond were a serious housing policy analyst, he would understand the tradeoffs at play. High physical standards for occupancy eliminate much of the low-cost housing stock, but lack of standards can mean people live in unhealthful, unpleasant slums. Allowing bad tenants to stay in good places degrades neighborhoods. Concentrating low-income people in public housing projects can lead to conditions as bad as in any urban slums. Making it difficult for landlords to evict nonpayers, squatters, and vandals reduces the available housing stock as landlords abandon properties or refuse to rent to poor people, and it doesn't free up units for better tenants.
Desmond's book actually tells an inspiring story of people working hard to solve these problems, usually with their own time and money. The solutions are never perfect, but lots of people are trying, with patience and skill, to keep everyone housed as best they can.
The book repeats the claim at several points that "the majority of poor renting families in America spend over half of their income on housing, and at least one in four dedicates over 70 percent," which is another misreading of the evidence. Those numbers come from the American Housing Survey, which yields very low-quality information about family income.
Desmond should have consulted the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey, which uses much higher-quality economic data about households and actually covers the population Desmond is writing about.
From those surveys, as of 2021, we find that the poorest 10 percent of the population spends an average of $12,416 per year on housing—including not just rent or mortgage payments but utilities, insurance, taxes, late fees, and other charges. That is 180 percent of their average pre-tax income—$6,916—but only 41 percent of their average annual total expenditures—$30,433—mildly higher than the overall population average of 34 percent.
How do families spend more than four times their pre-tax income? It's not by taking on debt or dipping into savings. On average, these same families added $5,570 to net assets. Low-income households get more money back from the government than they pay in taxes, and they receive subsidies and in-kind assistance that are not measured in most income numbers, including the American Housing Survey numbers. They also earn cash income in the underground economy.
There are certainly people forced to devote the majority of their financial resources to housing, and that's a problem worth caring about. But they account for a fraction of a percent of the U.S. population, or much less than what Desmond claims.
Halting all evictions, which some policy makers have called for since the publication of Evicted, would have catastrophic, unintended consequences. It would chase away honest landlords and embolden abusive ones, who will simply change the locks, cut off utilities, refuse essential repairs, or threaten their tenants with violence.
Desmond misinterprets his own evidence and favors moral grandstanding over serious policy analysis. His stories actually point to the conclusion that the biggest cause of poverty is crime. If poor neighborhoods were safe, if middle-class people didn't fear crime associated with housing projects, if poor people weren't routinely cheated and abused, poverty would be reduced to a simple problem of lack of money and could be eliminated for far less cost than current social spending.
Desmond's analysis never goes deeper than his facile assertion that "poverty persists because some wish and will it to."
"Abolishing poverty," as he sees it, means looking inside ourselves and finding the will to act. His books have had such a wide reach, I fear that this simplistic nonsense will cause policy makers to forget the hard-won lessons of the '60s in favor of policies that leave the American poor worse off than they already are.
Photos: Brandon Kruse/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Antonio Suarez/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; David H. Wells/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Ron Adar/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Renee C. Byer/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Laura Embry/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Lannis Waters/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Jvillegas@Sacbee.Com/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Michael Goulding/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Charlie Neuman/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Joe Sohm / Visions of America/Newscom; Ken Cedeno/UPI/Newscom; Gary C. Caskey/UPI/Newscom; Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA/Newscom; Teun Voeten/Sipa USA/Newscom; VARLEY/SIPA/Newscom; Jonathan Alpeyrie/SIPA/Newscom; MARILYN HUMPHRIES/ 2023 Marilyn Humphries/Newscom; Maxppp/MAXPPP; Max Faulkner/MCT/Newscom; Judy Griesedieck/MCT/Newscom; Andrew Councill/MCT/Newscom; Katherine Jones/KRT/Newscom; imageBROKER/Jim West/Newscom; Peter Bennett/Ambient Images/Newscom; DPST/Newscom; Remsberg Inc/Newscom
Music:"Human," by Rex Banner via Artlist; "Knowledge," by Colors & Carousels via Artlist; "Upward Motion," by Rex Banner via Artlist; "Hidden Side," by Russo via Artlist; "Boardwalk," by Generation Lost via Artlist.
The post Princeton's Matthew Desmond Gets Everything Wrong About Poverty's Root Causes appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Housing news happens all across the country, but this week's Rent Free is a little more California-centric. Our stories include:
But first, our lead story about zoning laws once again coming for the Good Samaritan.
Since March 2023, Chris Avell's church, Dad's Place, in Bryan, Ohio, has been keeping its doors open 24/7 for anyone who might stop by to use the church's kitchen, get food for themselves or their pets from its pantry, or join in church services.
When the homeless shelter next door is full, Dad's Place will take in some of those people too. Avell considers all these activities a core part of his church's mission. The city of Bryan, however, considers his sheltering of people an illegal, residential use of a commercially zoned property.
This past New Year's Eve, when Avell was arriving at the church to preach that Sunday morning, a police officer served him with 18 criminal charges related to violations of the town's zoning code. Avell pleaded not guilty to those charges earlier this month.
Churches' charitable activities often don't fit neatly into zoning codes' definitions of commercial and residential uses. For that reason, they often get dinged with code violations for doing things like operating a soup kitchen in a residential area or sheltering people in a commercial zone.
The fact that churches are also serving the poor and homeless can make them a target of nuisance complaints from neighbors and extra scrutiny and enforcement from local officials as well.
Bryan's decision to criminally charge Avell is nevertheless unusually punitive.
"It's a rarity that a city and a mayor would press criminal charges against a church period. I'm not aware of a mayor anywhere in the country prosecuting a pastor for having his church open. That seems to be the very definition of religious discrimination," says Jeremey Dys, an attorney with the First Liberty Institute who is representing Avell.
City officials hit Dad's Place with an escalating series of complaints before it filed criminal charges.
In early November 2023, city police and fire personnel visited Dad's Place, where they interrogated people inside and recorded a number of alleged violations of the zoning and fire code. They gave the church 10 days to fix the code violations and stop letting people use the church as a residence.
After those ten days had expired, the city's zoning administrator also visited the church, where he observed more allegedly illegal residential activity including people sleeping in chairs and makeshift bedrooms and preparing food in the church's kitchen. The administrator's report recommended charges be filed against Avell.
Dys argues that the city is using an unfairly narrow definition of what counts as church activity to persecute Avell and Dad's Place.
"It may not look like St. Paul's cathedral, but it is in every sense a church," he says. "Mayor [Carrie] Schlade has in her mind that churches meet at 10 a.m. to noon on a Sunday morning and then they lock the doors and go away for the rest of the week."
The city objects to the idea that they're discriminating against Dad's Place.
"Pastor Avell never requested, nor was approval given, to use Dad's Place as a residence or homeless shelter. The city enforces its zoning code equally against all. A church does not have special rights under the zoning code," reads a city press release from last week.
A subsequent fire department investigation this month also discovered a gas leak and other fire code violations, says the press release.
Dys says that the church is eager to provide a safe environment but that city officials are unfairly targeting Dad's place and that they are giving the city shifting demands on what needs to be done to the building. He notes that the pastor of the previous church that had occupied Dad's Place's building lived on site.
Attempts to negotiate with the city have gone nowhere, says Dys. "It's been 'kick everyone out and then we'll talk'."
Beverley Hills, California, property owners are the collateral casualties in a war between the city and activists suing over its failure to allow new housing construction.
Last week, the Los Angeles Times reported that a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge had blocked the city from issuing new building permits for projects that don't add new housing. That means anyone in Beverly Hills wanting to expand their business or dig a pool in their backyard now can't.
The order comes in a lawsuit brought by the non-profit Californians for Homeownership against Beverly Hills for adopting what they allege is a housing production plan that doesn't meet state requirements.
For background, California gives cities targets of how many housing units they should be permitting to keep up with job and population growth. Localities are required to produce "housing elements" outlining where this new housing can go. The state reviews and certifies these housing elements.
One trick cities have long used to perfunctorily comply with the law while avoiding actually having to allow new housing is to identify existing, profitable businesses as the site of future housing. The city can say it's planned for new housing, even though it's exceedingly unlikely the business will actually be redeveloped.
State housing officials accused Beverly Hills of doing just this when it submitted a draft housing element for review. When Beverly Hills went ahead and adopted the housing element, Californians for Homeownership sued the city.
Courts have a lot of discretion to craft remedies and block cities' ability to issue permits if they're out of step with state housing law, says Chris Elmendorf, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. But they've generally used these powers sparingly. A complete moratorium on all building permits, but for those that involve adding new housing, is possibly unprecedented, he tells Reason.
Pro-development "yes in my backyard" (YIMBY) legislators and activists have cheered the ruling.
"Ignoring state housing law has consequences," said California Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco) on X (formerly Twitter).
To be sure, the city has invited these consequences by flouting pretty clear warnings from state officials about the inadequacy of its housing element. It's true too that Beverly Hills' restrictions on new housing production crush property owners' ability to improve their land and make the city more unaffordable than it otherwise would be.
Still, the people suffering consequences of Beverly Hills' NIMBYism and irresponsibility aren't really the city government but residents who don't have any direct ability to force their city government to do anything.
Supporters of the courts' moratorium say an inability to get permits will encourage these residents to pressure their local leaders to get into compliance with state law. That also strikes me as overreach. It's an attempt to coerce people into supporting local policy changes by taking away their private rights to improve their property.
Far away from Southern California's wealth, growth-hostile enclaves, development company California Forever has released the language of a proposed ballot initiative it'll need to pass to build a new, urbanist-inspired city in rural Solano County.
The 83-page initiative, which is intended to appear on the November 2024 county ballot, would amend the county's existing zoning laws and urban growth boundaries to allow a new community on 18,600 acres of land owned by California Forever's subsidiary company Flannery Associates.
The initiative would require the company to abide by a number of community benefits agreements—including paying $500 million for scholarships, affordable housing, and parks, as well as another $200 million to invest in existing downtown areas in the county's existing communities.
The California Forever plan for a new city has been controversial since before it was even unveiled. The mysterious Flannery Associates' land acquisitions led to lawsuits between existing landowners and the company. Congress held hearings on whether the company's land purchases near Travis Air Force Base was some sort of Chinese spy plot.
The New York Times eventually uncovered that the land purchases were not an act of espionage, but something even more insidious: a tech-billionaire-backed plan to build a whole new city.
The company has done its best to frame its new city plans as something sustainable and desirable, but not necessarily radical. "All cities were once 'new' cities," California Forever says in some of the pitch material on its website.
California Forever's plans have received a frosty reception from Solano County residents in community meetings thus far. Should it pass, the ballot initiative would also require an exacting level of environmental review to be done of the proposed new community. That could open up the company and the county to years of environmental litigation from project opponents claiming this or that environmental impact wasn't studied enough.
Speaking of excessive litigation, neighborhood activists in Alexandria, Virginia, have filed a lawsuit to undo a suite of zoning reforms the city passed late last year.
The suburban D.C. community's reforms allowed at least four units on all residential lots, housing in industrial zones, reduced parking minimums near transit, and expanded a density bonus program for affordable housing.
A lawsuit filed by the Coalition for a Livable Alexandria and several individual members, and posted online by WTOP, claims the city failed to show that allowing more housing in the city will improve housing affordability. By not establishing that link, the city had acted in an "arbitrary and capricious" manner, they argue.
The group's lawsuit also argues that the zoning reforms violate the Virginia Constitution's equal protection guarantees because they leave private restrictive covenants in place. Anti-development activists managed to block Montana's zoning reforms using that same argument.
The Livable Alexandria lawsuit also seems to argue there's an equal protection violation inherent in upzoning single-family neighborhoods because some single-family homeowners are black. The city's abolition of single-family zoning "deprives Plaintiff Phylius Burks, an African American, of equal protection by moving the goal post as to land ownership after Plaintiff Phylius Burk purchased a single-family home" reads the lawsuit.
We'll have to wait and see if that argument sticks.
The occupancy limits of Fort Collins, Colorado, allow a family to live with an exchange student or a nanny. A family living with an exchange student and a nanny is prohibited. Maybe this is why more sitcoms aren't set there.
The post Zoning Bans the Good Samaritan appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In January 1985, Sol Wachtler, then the newly minted chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, commented to The New York Daily News that prosecutors in his state could "by and large" get grand juries to "indict a ham sandwich."
To date, the ham sandwiches have remained free. But the spirit of the maxim—that district attorneys can usually secure an indictment regardless of a case's merits—has likely attracted some modern-day supporters with the prosecution of Daniel Penny, whom a grand jury indicted on second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide charges in June. This week, a judge rejected Penny's motion to have those charges dismissed.
On May 1, 2023, a man named Jordan Neely began threatening passengers in a New York subway car. Penny, a former Marine, responded by restraining Neely in a chokehold. Police boarded the car several minutes later, and, after attempting CPR, Neely was transported to Lenox Hill Hospital, where he was ultimately pronounced dead.
The case almost immediately became a cultural litmus test for how you feel about crime, homelessness, and the right to self-defense. Is Daniel Penny a reckless vigilante? Or is he a ham sandwich?
Testimony given to the grand jury, provided by witnesses on that subway car, injects a bit more nuance into a debate that has primarily been colored by a viral video taken by a freelance journalist who'd been on the train.
"Someone is going to die today," Neely reportedly said, according to Person No. 9, a high school student who testified she started to pray that the "doors would open" so she and her classmate could get away. Neely threatened that he "would kill anyone" and was willing to "take a bullet," said Person No. 4, a retiree. Two more witnesses added that Neely had assumed a fighting stance, and another witness—Person No. 18, a mom who was taking her young son to a therapy appointment—recounted that Neely was making "half-lunge movements" and coming within "a half a foot of people."
"I have been riding the subway for many years," said the retiree. "I have encountered many things, but nothing that put fear into me like that."
On the flip side, the video, taken by journalist Juan Alberto Vazquez, captures a passenger telling Penny he might "catch a murder charge" if he continued because he had a "hell of a chokehold." "My wife is ex-military," he said. "You're going to kill him now."
Much has been made of the fact that Penny is also a veteran. He should've known when to release Neely, the thinking goes.
Not necessarily, according to several Marine veterans interviewed by Business Insider, all of whom said that training focuses not on the safety of a subject but on the safety of innocent bystanders whose lives may be in danger. "Once you make the decision to intervene, the only thing you can do is hold on until help arrives," said a former senior officer, who opted to remain anonymous. "We don't place a heavy emphasis on knowing when to let up to ensure your opponent survives," added Alex Hollings, a former Marine black belt who of the four was the most critical of Penny's actions. "He should have been able to assess that his opponent was no longer providing any kind of resistance, and at that point he should have known that Neely was unconscious," he said. "Of course, we are talking about a fight. Most people aren't thinking at all, let alone thinking straight during one."
It will be up to a jury now to determine if the alleged recklessness Hollings describes rises to a criminal level. And reckless will indeed be the key word. Under New York law, Penny is guilty of second-degree manslaughter if he "recklessly cause[d] the death of" Neely despite being "aware of and consciously disregard[ing] a substantial and unjustifiable risk that such result will occur." [Emphasis mine.] For the criminally negligent homicide charge, Penny is guilty if he caused Neely's death after he "fail[ed] to perceive a substantial and unjustifiable risk that such result will occur." [Emphasis mine.] The former charge carries a prison sentence of up to 15 years; the latter count prescribes a term of up to four years.
Those who feel Penny's prosecution is unjust—that he has been ham-sandwiched—can take comfort in the fact that his jury at trial will be tasked with evaluating his case with a much higher standard of proof than his grand jury was. That may not be complete consolation, however, when considering another criminal justice cliche: that "the process is the punishment."
The post 'Someone Is Going To Die Today': Did Daniel Penny Act in Self-Defense? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When Los Angeles officials were looking to set up a new homeless shelter where residents could have their own space, they decided speed was the priority. For that reason, they declined to build the typical tiny home village in favor of an easier-to-assemble "safe sleeping" tent encampment. At a price of $44,000 per tent, one would hope the site went up pretty fast.
All told, Los Angeles' East Hollywood encampment, complete with showers, fencing, and staff facilities, cost $4 million to build. The city-contracted nonprofit Urban Alchemy spends another $3 million operating the site each year—with most of the operating expenses going toward 24/7 staffing and catering.
Other cities' "safe sleeping" sites are similarly expensive.
Supporters of safe camping sites stress the quick set-up times and improved safety, hygiene, and independence they provide occupants compared to unmanaged tent encampments. Nevertheless, delivering some of the benefits of sleeping inside to an open-air parking lot is an inescapably expensive endeavor. Actual buildings are more cost-effective. In all of the aforementioned cities, the yearly costs of renting an average-priced apartment are cheaper than the per-tent costs of a safe camping site.
"What we found in the early iterations of safe sleep is that some people preferred tents because it gave them a sense of ownership." —Kirkpatrick Tyler, Urban Alchemy's chief of government-community affairs, in the Los Angeles Times
The post Homeless Encampments Cost These Cities Tens of Thousands of Dollars Per Tent appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A few months ago, Christie Gardner's apartment was wrecked by a fire. Now she's living with the damage left by the fire, smoke, water, and the firemen who helped save her apartment. "It's a total disaster right now," says Gardner. "They broke up all my bookshelves, my computer." To make matters worse, her electricity has been turned off, so she has to get by with just a few battery-operated lamps and the waning hours of daylight.
But Gardner is no stranger to suffering. The six decade-plus resident of Washington, D.C., was forced to quit her job as a certified nursing assistant after she suffered from a workplace injury that left her needing a hip replacement. Still, Gardner remains positive, always reminding herself and those around her: "It will get better. God is good."
Gardner now spends her time advocating for her community, volunteering for several nonprofit organizations, attending doctor appointments—and fighting the D.C. government for welfare benefits.
Like many in D.C. and throughout the country, Gardner has fallen over a welfare benefit cliff—it's what happens when someone suddenly loses benefits because a slight increase in income pushes them over the welfare program's income-eligibility threshold.
Since 2020, Gardner has seen some of her welfare benefits decline roughly 90 percent despite still being on disability. Among other changes, since 2020 her monthly SNAP benefits have decreased from almost $300 to just $30. Despite her best efforts, she has been unable to determine the precise cause of these reductions, though she says she thinks it could be due to her becoming eligible for and receiving Medicaid.
She turned to a local nonprofit, Bread for the City, that aims to empower low-income Washingtonians to escape poverty by providing food, clothing, medical care, and legal and social services. The organization also advocates for their clients by soliciting the D.C. government for needed reforms and by helping them understand what welfare programs they qualify for, how to apply, and how to avoid falling over their benefit cliffs.
The bureaucracy surrounding welfare programs makes them very expensive, inefficient, and confusing to navigate—costing taxpayers a lot of money while failing to provide meaningful help to those that are struggling economically.
Brittany Pope, a licensed graduate social worker, is Bread for the City's economic security supervisor and oversees the organization's involvement in government-funded projects like Thrive East of the River and DC CARES. These programs intend to help low-income community members who have been denied unemployment benefits, pandemic relief aid, and federal stimulus payments through cash transfers paired with legal, social, and economic counseling services.
As Pope explains, these cash transfer programs are difficult to administer because the programs might disqualify participants from being eligible for benefits if the government decides to count the cash transfer payments as earned income.
That could be what happened to Gardner when she took part in the Thrive East of the River program in 2020. Gardner was accepted into the Thrive program because of her economic status and her disability stemming from her workplace injury. It is possible her inclusion in this cash transfer program threw her over some benefit cliffs, but her decrease in welfare benefits also coincided with her beginning to receive Medicaid. After her participation in the program concluded, she was no better off financially.
The federal government, states, and some localities all administer welfare programs. Complicating the situation, every welfare program has different income-eligibility limits which can vary by family size, age, and disability. Pope describes counseling clients as "thread[ing] the needle in between all of the different programs' income and asset limits." While welfare offices staff social workers, lawyers, and other support employees to enroll participants and explain programs to them, the offices are often too understaffed and the employees too overworked to manage their ever-growing caseloads.
Both Gardner and Pope mentioned the difficulties they have had with reaching the D.C. Department of Human Services (DC DHS) and other D.C. government offices' staff. Receiving adequate guidance was even more difficult, if not impossible.
DC DHS did not respond to requests for comment, but it has not entirely ignored this problem. The agency launched the Career Mobility Action Plan (Career MAP) as a pilot program in December 2022 to help combat the effects of welfare benefit cliffs and encourage families to pursue employment. Families who were a part of the Family Re-Housing Stabilization Program were eligible to join a lottery to participate in Career MAP. Six hundred families were chosen at random to receive up to five years of housing, career, and familial support from D.C. DHS. Along with rental assistance, participating families are given up to $10,000 a year to bridge the gap if they lose benefits as a result of their income increasing from work.
"It's a baby step," Pope says of the program. "It's kind of like a workaround, like a bandaid, basically. But it doesn't fix the root of the issue." Career MAP acknowledges benefit cliffs and provides families with money to overcome them.
But Pope is right: These programs fail to fix the broken policies that enable benefit cliffs to form in the first place. Spending more taxpayer money on more government programs rarely solves anything, especially when the government bakes disincentives to work and economic mobility into the programs. As policy scholar Michael Tanner has noted, government policies that create welfare benefit cliffs "act as poverty traps, deterring work effort or putting a low ceiling on how much those families can increase their standard of living." This can be true of welfare programs in general, which disincentivize work and compete with better-targeted and better-administered private charity and community support programs.
Even though she is a victim of welfare benefit cliffs, Gardner is not eligible to participate in the Career MAP program because she was not in the Family Re-Housing Stabilization Program. She currently lives in a (now burnt out) Inclusionary Zoning Program apartment and has been on the DC Housing Authority's public housing waitlist since 2013—the year the list was closed due to the overwhelming volume of applicants.
Teetering on the edge of benefit cliffs is the norm. Falling over happens to too many. Rescues are the luck of the draw. In the end, the D.C. government's welfare programs are largely ineffective: in trying to help, they instead make things worse.
The post Welfare Is Great—for the Welfare Bureaucrats appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Happy Tuesday and happy holidays to all Rent Free readers who've helped make the newsletter a success right out of the gate. To close out 2023, I wanted to try something a little more in the Christmas spirit than the normal rundown of the week's top housing and urbanism stories.
December 26 is when many are feeling a bit of a holiday hangover (and maybe an actual hangover) after the excitement of Christmas Day.
Of course, if you are familiar with the lyrics of the classic "Twelve Days of Christmas" song, you'll know that the season is only just getting started. Over the next few days, you can expect a series of increasingly outlandish gifts from your true love.
Now, it's beyond my means to send every reader a partridge in a pear tree. The next best thing I can offer is the following list of increasingly off-the-wall ideas for making our cities more affordable, functional, and free.
Some of these are more grounded in actual white papers than others. A few still need a couple of details worked out. One or two are more thought experiments than anything else. But they hopefully will provide some food for thought as you polish off the last remaining dregs of eggnog.
This past year saw a lot of practical, incremental housing reforms get passed. In 2024, we should try some more out-of-the-box thinking.
(And check back next Tuesday when we return to regular programming.)
California has a policy called the "builder's remedy," which allows developers to build residential projects of unlimited density in communities that are out of compliance with state housing law, local zoning be damned.
It's supposed to be a weapon of last resort against cities that refuse to permit their fair share of housing.
To date, however, no one's gotten one of these builder's remedy projects approved. One reason is that California housing law and related court decisions make it anyone's guess when a city is actually out of compliance with state housing law.
One exceedingly modest off-the-wall idea to clear up this confusion, and make the system more market-oriented, would be to adopt a price-based builder's remedy law.
Let's make communities eligible for builder's remedy projects when rents or home values go above a certain price level.
Setting an objective standard for when builder's remedy projects apply would route around a lot of bureaucracy. Basing that objective standard on housing prices would allow home construction in places where demand for it is highest. Cities that wanted to avoid "builder's remedy" megaprojects would have to reform their zoning codes until they'd achieved broad-based affordability.
America's housing shortage is often blamed on an excess of local control. Could hyper-local control be part of the solution?
One modestly off-the-wall idea that's gaining currency in the United Kingdom is "block voting" or "street voting." Basically, this policy allows small collections of property owners on the block level to vote to upzone themselves without the need to get approval from city hall.
Incumbent homeowners often oppose upzoning that allows new housing because they get nothing from the new housing except more noise, more traffic, and potentially lower property values.
You can say that's a bad attitude. The idea behind block voting is that it's bad economics too. Homeowners should support upzoning, because increasing the development potential of their land should make their land more valuable.
If small collections of homeowners were given the opportunity to upzone their own land, odds are many would do it, and sell it off to the next developer who comes knocking. The homeowners get more money, and the city gets more housing. Everyone wins!
Bills that allow duplexes in single-family zones or mid-rise apartments near transit stops can turn into knock-down, drag-out fights that suck up everyone's effort and time. Wouldn't it be easier to just slip these reforms through without anyone noticing?
That might sound really off the wall. It's more or less what the Florida Legislature did this year when it passed the Live Local Act.
The law is mostly a grab bag of mortgage subsidies and developer tax credits. Tucked inside is a provision allowing developers to build housing in commercial and industrial areas, provided they include a set percentage of affordable housing. The residential projects allowed by the Live Local Act can also be as tall as the highest building within a mile.
For much of the state's suburban areas, that's not too dramatic a change. A disused strip mall can be turned into a low-slung apartment building.
In a place like Miami Beach, property owners are claiming the law gives them the ability to turn low-slung, landmarked hotels into residential skyscrapers.
If people grokked how much upzoning the Live Local Act really allowed when it was first proposed, it's possible it wouldn't have passed. One lesson for future YIMBYs is they should write their reforms in a way that will produce a lot of housing, without catching the attention of their NIMBY opposition before everything's signed into law.
The United States Postal Service (USPS) has been in the red for decades, necessitating constant subsidies from taxpayers. Those same taxpayers, meanwhile, are suffering the full brunt of America's housing cost crisis.
One midrange off-the-wall idea to solve both these problems at once would be to make the Postal Service into a real estate titan.
In a 2020 op-ed, infrastructure researcher Nick Zaiac and California YIMBY Research Director (and occasional Reason contributor) M. Nolan Gray noted that USPS owns 8,400 facilities totaling 900 million square feet of land and that much of it is in highly desirable, highly expensive urban areas. And because this is federally owned land, it's exempt from local zoning laws.
USPS should take advantage of both facts by selling off the development rights to build housing on top of existing postal properties. That would shore up the postal service's finances while adding thousands of new homes. As a bonus, people living on top of their post office would probably get their mail a lot faster too.
In January, a former Los Angeles city councilmember pled guilty to federal charges stemming from bribes he accepted from a developer. In June, a sitting Los Angeles councilmember was indicted for a similar scheme.
This is hardly a phenomenon confined to Los Angeles. Odds are, by the time you're done reading this list, some local official somewhere will have been arrested for taking bribes from a developer.
The frequency of real estate–related corruption scandals at city hall is a real shame. It's also real evidence of just how costly zoning regulations can be.
Profit-maximizing developers are willing to shell out exorbitant bribes only because the rules they're trying to route around cost them even more. Public officials will risk prison accepting those bribes because their power to say yes or no to new housing is really that valuable.
Lawlessness isn't good. It's also inefficient.
Instead of forcing developers and city council members to illegally swap favors in smoke-filled rooms, let's bring the whole process above ground. Let's "legalize" corruption by letting developers pay a cash price for regulatory relief.
If a developer wants to build a taller building than the zoning code allows or put apartments in an exclusively commercial zone, there should be a set price they can pay to get their permits. Politicians could get a percentage of this money for their personal use, while the rest goes into the public treasury.
This is a solidly off-the-wall idea but it could be a big boon for housing.
With legalized corruption, developers will make more money building larger, less-regulated projects. The public will get more housing and more tax revenue. The politicians will get smaller bribes, yes, but they'll also avoid going to prison.
Economist Gordon Tullock argued that in the short term corruption could improve the efficiency of systems with bad rules. But over the long run, Tullock said, politicians would make the rules even worse to maximize the bribes people pay to escape the bad rules.
A system of formally legalized corruption would likely produce the same result. But it would at least make the cost of bad rules all the more apparent.
In America, localities have carte blanche to write their zoning codes from start to finish. The result is a bewildering patchwork of bespoke local processes, one-off special districts, and arcane definitions. Because these rules are written by the level of government least interested in growth, they tend to be pretty restrictive too.
An off-the-wall idea to fix this problem would be to do zoning Japanese-style.
In the land of the rising sun, the national government is responsible for coming up with zoning districts. While an individual American city might have dozens of districts and overlays, the entire nation of Japan has just 12. The rules for each are also more flexible: Housing can go in commercial districts, shops can be built in residential areas, etc.
Local governments are still responsible for mapping which zones cover which properties. But they have to use those nationally created zoning districts.
Thanks to this system, Japanese cities are remarkably affordable places brimming with mixed commercial/residential areas. We could have that here too.
Notwithstanding all the nice things I just said about Japanese zoning, we really should just get rid of zoning altogether. That sounds pretty off the wall when you first hear it. After all, zoning laws are something most people just kind of accept, as a fish accepts the water it swims in.
But zoning is the real off-the-wall idea when you start to think about it. And not in a good way.
Anyone with a free market bone in his body should realize how crazy it is that we entrust city hall to scientifically plot out which kinds of buildings will go where, and then decide what's allowed to happen in each one.
Less libertarian observers still can, and indeed have, looked at the results of zoning in terms of higher home prices, longer commutes, higher rates of homelessness, less economic dynamism, and more, and decided the whole system has to go.
I make a more elaborate case for this in my "Zoning Theory of Everything" essay from earlier this year.
Gray also wrote a whole book about how a world without zoning would more easily deal with the things we think zoning is supposed to solve: noise, pollution, neighborhood character, etc.
Most of the housing and housing affordability discussion focuses on the zoning code. Less attention gets paid to the building code, which tells you how buildings actually have to be built.
While zoning has no merit whatsoever, the building code does have some value in protecting health and safety. But it can still cause lots of problems.
For instance, antiquated building code requirements that apartment buildings have two staircases make smaller garden apartments hard or impossible to build, and ruin the layout of family-sized apartments, for instance. Oftentimes, the building code requires the use of expensive materials that do nothing to protect human life, but do drive up construction costs.
An admittedly pretty off-the-wall idea would be to get rid of the building code too. In its place, we could rely on insurance companies to set more market-driven, and more rational, health and safety standards for new construction. Ensuring builders are liable, civilly and criminally, for shoddy work would enforce good behavior.
In return, builders would have more flexibility, people would have cheaper housing, and taxpayers could redirect all the money they spend on building inspectors into something more useful.
Former President Donald Trump has promised that, if elected to a second term, he'll kickstart the construction of beautiful "freedom cities" on federal land, where housing will be affordable and cars will fly.
The specifics of what Trump is proposing are indeed off the wall—so much so that I can't truly recommend the idea. That said, a more modest version of freedom cities would be a great idea.
The federal government owns vast tracts of undeveloped land in western states. A lot of that land exists on the exurban fringes of thriving cities, where it functions as a de facto urban growth boundary.
Given the post-COVID boom in Mountain West home prices, there's clearly a lot of demand for developing this exurban land. And if someone wants to take a chance on building a real freedom city out in the middle of nowhere, they should have that right too.
Opening up federal lands to residential development would require congressional action. Fortunately, Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) already has a bill to get the job done.
If Congress really wanted to do something to help more Americans own a home, they should drop their efforts to impose rent control on the whole country and take up Lee's bill to make (sort of) freedom cities a real possibility.
A pithy piece of investment advice Tony Soprano gives his son is to buy land because God isn't making any more of it.
Perhaps He isn't. But that doesn't mean man can't step in to do that job instead. An exceedingly off-the-wall idea for making cities affordable is to bring back land reclamation.
From Manhattan to Amsterdam, some of the world's greatest cities have been built atop land that used to be water until humans started piling dirt on top of it. Today, some of this manmade mud is the most valuable real estate in the world.
We hardly lost the ability to do land reclamation. Surely if 14th century Dutchmen figured it out, so can we. A lot of environmental laws would have to be tweaked and reworked to make this a possibility. But that's certainly no reason not to do it.
Indeed, since the most expensive land is typically coastal land, there'd be a huge financial return on building more of it.
We could go a long way toward making cities affordable by liberalizing the regulations we have on land that already exists. But if we want to go all the way toward making urban areas the best they can be, we'd benefit from adding more land too.
That doesn't necessarily mean we should fill in San Francisco Bay tomorrow. But we should at least consider the possibility of filling in part of it someday soon.
Homeless encampments are a depressingly common sight in American cities. They persist despite no one wanting them there. There's nevertheless a fierce debate about whether local officials should clear them or leave them be.
Some say yes to clearing encampments, citing the costs of concentrated vagrancy and loss of public amenities like parks. Others say no, arguing that encampment sweeps still leave people homeless, are expensive in their own right, and typically involve serious rights violations of the homeless.
I think both sides have pretty good points, and it doesn't seem like there's an easy answer. Until now.
Perhaps the way to solve homeless encampments is the incredibly off-the-wall idea of just giving the homeless property rights to the park or underpass or wherever they've occupied. Once they have secure title, some Coasian bargaining can begin.
If the homeless encampment truly is a severe blight on the neighborhood, nearby property owners could purchase the land from the homeless and return it to a functioning park. The homeless themselves would then have enough cash in hand to get more traditional accommodations of their own.
And if nearby property owners aren't willing to pay the price the homeless are asking, that's evidence that the value of using the land as a homeless encampment is higher than any negative externality it creates.
The homeless people's secure property rights would over time enable them to improve the encampment into a more permanent shanty town, which in turn would give way to more established, commodious dwellings.
The economist Hernando de Soto has argued that a cure for extreme poverty in the Global South is to give the poor secure title to their land. I think that's a great idea. If it would work in the slums of Harare, I see no reason it can't be applied to L.A.'s Skid Row or Washington, D.C.'s McPherson Square.
When working on a tough problem, sometimes it helps to work backward. Imagine where it is you want to be, and then figure out what steps you need to take to get there. Applied to housing issues, this means thinking long and hard about what policy reforms will get us "The Cube."
You know The Cube. It's the single building that will house the entire human race in one ultradense, megalopolis where every neighborhood has a walk score of 100 million and every job in the world is a short elevator ride away.
No one will want for shelter when one big building houses all of humanity. Space in such a dense environment will be quite expensive, but the high wages produced by locating a 7-billion-person labor market under one roof will make up for that. If they don't, no worries. We'll just make The Cube even bigger!
It's all well and good to abolish zoning and building codes, but these are merely intermediary steps toward our ultimate goal of building The Cube. Endless other regulations will likely also have to be repealed as well to ensure we're able to engineer, finance, and construct The Cube.
People will likely raise objections about the desirability and feasibility of The Cube. Selling The Cube will be hard. That's why it tops out as our most off-the-wall idea. But once it's built, everyone will be happy to have it.
Freedom is a good thing in and of itself. Freedom is also a tool that gets us other things we really want. And what we really want here at Rent Free is The Cube.
The post 12 Increasingly Off-the-Wall Housing Reforms appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The year winds down, but housing news steams along here at Rent Free. This week's stories include:
But first, our lead item about a California couple who lost their fight with the state regulators ordering them to dismantle their home:
The two-story mobile home that Michael and Susan Christian own and live in in the Orange County beach community of San Clemente, California, isn't blighted, dangerous, ugly, or even unpopular with the neighbors.
But it is a little too tall, according to state officials with the California Coastal Commission.
For over a decade, the commission—a state agency with the final say over most development on the California coast—has been arguing that the Christians' addition of a second story to their home obscures ocean views from a nearby walking trail. It also argued the couple added that second story without getting the required permits from the commission.
Late last month, a California appeals court sided with the commission, ruling that the Christians must comply with its demands to shrink their house from its current 22 feet in height down to 16 feet. The Christians' representatives say that will require them to completely tear down and rebuild the home.
"They're an elderly couple. They're in their 70s. They have all kinds of health issues. This is their only home; they live in it," says Lee Andelin, one of the Christians' lawyers. Dismantling the home "is going to cost them millions of dollars, for what? There's not a broader benefit for the public."
Andelin argues the ruling will embolden the commission to place even more restrictions on coastal homeowners' ability to improve their properties.
The Coastal Commission's Long Anti-Development History
The California Coastal Commission has been called "the single most powerful land use authority in the United States."
Created in the 1970s to stop a "corporate land grab" on California's coast, it has the final say over local government regulations on coastal development and most individual projects within the coastal zone.
The commission's "yes in my backyard" (YIMBY) critics argue its overregulation of development has made coastal housing unaffordable to most Californians. One 2010 study found that areas regulated by the commission have higher housing costs and higher incomes.
Property rights advocates argue that the commission's discretionary powers give property owners little guidance on what they're allowed to do on their properties. That leaves them exposed to endless process and appeals when applying for permits—and huge fines for doing anything without the right permits.
The Christians' Story
The Christians got approval to expand their home in 2011 from the California Department of Housing and Community Development, which regulates mobile home construction. At the time, the Christians thought that was the only approval they needed.
In 2014, the Coastal Commission sent the Christians a letter of violation saying that the already-completed renovations were unlawful without their approval.
The couple applied for an after-the-fact permit, which the commission approved in 2016 only on the condition that they cut the size of their house down from 22 feet to 16 feet to avoid "significant" view impacts from nearby walking trails.
The Christians stressed to the commission that they couldn't just lop off six feet of their house without tearing down the whole thing and starting over.
That failed to change the commission's mind. So the Christians sued, arguing the view impacts of their second story were not significant. Pointing to its approval of taller buildings near other coastal trails and parks, they also argued that the commission was applying subjective and ad hoc standards on view impacts.
In November, a state appeals court rejected the Christians' arguments, finding instead that the commission had wide discretion to determine which view impacts were significant. The court also ruled that the commission was under no obligation to establish objective criteria on view impacts.
Determining when new construction adversely affected protected ocean views "will inherently depend on some site-specific factors that require subjective interpretation by the Commission," reads the unpublished opinion.
Wider Impact
Because the appeals court decision is an unpublished opinion, it's not a binding precedent. The Christians' lawyers argue that it will nevertheless encourage the Coastal Commission to deny or condition permit applications on subjective view-impact grounds.
The Christians' options after the appeals court decision are limited. Andelin says they are still within the deadline to appeal to the California Supreme Court, but the odds of the court taking up their case are slim.
Provided they don't appeal, the Christians have no other option than to comply with the commission's demands to tear down their house and build something smaller in its place.
It's an expensive and difficult prospect for the aging couple. But noncompliance could see the Christians hit with tens of thousands of dollars in daily fines.
"They'll have to move out," says Andelin. "It's a hardship."
Last week, Rent Free covered the Austin City Council's passage of an ordinance allowing property owners to build up to three homes on all residential plots citywide.
When one considers the fine print, it's one of the more ambitious repeals of single-family zoning that's passed anywhere in the country. But Austin's new regime could be short-lived.
Last week, in the case Acuña v. City of Austin, a local Travis County court struck down a previous set of zoning reforms Austin had passed in 2019 creating density bonuses and allowing housing in commercial zones. The court sided with suing homeowners who'd argued they hadn't been provided with the required individualized notice of the zoning changes and that their "right to protest" zoning changes had therefore been violated.
Jack Craver, author of the Austin Politics Newsletter*, writes that the "radical" opinion could effectively outlaw all of Austin's density bonus programs (which allow developers to build larger individual projects in exchange for including affordable units).
The ruling doesn't directly involve the more recent zoning reforms the city passed. The City Council also passed the new reforms via a special process and with a supermajority vote, meaning they don't have to give homeowners individualized notice of zoning changes.
But Douglas Becker, the lawyer for the plaintiffs in Acuña, tells Reason the city still arguably violated Austinites' right to protest zoning changes. Becker says he's conferred with clients about challenging the most recent reforms, but no decisions have been made yet.
There are roughly 650,000 homeless people in the country, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) 2023 Point-in-Time Count report, which counts all homeless people on a single night in January.
The count, published this past Friday, found that homelessness had increased 12 percent nationwide since the 2022 count. Per the report, four in 10 homeless people are unsheltered, meaning they live on the streets or in other places not considered fit for human habitation.
A HUD press release credits the housing spending in the Biden administration's $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan from 2021 for reducing homelessness between 2020 and 2022. The expiration of those additional resources "contributed" to this year's rise in homelessness, HUD said.
That's a tough claim to fact-check. HUD waived jurisdictions' requirement to complete a full Point-in-Time count in 2021 because of COVID concerns. Last year's Point-in-Time report said the 2021 partial count "artificially reduced" the 2021 homeless population. This year's report says lingering pandemic effects also "artificially reduced" 2022's homeless count.
It's tough to say then how much the rise in homelessness is attributable to expiring funding and how much is a result of a more comprehensive survey being completed in 2023.
Reason has covered how much local zoning restrictions hamper even purely private efforts to provide shelter and services to the homeless during the pandemic.
When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the Live Local Act in March 2023, he praised the law's tax credits for low-income housing and mortgage subsidies for teachers and firefighters. He made no mention of the legislation's inclusion of what's turning out to be some pretty radical zoning reforms.
The Live Local Act allows developers to build housing in commercial, industrial, and mixed-use areas at the highest residential density allowed in the local jurisdiction. Provided the projects include the requisite amount of affordable housing, local governments have to approve these new developments.
The potentially huge density increases the law allows, mixed with what are turning out to be relatively modest affordability requirements, and an opportunity to skate around local anti-development politics are seeing developers rush to use the law.
"I have them in every major city—Tampa, Orlando, Miami—and we're in a mad dash to get them done," one Florida land use lawyer told The Wall Street Journal, saying he's working on 40 separate Live Local projects.
— Kevin ???? Glass (@KevinWGlass) December 15, 2023
Washington, D.C., has only two licensed firearms dealers. The city's zoning code still finds it necessary to have minimum parking requirements for gun stores—1.33 spaces for every 1,000 square feet of floor space above 5,000 square feet.
*CORRECTION: The original version of this article misidentified the Austin Politics Newsletter's distributor.
The post California Officials Force Elderly Couple To Dismantle Home, Citing Blocked Ocean Views appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Former Hialeah, Florida, police officer Rafael Otano has been sentenced to five and a half years in prison after being convicted of kidnapping a homeless man who was considered a nuisance by shop owners at a local strip mall. Prosecutors said that after a shopkeeper called police last year to complain about the man, Otano and another officer drove the vagrant to a wooded area outside of city limits that is a popular dumping site, beat him, and left him there. An off-duty Miami-Dade police officer later saw the man and called for help. The trial date for the other officer charged in the kidnapping has not yet been set.
The post Brickbat: Out of Sight, Out of Mind appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>World leaders are descending on San Francisco this week for a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. Most of the coverage of APEC thus far has focused less on trade deals and geopolitics and more on the city of San Franciso's efforts to clean up the streets ahead of the conference.
Headlines in publications both local and international noted the city's energetic efforts to clear homeless encampments, clean streets, and crack down on drug activity in the downtown conference area. The Daily Mail helpfully published some before and after pictures of newly sparkling streets.
California politicians have been pretty open about the fact that the street cleanup efforts are to spruce up the city for APEC.
"I know folks say, 'Oh, they're just cleaning up this place because all these fancy leaders are coming into town.' It's true, because it's true," said California Gov. Gavin Newsom to reporters yesterday. Still, Newsom stressed that the pre-APEC cleanup is part of a new, more proactive approach of the city and the state to crack down on public vagrancy.
This transformation of a few San Francisco streets has sparked two contradicting criticisms.
Some local homeless advocates complain that the city's rush to clear encampments before APEC is disrupting the lives of the now-displaced downtown homeless people and straining shelters elsewhere in the city.
On the other hand, you have some mostly online, mostly conservative detractors who are asking why it took a communist dictator coming to town before San Francisco "fixed" its homelessness problem.
What does it tell us that San Francisco cracks down on lawlessness only when the dictator of a communist country is about to visit that city?https://t.co/X4UaxoN8wu
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) November 13, 2023
San Francisco finally fixed the homeless crisis. All it took was a visit from a world dictator.
Before Xi: After: pic.twitter.com/2WimoNHC49
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) November 12, 2023
Nobody is talking about this, but the way SF simply said *YOU ARE LEAVING, NOW* to the entire homeless/vagrant/drug addict/criminal population of its downtown ???????????????? ???????? ???????????????? for Xi Jinping suggests either a lack of will otherwise, or the adoption of Xi Jinping tactics. https://t.co/ky7rcuSU10
— Jeff Blehar is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) November 12, 2023
Gov. Newsom orders homeless camps removed in San Francisco in an obvious attempt to impress his new best friend, China's Communist dictator. Pity he's had no desire to impress those who actually live in California. https://t.co/d3MhdKjFt5
— Senator Melissa Melendez (@senatormelendez) November 14, 2023
"The speed at which the downtown area has been cleared up shows that when there is impetus, it can be done. It is a shame, then, to see that politicians like Newsom only seem to act when it is politically expedient to do so," wrote Soledad Ursúa at Unherd.
In short, some people are complaining that the city has made its homelessness problem worse, while others are complaining that it could have easily been solved sooner.
This disconnect is partially the product of these two groups talking about different sides of what Matt Yglesias recently dubbed "America's two homelessness problems."
To summarize, there's the one homelessness problem experienced by the homeless themselves through a lack of housing. Then there's the other homelessness problem experienced by the public generally through exposure to a bunch of vagrancy and disorderly behavior spilling out into streets because of that lack of homes.
San Francisco's APEC cleanup did nothing to address the first homelessness problem, which is what the local homeless advocates are complaining about. The city simply moved some homeless people from one area of the city to another. Some have plausibly ended up inside homeless shelters or less visible spots on the street. But, the number of homeless people in the city remains as high as ever.
San Francisco did make some progress on the second homelessness problem by dismantling tent encampments, replacing people on the streets with flower boxes, and creating a heavily policed security cordon covering a few city blocks.
Even still, the city hardly "fixed" its second homelessness problem. It just shifted encampments and vagrant behavior away from the downtown.
In his homelessness essay, Yglesias argues that it's fine to clear a tent encampment even if it doesn't make a dent in the unsheltered homeless population because improving urban quality of life is a worthy goal by itself.
I agree with that idea to a point. In a libertarian world, there obviously wouldn't be public parks. If the park shouldn't ideally exist, it follows that there's also no inherent right to sleep in it. Likewise, there's no fundamental right to pitch a tent on a public sidewalk and create nuisances for adjacent property owners and passersby.
Nevertheless, dismantling a homeless encampment isn't free. It requires tax dollars and the exercise of actual state force. In the process of enforcing camping ordinances and responding to public nuisances, police also have a habit of violating people's well-established rights.
Indeed, routine police abuse of the homeless has produced a long string of court decisions that place limits on cities' abilities to sweep homeless encampments and arrest people for being poor in public.
It also costs the general public in the form of more taxes, more surveillance, and more interactions with law enforcement.
There's a difficult balancing act to be struck then between making streets and parks a nice and safe place to be for the general public and protecting the rights of people who would bear the brunt of quality-of-life-focused law enforcement.
That balancing act is made no easier if you're a city like San Francisco, which boasts one of the highest rates of homelessness in the entire country. The more homeless people a city has, the more force the police will have to use to maintain a given amount of public order and cleanliness.
The city's APEC cleanup measures should make that clear enough. Right now, whole blocks of downtown San Francisco are effectively a miniature police state, with security fencing, pedestrian and vehicle checkpoints, and whole areas closed off to the general public.
Those measures have worked at temporarily walling off the downtown from the city's persistent homelessness problem. They're not measures that can or should be made a permanent citywide effort—at least not if one places any value on not living in a police state.
Indeed, some of the people attacking Newsom and the San Francisco city government for only cleaning up the streets for Xi Jinping's visit seem to be flirting (sometimes explicitly) with the idea perhaps Chinese Communist Party–style public order wouldn't be such a bad thing.
i'm downtown sf and there are heavily armed policemen everywhere — underground, drug stores, street corners. "how you doing?" one asked, super friendly, hand on his gun. all in advance of xi's visit i guess, but crime has evaporated.
it could be like this every day.
— Mike Solana (@micsolana) November 10, 2023
That's a bad attitude for sure, but it comes from some very justified frustration.
San Francisco is one of the richest cities in the free world. Its residents shouldn't have to choose between a degraded quality of life that comes with thousands of people living on the streets and an aggressive police state that keeps those thousands of homeless out of sight and out of mind.
Escaping that unhappy tradeoff would require the city, and the surrounding region, to radically liberalize housing construction.
That would bring housing prices down and bring a lot more people inside. That wouldn't solve everyone's problems, but it would mean a lot of dysfunctional behavior playing out in public will instead move behind closed doors.
A less overwhelmed San Francisco city government (and voluntary philanthropic actors) could also more judiciously deal with those remaining people that insist on pitching a tent in the park or smoking meth on the street.
The post San Francisco's APEC Cleanup Hasn't 'Fixed' Its Homelessness Problem appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>To solve its worst-in-the-nation homelessness problem, Los Angeles is considering the novel and legally suspect approach of commandeering empty hotel rooms as shelter housing.
Come March, city voters will decide on a ballot initiative backed by the hotel union Unite Here requiring hotels to report their empty rooms to the city's housing department. The homeless would then be given vouchers to rent the vacant rooms. Hotels don't have to leave those rooms available; they just can't refuse service to homeless customers paying with housing vouchers.
The idea has its roots in Project Roomkey, a federally funded, state-run initiative during the pandemic that moved the homeless out of superspreader congregate shelters and into empty hotels. Project Roomkey and similar programs in other states worked smoothly enough because the feds were willing to pick up the tab, few business travelers or tourists were looking for rooms, and hotel participation was voluntary.
Now that people are traveling again for business and pleasure, hotel owners are less eager to rent rooms in normally operating hotels to the homeless. They are especially not happy about being required to do so by law. They complain that the ballot initiative wouldn't provide hotels and hotel staff any help dealing with disruptive homeless guests they'd be forced to house.
"Unite Here is fighting to fill all LA-area hotels with the same types of activities you see on Skid Row. If they succeed, they'll jeopardize the safety of both hotel guests and workers, virtually destroy the city's tourism industry, and cause massive job losses," said Chip Rogers, who runs the trade group American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA), in a recent statement.
Not all hotel workers like the idea either. A number testified against the proposal when the L.A. City Council was first considering it, reports the Los Angeles Times.
The Unite Here Local 11, whose members are in the middle of a two-month strike, is still vigorously pushing the plan. One of its demands is that hotel owners endorse their ballot initiative. That seems unlikely, as does passage of the ballot initiative itself. A poll conducted by the AHLA found that 86 percent of Angelenos "believe the city should not prioritize housing homeless people in hotels."
Whether or not the ballot initiative is merely a cynical bargaining chip, it's certainly misguided. Forcing hotels to accept homeless guests is just another game of musical chairs played with the city's insufficient number of beds, rooms, and homes. New construction is needed. Thankfully, that can happen without worsening hotels for workers, guests, and owners.
The post L.A. Wants To Commandeer Vacant Hotel Rooms as Homeless Housing appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Former President Donald Trump played all the hits at the opening day of the California GOP Convention in Anaheim, California, promising to liberate the state from the ruling "far-left Marxist" Democrats and bring back closed borders, tariffs, public order, and plentiful water.
"California was once a symbol of American success," said Trump during his winding speech today. "The Golden State gave us the gold rush, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the golden age of Hollywood."
But "under the radical left Marxists and fascists," it had become the site of "mass homeless encampments, soaring taxes, woke tech tyrants, child mutilation…roving bands of criminals looters and thugs."
The stakes are high in Anaheim. The state will send the largest contingent of delegates to the Republican National Convention.
A recent rule change by the state part means that any candidate who wins more than 50 percent of the vote in California's March 5 primary will capture all of the state's 169 delegates. If no one wins an outright majority, then the delegates will be awarded proportionally.
That setup heavily favors the former president, who is the favored choice of over 50 percent of California Republicans. If one excludes undecided voters, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is running a distant second with less than 20 percent of the vote.
Republicans stand no chance of winning California in the 2024 general election. Trump won only 35 percent of the vote there in 2020, a result the former president blamed on the state's "rigged" elections.
"No way we lose this state in a real election," said Trump. "If we had a real election with no mail-in votes. We'd win this state by a lot. We need fair and free elections in this country."
If the crowd at the opening day of the GOP convention is any guide, the former president has the primary in the bag.
Hours before the event, an enthusiastic crowd of hundreds of the former president's supporters had lined up outside the ballroom where he was speaking. Many of the attendees were wearing the typical fare of red MAGA hats and Trump 2024 paraphernalia. A conga line of people in "Trump 47" football jerseys earned cheers from the waiting crowd as they paraded around the banquet hall before the speech.
The numerous criminal cases Trump is a defendant in were not a liability at the convention. People wearing shirts and holding signs featuring Trump's mug shot with slogans like "wanted for president" and "never surrender" were a dime a dozen. A booth selling swag outside the ballroom featured mug shot merch.
Trump himself cracked jokes about the criminal charges he was facing. "Now I'm setting records. Al Capone was not indicted as much."
"They're fake charges," he said. "Try to destroy a man so he can't get elected."
The former president also spent a significant portion of his speech speaking to California's lack of water for agricultural and residential uses, a shortage which he said was manufactured by the state's "lunatic" environmentalists.
"In Los Angeles, you have faucets, washing machines, all these things, but there's very little water…a $35 million house and you can't take a shower," he said.
"All the dry canals will be brimming, you can use it to irrigate, including your homes and bathrooms. The overflow to dampen your forests, you won't have these fires," said Trump, suggesting the surplus could be used to put out wildfires.
The former president also spent a lot of time talking up his record of protectionism during his first term and promised to revive tariffs once back in office. "We're going to put a big tariff on China," he said at one point.
Trump earned some of the largest cheers for his promises to restore public order to California and use the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate "every radical D.A." in the state. "We will start with the Marxist monsters unleashing mayhem on L.A. and San Francisco."
"We will return law and order to California. If you rob a store you can fully expect to be shot as you're leaving it," he said to applause.
Trump also vowed to cut funding to any school that taught critical race theory or had a vaccine or mask mandate; clear the homeless from the streets; conduct the biggest deportation operation in the nation's history; "destroy the Deep State"; and end the Russia-Ukraine war.
"They want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take your freedom," concluded Trump. "We are going to save your state."
The post At California GOP Convention, Donald Trump Promises To 'Liberate' Communist California appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>America needs more housing. Pressure for reform is only growing as available homes get less and less affordable. Unfortunately, rather than addressing the root cause of high housing prices—an epidemic of local overregulation that prevents enough homes from being built—some legislators continue to flirt with social experiments that can harm both landlords and renters.
For example, some states and localities have implemented well-meaning "fair chance" laws banning criminal history on background checks for prospective tenants. Progressive Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D–Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (D–Mich.) recently introduced the idea as federal legislation. In a statement, Pressley said, "It's time we remove the systemic obstacles that have exacerbated the prison-to-homelessness pipeline."
We do indeed have an overcriminalization and overincarceration problem in this country, so on its face, this seems like a good idea. According to the Department of Justice, more than 650,0000 ex-offenders are released from prison every year, not counting the nearly 6.9 million people on probation, on parole, or still in jail or prison at any one time. Far too many face undeserved challenges when trying to re-acclimate into society and not reoffend.
That's partly because relatively few landlords want to rent to people with criminal records. Landlords minimize the risk of delinquent or destructive tenants by selecting the best applicants on a given margin. From this perspective, avoiding people with criminal records seems like an easy choice, even though it means some potentially great tenants are rejected. The best reforms would correct the real problems of overcriminalization and overincarceration. That's politically difficult and may take a long time. Equally important would be removing all artificial barriers to building more homes.
An abundance of homes, especially rental properties, would reduce prices and encourage landlords to compete along different margins, including accepting the previously incarcerated. More housing supply would also make it easier for ex-cons with stable jobs to buy homes at much lower prices and be free from landlords altogether.
On the other hand, top-down reforms like the one proposed by Pressley and Tlaib would shift more of the risk of housing ex-cons onto landlords. The result is both unjust and counterproductive.
Remember the Obama-era initiative to "ban the box"? Reformers sought to boost the job prospects of persons with criminal records by prohibiting employers from asking about applicants' criminal histories. It was another well-meaning idea, but one that overlooked unintended consequences. Preventing employers from discriminating based on criminal history didn't remove the desire of some employers to avoid hiring criminals; it just forced them to use poor information. More employers began discriminating against black and Hispanic applicants. Evidence suggests a similar outcome if criminal background checks of tenants are restricted. A study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis found that when the use of background checks and other information was restricted in that city, racial discrimination in housing increased relative to nearby St. Paul, where no such restrictions were in place.
It's not that individuals with past convictions never see their applications accepted. It's that banning landlords from acquiring background information that they find useful won't suddenly change their thought processes about what makes for desirable tenants. These landlords will find other, noisier information to use in its place—information that may unfortunately sometimes draw from racial stereotypes.
Oh, and because noisier information means more mistakes, it will also further reduce the housing supply by discouraging people from becoming landlords.
Nevertheless, the effort is gaining steam. The Federal Trade Commission and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recently sought public comment on the use of criminal and eviction records in screening clients. Although they have proposed no specific action, it's easy to guess which direction the Biden administration is leaning.
Increased racial discrimination is not the only possible unintended consequence. As one comment from the public observed, "Rental housing providers are in the business of housing and not the eviction business." Eviction is a last resort, but making it harder for landlords to match with the right tenant is likely to mean more of it.
There are many different types of landlords, and they should be able to judge for themselves what information is necessary to operate at their desired risk tolerances. Efficiency keeps customer costs down, and it's a rare market where efficiency improves with less information.
The formerly incarcerated certainly do need more access to housing. But the best available means is simply to increase the supply of housing while reducing the number of people imprisoned for minor offenses.
COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM.
The post Banning Criminal Background Checks Will Lead To More Housing Discrimination, Not Less appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Los Angeles City Council has agreed to pay $60 million to buy the Mayfair Hotel in Westlake. That's on top of the $11.5 million the city previously paid the hotel's owners to
The post Brickbat: Let's Stay Awhile appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>At times, the California Legislature is reminiscent of a high-school student council, except that instead of working with few-hundred-dollar activities budget lawmakers are spending more than $300 billion in revenues. I'm not the first commentator to notice that politicians often promise things they can't possibly provide—and are no more realistic than a student body president offering free pizza on Fridays.
What can you do? Democracy is, as Winston Churchill said, "the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Fast forward to the latest capitol silliness. A group of Democratic lawmakers is starting the End Poverty In California caucus, which is unlikely to be as EPIC as its name suggests. Ending poverty is a large promise—and the Legislature is much better at passing laws that exacerbate poverty (minimum wage, anti-competitive union work rules, onerous licensing requirements) rather than reduce it.
For starters, legislative caucuses are notoriously ineffective. They're the equivalent of those high-school clubs where like-minded people get together to engage in virtue signaling and whatnot. The state legislature has 16 caucuses centering on identity (gender, ethnicity), issues (aviation, environment), or locale (rural communities, the Bay Area).
The latest newsworthy caucus formation is the Problem Solvers Caucus, which promises to put good policy over partisanship, but which has accomplished nothing remarkable. We can only hope the "ending poverty" effort is equally ineffective given the people whose ideas it is based upon. Politico reports the name is a "nod to Upton Sinclair's 1934 gubernatorial campaign" and is the "brainchild" of former Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs.
Sinclair was a socialist and Tubbs is best known for promoting "universal basic income." Sinclair's EPIC campaign plan promised to "develop a state-managed cooperative economy that would initially provide livelihoods for the unemployed while pointing the way to the eventual replacement of the private economy based on profit," the University of Washington explains.
The new EPIC chairman is Assembly Majority Leader Isaac Bryan (D–Los Angeles) so this comes from one of the Legislature's most powerful members. Tubbs has created a nonprofit group of the same name. He served as the mayor of one of the state's most impoverished cities—a San Joaquin Valley industrial city best known for its municipal bankruptcy (caused in part by excessive benefits for city employees) and atrocious crime rates.
Tubbs apparently was so busy basking in his national attention as a young progressive rising star that he didn't tend to matters at home. He lost re-election to a Republican political neophyte in a city with a two-to-one Democratic voter registration advantage. After his loss, he became an economic adviser to Gov. Gavin Newsom. Tubbs' major initiative was that privately funded project to provide $500 monthly in free money to select residents.
If you're still not understanding where this caucus is headed, then I'll quote from Tubbs' testimony at an Assembly subcommittee on poverty and inclusion, as captured in a video that his nonprofit released. Tubbs said the state has a "unique opportunity" to pass "common-sense, well-researched policies from baby bonds to guaranteed income to housing as a right to more affordable housing to truly make the state a golden one for all."
Baby bonds would have the government provide a set amount of money to every newborn child. Guaranteed income means the government would provide a stipend to everyone. Turning housing into a "right" means that landlords would lose the ability to evict tenants and also includes rent controls—even though "well-researched" studies have found such policies deplete the housing stock. More "affordable housing" means more subsidized housing.
Tubb's group is correct that poverty rates in California are atrocious. "California has the highest rate of poverty at 13.2% of any state in the U.S.," it notes. "28.7 percent of all California residents were poor or near poor in fall 2021." EPIC doesn't address that California's poverty rate is the worst in the nation—especially when cost-of-living factors are included—despite this being the nation's most progressive state. It offers the most generous welfare programs.
One would think that politicians who are serious about ending poverty would at least address that paradox. The video features union organizers who point to the need for an even more powerful union presence in our state, yet unions were on the vanguard of some of the state's most poverty-inducing policies—such as Assembly Bill 5, which tried to ban most forms of independent contracting and destroyed moderate-income jobs throughout the freelance economy.
With their progressive policies, lawmakers are destroying the incentive for developers to build more housing. They're always adding regulations and taxes that shutter businesses and discourage people from investing in new ones. Instead of recognizing that California's poverty problem largely is the result of government meddling, EPIC will propose more-aggressive interventions. At some point, lawmakers need to stop making unattainable high-school-level promises and begin wrestling with complex realities.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
The post Ending Poverty Requires Serious Policy, Not Political Platitudes appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A homeless military veteran whose service dog was tased by North Carolina police officers and later died has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit.
Reason reported in 2021 on the case of Joshua Rohrer, who was arrested by two police officers in Gastonia, North Carolina, for panhandling after a 911 caller complained that he was "using this dog to make people feel sorry for [him]." When Rohrer argued that he wasn't doing anything illegal, the officers tackled him and tased his service dog, Sunshine. Sunshine ran away and was later hit by a car.
"They laughed at me," Rohrer told Army Times, recounting the officers' reaction to his distress.
Prosecutors later dropped charges against Rohrer for panhandling and resisting arrest. Now Rohrer, who has service-related post-traumatic stress disorder, is suing, arguing that the violent arrest violated his First and Fourth Amendment rights, as well as the Americans with Disabilities Act.
In addition, the suit alleges that the Gastonia Police Department and city officials made hundreds of false and defamatory comments on Facebook about Rohrer in retaliation for speaking out following his arrest. For example, the police department repeatedly posted that Rohrer had agreed to take a plea deal before the charges were dropped. The suit argues that by posting about Rohrer's plea deal, which ultimately never happened, the department not only smeared Rohrer as guilty but also accessed and published details from his sealed case file.
"The daily barrage and high volume of these posts, the specific targeting of Mr. Rohrer, and the fact that they reveal confidential information demonstrate a pattern of harassment that would chill a reasonable person from exercising their First Amendment rights," the suit reads.
The lawsuit seeks punitive and compensatory damages, as well as an injunction against the city's panhandling ordinance, which it argues is facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment.
Towns frequently use overly broad panhandling ordinances to crack down on begging and roust homeless people, despite numerous court decisions upholding a general First Amendment right to ask others for money in a public space. For example, earlier this year the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment nonprofit, filed a lawsuit on behalf of a man who was harassed by police for holding a sign that read, "God Bless Homeless Vets."
In one of the many Facebook posts about Rohrer's case, the Gastonia Police Department wondered: "If this is such a clear violation against the Constitution and civil rights, there should have been several attorneys willing to take this case pro-bono right? But yet, that hasn't happened. Perhaps you should ask Mr. Rohrer why [he] hasn't pursued anything further."
The department now has its answer. Rohrer is represented by the Guidry law firm and by the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP) at Georgetown University.
"Mr. Rohrer has been—and continues to be—targeted by the Gastonia police for his constitutionally protected speech, from standing on a median accepting donations from passersby to protesting government misconduct and calling for accountability in the wake of his arrest," ICAP senior counsel Joseph Mead said in a press release. "This case is about ensuring that even members of the most vulnerable populations in our society—including people with disabilities or without housing—will be protected from government overreach and retaliation."
A spokesperson for the City of Gastonia declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.
The post Homeless Veteran Sues Police After Service Dog Tased During Panhandling Arrest appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Several California Assembly members this year introduced a constitutional amendment that declares housing a "fundamental right." Who knew? Lawmakers have wrestled with innumerable complex issues over the years, but finally someone realized that all they needed to do to magically solve any problem is to pass a new "right" to something.
Expected soon: constitutional amendments declaring "rights" to a million dollars, to a brand-new electric SUV, and to a dog that's properly housebroken. Sorry for the facetiousness, but Assembly Constitutional Amendment 10 epitomizes the lack of seriousness we've come to expect from the Legislature. Actually fixing the housing problem is a tough slog.
The legislation, which would need approval by California voters, is modeled on United Nations measures from 1948 and 1966 declaring similar rights. The world's housing stock has dramatically improved since then, but anyone who thinks that two toothless UN measures were the cause—rather than a booming market economy—really should claim the right to a therapist.
This proposed amendment is remarkably demanding. The Assembly analysis explains that the measure isn't a right to "shelter," which it finds inadequate. "The right to adequate housing should not be interpreted narrowly," it notes. "Rather, it should be seen as the right to live somewhere in security, peace, and dignity." Yet a state that can't provide basic shelter for 180,000 homeless people shouldn't be promising inchoate benefits such as dignity.
The legislation also defines the right to housing as "a right to protection from forced evictions, equal and nondiscriminatory access to housing, and that housing must be adequate." That means housing "with security of tenure; availability of services, materials, facilities, and infrastructure" along with a location that offers "cultural adequacy." Huh?
I have no idea what it means to have housing with "cultural adequacy," but I do know what it means to have "protection from forced evictions" and "security of tenure." That seems to mean that landlords would no longer be able to evict tenants for almost any reason, perhaps even including nonpayment of rent. That creates a practical (not to mention a constitutional) problem.
If a property owner can't properly vet tenants and potentially can't evict them, then they aren't going to invest in or rent out apartments. They certainly aren't going to make repairs to houses lived in by non-paying tenants, which will make the housing stock less adequate. We need more housing, not less, and such edicts discourage housing investment.
For precedent, ACA 10's supporters point to the state's "Human Right to Water" law declaring "that every human being has a right to safe, clean, affordable and accessible water adequate for human consumption, cooking, and sanitary purposes." Signed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown in 2012, it sounded noble. Who doesn't want everyone to have potable water?
But in the ensuing years, the state failed to provide clean drinking water to poor, farm-worker towns in the south San Joaquin Valley, even though the fix (hooking up those communities to infrastructure in neighboring water districts) was a tiny expense relative to the state budget. Apparently, the state is willing to grant human rights as it sees fit—but only if they're cheap and easy. Following that law's passage, the state continued to neglect its duty to build more water infrastructure.
So spare us these meaningless "rights" bills, which seem designed to result in press conferences rather than meaningful solutions. In fairness, some of ACA 10's goals are reasonable—e.g., pushing localities to approve more housing construction. But this law wouldn't accomplish that.
The state already is taking a serious approach toward deregulating land use through laws such as Senate Bills 9 and 10, which create a "by right" approval process for duplexes and mid-rise condos. The state also is battling NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) cities such as Huntington Beach, which are fighting the laws' implementation in the court system.
Those laws—and ones that reduce parking minimums and allow developers to build housing on commercial sites—were the result of hard work that involved tough negotiations, coalition building, and the usual legislative sausage-making. This "housing right" amendment is an affront to those efforts by pretending that there's a shortcut.
There's also much wrong philosophically with creating new "rights" via legislation and voter initiative. Historically, there are two types of rights—"negative" ones and "positive" ones. The former protects individuals from government usurpations. The First Amendment's speech protections ("Congress shall make no law …") is the premiere negative-right example.
By contrast, your positive right to housing means the government must force others to give it to you by taking their money (via taxation) or undermining their property rights (by limiting their right to evict you). Not only is that approach ethically wrong, but it will only lead to fewer available rentals. Then again, there's nothing we can do to rein in lawmakers' right to introduce worthless legislation.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
The post Declaring a 'Right' to Housing Won't Solve Homelessness appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Oregon State University has a beautiful campus, but the surrounding community in Corvallis, Oregon, struggles with pockets of poverty and homelessness. Amy Crevola, a clinical social worker who lives in a lower-income neighborhood near campus, decided to help in 2021.
She collected donated items and arranged them in her carport like a garage sale, except everything was free. The inventory included clothes, personal care items, baby supplies, household goods, and fresh sandwiches in a fridge. In the summer, a cooling station provides hats, sunscreen, and bottled water. And in the winter, a warming station offers socks, mittens, and hot cocoa.
Neighbors generally support the makeshift charity, and some volunteer to assist. As word spread, about 10 to 20 people started coming each day to take items and sometimes just to chat.
It's a private solution to a public problem. And zoning officials don't appreciate it.
The tension comes from competing philosophies about how best to address poverty and homelessness. The city's approach is to hide anything that threatens its brand as a top 10 college town and naturalist's paradise. Officers conduct monthly sweeps of encampments, pushing the indigent population elsewhere.
Funding for other approaches is limited. The city shut down its men's homeless shelter in June due to lack of resources, and other shelters face budget cuts and layoffs. Crevola's effort, by contrast, costs taxpayers nothing. But it puts an uncomfortable truth on full display.
So on June 9, armed with a single complaint, the zoning police issued a notice of violation that ordered Crevola to shut down within 30 days.
Hoping for a compromise, she offered to scale back operations. The city declined. Officials told her she could host six garage sales each calendar year, lasting no longer than two days each. Or she could convert her carport into a garage and hide her services behind a wall—a change that could cost $20,000 or more.
Both options come from Corvallis' code for home-based businesses. But Crevola does not operate a home-based business. The people who visit are guests, not customers, and no money changes hands.
The city doesn't care. It says the code allows people to use their property only for a list of predefined activities. There is no room for innovation.
Zoning police use similar tactics nationwide to restrict activities that some people find unsightly. Our public interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, has seen just about everything.
Regulators blocked Kathy Hay from sharing food with her neighbors using a publicly accessible pantry behind her home in Asotin County, Washington. Regulators blocked Kimberly Dunckel from hosting small classes at her sanctuary for abused and disabled farm animals in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. And regulators blocked a charity in Calhoun, Georgia, from building affordable homes on its land because city leaders didn't want to attract "riffraff."
Sometimes parks are off-limits too. Officers arrested grandmother Norma Thornton for serving meals to the homeless on public land in Bullhead City, Arizona. Some zoning departments even criminalize kindness in commercial districts. Code enforcers tried to block a homeless shelter in a donated office building in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina.
Besides violating property rights, these crackdowns are short-sighted. Poverty and homelessness are complex problems. Government officials should welcome assistance wherever they can find it.
They should treat people like Crevola as allies, not public nuisances.
The post Zoning Police Criminalize Kindness in Oregon appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For my new video, I asked people on the street, "If you could spend $30 billion trying to solve the world's problems, how would you spend it?"
"Build houses…address homelessness," said a few. "Spend on health care," "redistribution." The most common answer was "fight climate change."
Really? Climate change is the world's most important problem?
"It's not surprising if you live in the rich world," says Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center.
Lomborg has spent the last 20 years consulting with experts from the United Nations (U.N.), nongovernmental organizations, and 60 teams of economists, seeking consensus on how to address the world's biggest problems.
"The point is not that climate change is not an issue," says Lomborg, "but we just need to have a sense of proportion."
He says that while climate change may cause problems someday, "if you live most other places on the planet, you're worried that your kids might die from easily curable diseases tonight."
That's why, he says, it's important to ask ourselves, "Where can we spend dollars and do a lot of good versus…just a little good?"
Twenty years ago, the U.N. issued development goals. Surprisingly, Lomberg says they actually helped people.
"They basically said, let's get people out of poverty, out of hunger, get kids into school, stop moms and kids from dying."
That effort, plus global capitalism, lifted millions out of poverty.
Unfortunately, now the U.N. pushes "sustainable" goals that promise everything to everyone.
"Get rid of poverty, hunger, disease, fix war, corruption, climate change," says an exasperated Lomborg.
But a Bank of America report estimates that fighting climate change alone would cost trillions. Even that might not affect the climate very much.
"If we spend way too much money ineffectively on climate," Lomborg points out, "not only are we not fixing climate, but we're also wasting an enormous amount of money that could have been spent on other things." Better things.
Lomborg's new book, Best Things First, says "$35 billion could save 4.2 million lives in the poor part of the world each and every year."
For example, screening people for tuberculosis, giving medicine to people who have it, and making sure they complete their treatment would save up to a million lives a year.
"Nobody in rich world countries die from tuberculosis, but in poor countries, they still do," says Lomborg. "Spend about $5.5 billion, you could save most of those people."
Hundreds of thousands more die from malaria. Buying bed nets with insecticides that kill mosquitoes would save lots of lives. So would spending on basic vaccines for kids.
These ideas are common sense. They cost much less than what we spend now pretending to manage the climate.
"You want to help people," I say to Lomborg, "yet people hate you."
"Well, some people hate me," he laughs.
One shoved a pie in his face. Others call him "the devil incarnate," a "traitor" who "needs to be taken down." All because he points out that the world has bigger problems than climate change.
"Climate change might kill poor people, too," I point out.
"It certainly will. And climate change is more damaging for poor people!" Lomborg replies. "But remember, everything is worse for poor people—because they're poor."
"Unmitigated scaremongering leads to ineffective political action," says Lomborg. "We need to have a conversation about where we spend money well, compared to where we just spend money to feel virtuous about ourselves."
COPYRIGHT 2023 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
The post Fearmongering Won't Solve Climate Change appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>San Francisco officials have agreed to pay up to $19.5 million to the owners of Hotel Whitcomb to pay for damages caused by homeless people housed there as part of
The post Brickbat: Guests from Hell appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The country is reeling from the news that a major political figure has been indicted.
On Tuesday, county prosecutors charged Los Angeles City Councilman Curren Price with 10 counts of embezzlement, perjury, and conflict of interest.
According to the indictment, Price's wife accepted $150,000 in payments from affordable housing developers whose projects were being considered by City Council committees Price was on. Prosecutors allege Price failed to report these payments while voting to approve developers' projects, sell city-owned land to them at less than the appraised value, and award them city affordable housing funding.
Most of the developments Price assisted were Proposition HHH projects—a 2016 ballot initiative that approved a $1.2 billion bond issue to pay for the construction and city acquisition of supportive and affordable housing for low-income and formerly homeless Angelenos.
The implementation of Prop. HHH has been the subject of numerous scathing audits from the Los Angeles Controller's Office, which says its projects suffer from serious delays and cost overruns.
"Overall HHH per-unit costs in the primary pipeline continue to climb to staggering heights. For projects in construction, the average per-unit cost increased from $531,000 in 2020 to $596,846 in 2021," reported the last controller audit from 2022, which noted that per-unit costs of some projects exceed $700,000.
Initial estimates had projects coming in at a per-unit cost of $350,000 to $414,000 per unit, reported the Los Angeles Daily News.
The Price indictment is yet another dark mark for a program that's failed to stem the steady rise of homelessness in Los Angeles.
"We will continue to work tirelessly to root out corruption at all levels and hold accountable those who betray the public's trust," said L.A. County District Attorney George Gascón.
It's not the only housing-related Los Angeles corruption scandal to play out recently.
In January, former Los Angeles City Councilman José Huizar pleaded guilty to charges stemming from his acceptance of bribes from developers hoping he would approve their projects in the face of trade union opposition.
Third parties like trade unions and community groups have their own perfectly legal means of shaking down developers.
California's environmental review law requires that government agencies study and mitigate the environmental impacts of projects they have discretion over. The same law gives third parties the right to file administrative appeals and lawsuits if they think a government agency "abused its discretion" by approving a project without conducting a thorough enough study of those environmental impacts.
That arrangement has sparked a whole cottage industry of "greenmailing" third parties who threaten to delay projects for years with appeals and expensive litigation unless project sponsors agree to pay them off—say by agreeing to provide "community benefits" or promising to hire all union labor.
These tactics are generally legal. So is submitting to them. Only when a developer pays a politician to try to avoid a greenmailing hustle do federal and state prosecutors get involved.
In some ways, they're making a bad situation worse.
The economist Gordon Tullock has argued that in the context of an inefficient system with bad rules, corruption is actually a net good—at least in the short term.
Market participants pay bribes as a means of escaping the need to comply with even more costly rules and regulations. In the longer term, Tullock argued, corruption locks in bad government by giving officials an incentive to keep bad rules that necessitate corrupt workarounds in place.
That's effectively where Los Angeles has found itself. The city has made development an expensive, cumbersome, massively overregulated process in which politicians have an extraordinary amount of discretion and third parties can bring everything to a grinding halt.
The human cost in terms of high housing costs and rising homelessness is readily apparent. When voters frustrated by high housing costs and rising homelessness approve a government-led solution like Prop. HHH, it falls prey to the same corrupt rent seeking that caused the problems in the first place.
The occasional indictment of a city politician doesn't do much to change this state of affairs. The incentives to participate in corruption remain.
What would reduce everyone's incentive to engage in corruption is letting people build want they want on land they own.
It'd be hard for government officials to charge people for favors no one needs and they can't deliver. As a silver lining, housing would cost less and fewer people would be sleeping on the streets.
The post City Council Indictment Shows How L.A.'s Overregulated Housing Market Breeds Corruption appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>California is home to nearly one-third of the nation's homeless population and the problem—by almost everyone's account—continues to worsen. The statistics tell part of the story: More than 170,000 people sleep in tents in public parks, under freeway bridges and on sidewalks in our cities and suburbs. The state has spent $20 billion to address the problem in five years.
The anecdotes are even more telling, given that the common, appalling street scenes cause businesses to shutter and discourage people from visiting downtowns or using public transit. I was chatting on my cellphone on a Sacramento street when a homeless man started screaming in my face. It doesn't take many incidents like that to harden our attitudes.
Liberal Democrats, who typically run big-city governments, have understandably been reluctant to embrace enforcement-centric policies. That's changing as scared and angry residents speak out. Gov. Gavin Newsom announced efforts to clear out 1,200 homeless encampments. Officials in San Francisco even unleashed the National Guard to tamp down open-air drug markets.
The governor's office said the effort is "concentrated in or near the Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods of the city." Those neighborhoods are Ground Zero for homeless encampments, which should surprise no one. Sprawling tent cities have become like the Wild West—breeding grounds for illicit drug use, retail theft, and sex crimes.
Meanwhile, California's official "Housing First" policy is failing. As a fact sheet on the Housing and Community Development website explains, "anyone experiencing homelessness should be connected to a permanent home as quickly as possible, and programs should remove barriers to accessing the housing, like requirements for sobriety or absence of criminal history."
That approach is an outgrowth of progressive ideology. Housing First views homelessness primarily as a housing problem, thus downplaying the addiction and mental-health issues that are at the root of the crisis. Placing mentally ill people and those with substance-abuse problems unsupervised in housing units doesn't provide them with the help they need. As one homeless expert told me, it mainly results in them dying alone in a room.
Even if Housing First worked, the state can't afford to build—and certainly not quickly—the number of units needed. We've seen absurd news stories about affordable housing projects costing more than $1 million per apartment. Thanks to the usual governmental issues (poor management, environmental rules, union featherbedding), cities can't even build a public toilet for less than $1.7 million.
The head of Orange County's Rescue Mission has told me that the vast majority of people the nonprofit assists self-identify as having a mental health or addiction issue. Yet homeless activists and political commentators push the fiction that homelessness is primarily a housing issue—and advocate their usual litany of solutions: rent controls, eviction moratoria, and additional spending on subsidized apartments.
They make the problem sound easy to fix. As a headline in the Jesuit magazine, America, noted: "Homelessness is only getting worse, but we know the solution: a right to housing." Declaring new rights doesn't solve anything, of course, and only will make matters worse.
Depriving property owners of the ability to evict non-paying tenants and imposing rent controls demonstrably discourages housing investment—and leads to further shortages. In reality, homelessness is a mental health and social issue that's exacerbated by our state's inordinately high cost of housing.
The overwhelming nature of the problem, poor public policies, and aggravating debates lead many people to basically throw in the towel. But that might not be necessary. I recently moderated a homelessness panel in downtown Sacramento, where attendees watched a short movie that compared San Francisco's intractable problems with those in San Antonio. There are no easy buttons, but the documentary, "Beyond Homeless," did offer a thoughtful blueprint.
Essentially, the Texas city built a lovely campus in an industrial area not far from downtown. It offers dormitories, a cafeteria, clean restrooms, and a panoply of social services. It's run by a nonprofit organization. According to the filmmakers, San Antonio's downtown unsheltered homeless population dropped by 80 percent. The program has moved 6,000 people into permanent housing.
The state and cities already are spending billions of taxpayer dollars a year, so why not spend more of that money in this humane manner? California officials would be thrilled to reduce its downtown homeless populations by that degree—even if dealing with the remaining 20 percent of homeless people is still challenging. (With the latter, the state's new CARE Courts, which "sentence" low-level lawbreakers to services rather than jail, will help.)
This approach would satisfy the federal Martin v. City of Boise decision, which limits the ability of cities to enforce anti-camping ordinances unless they have a place to house homeless people. So here's the basic model: Build a big, nice campus for homeless people that offers an alternative to living in parks and on sidewalks. There's more to it, but maybe everyone is overthinking the problem.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
The post Homelessness Isn't an Unfixable Problem appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The U.S. Department of Justice is intervening on behalf of a Christian charitable group in Orange County that's been threatened with fines and even criminal penalties for using their property to hand out snacks and coffee to the homeless.
On Wednesday, the DOJ filed a "statement of interest" in a lawsuit filed by Micah's Way against the city of Santa Ana, California, arguing that the city's crackdown on their snack service violates federal laws protecting religious activity from discriminatory local land use regulations.
"The free exercise of religion is a bedrock principle of our nation," said U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada for the Central District of California in a press release. "Religious groups should be entitled to exercise their religion by providing charitable services based in their religious beliefs."
Since 2005, Micah's Way has operated a resource center where volunteers help connect their poor and homeless clients with birth certificates, ID cards, clothing, bus passes, and other services, according to a January complaint filed by the group. They also offer the people who come to the resource center muffins, pastries, and fruit, plus hot coffee.
Micah's Way claims their charitable activities continued without issue for over 15 years. Things changed in 2020 when the group moved its operations outside as a pandemic precaution. That same year, a needle exchange opened up two doors down.
The lawsuit claims that the influx of people using the needle exchange led to a number of "troublesome incidents," including trespassing, loitering, and drug use, and that Micah's Way was partially blamed due to "guilt by association." The incidents sparked complaints from neighbors, including Santa Ana's then-Mayor Vicente Sarmiento, who lived near the resource center, according to the complaint.
In November 2021, Micah's Way received an administrative citation from Santa Ana for not having a valid certificate of occupancy. The citation came despite the group having been a city-licensed nonprofit that often worked with city officials.
The citation demanded that the group obtain a certificate of occupancy at their resource center or else cease all operations there. When the group applied for the needed certificate, they were denied twice in January 2022 and June 2022 on the grounds that it was engaged in food distribution, which wasn't allowed by their property's "professional district" zoning.
A June letter from the city said that if Micah's Way continued operating its resource center without a certificate of occupancy, the city would take "all appropriate action" against the group, including "administrative fines, criminal prosecution and/or civil remedies such as injunctions and penalties."
Communications from the city to Micah's Way obtained by Voice of OC say that the group's feeding of the homeless had generated complaints from nearby residents about transients lingering in their neighborhood, discarding food waste in public, and scaring residents.
Micah's Way contends that the vast majority of neighbor complaints were the result of the needle exchange and that these complaints dropped off precipitously after the exchange moved in February 2022.
In an attempt to address any remaining concerns, the group also moved its operations back inside its building in the summer of 2022. It also agreed to only hand out food in connection with its other services.
This didn't placate the city.
In January 2023, the city refused to issue the group a certificate of occupancy unless Micah's Way also agreed to a number of nonnegotiable conditions, including that the group stop handing out any food at all at its resource center, stop food deliveries from the resource center, stop its outreach work to the homeless, and not advertise in public or private the availability of food and drink at its resource center.
In response, Micah's Way sued Santa Ana in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California later that month. Its lawsuit alleges that the city is violating the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA).
The 2000 law bars local governments from enforcing land use regulations that "impose a substantial burden on religious exercise" without a compelling justification.
Micah's Way argues in its lawsuit that feeding the homeless is a core part of its religious mission with little impact on its neighbors. The city's demand that they stop distributing food imposes a substantial burden on their religious exercise without furthering any real government interest.
"[Micah's Way] has now been confronted with the binary choice between the following two unacceptable alternatives," reads the complaint. "Obtaining a [certificate of occupancy] for [its] Resource Center by agreeing to abandon their religious beliefs in providing food and drink to the needy or…remaining true to their religious beliefs and then facing potential fines and prosecution."
In March, Santa Ana filed a motion to dismiss Micah's Way lawsuit. The motion argues that the group's provision of snacks is a very small part of its overall activities. Therefore, the city's demand that the snack service stop isn't a serious enough burden to trigger RLUIPA.
"Simply providing small snack food items such as a 'cup of coffee and a muffin' to individuals that obtain other services at the Property is a minor activity," reads the city's motion to dismiss. "Any curtailment or limitation on such a minor activity is a mere inconvenience and cannot possibly be a 'substantial burden.'"
Micah's Way is hardly the only religious group to run afoul of local zoning codes.
The charitable missions of churches and nonprofits often don't neatly fit within zoning codes that sort all human activity into neat little boxes. Reason has covered a number of cases of churches in residential zones being told they can't operate a "commercial" soup kitchen and churches in commercial zones being told they can't operate a "residential" shelter.
The idea behind RLIUPA, which passed with wide bipartisan support in Congress, was to give religious groups added federal protection from overly restrictive zoning codes.
In 2018, the DOJ under President Donald Trump launched its Place to Worship Initiative to educate local governments about RLUIPA's legal protections and make it easier for religious organizations to file complaints of RLUIPA violations to the DOJ.
The department's "statement of interest" unequivocally rejects Santa Ana's argument that it's within the bounds of RLUIPA to demand Micah's Way stop handing out snacks.
The city's threats of "monetary and criminal consequences is not a 'mere inconvenience,'" it reads. "Rather, the City has inflicted 'substantial pressure' to compel [Micah's Way] to modify its behavior by ceasing to perform 'act[s] of charity in providing . . . food and beverage items to the poor and homeless persons.'"
It asks that the city's motion to dismiss the case be denied.
The post City Threatens Christian Group With Fines, Prosecution for Giving the Homeless Muffins, Coffee appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>News that a mentally ill man had been killed last week on a New York City subway and the conversation that followed almost immediately became a synecdoche for the wider social debate about rising crime, public disorder, racial divides, and attitudes towards the homeless population. But whether they realize it or not, those on opposite ends of that discussion seem to agree on a core point: It was, in some sense, the fault of "the system" that Jordan Neely was choked to death on the F train.
"Had he been in treatment, Jordan Neely's death in a subway car may have been prevented," wrote Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Stephen Eide in City Journal. The City Journal has devoted a great deal of energy to arguing that recent upticks in urban disorder suggest a need for a more punitive or carceral approach. On this account, if Neely hadn't been out and about—because he either was in jail or perhaps involuntarily in a mental health institution—he wouldn't have died.
But that line of thinking often fails to account for the fact that Neely was engaged with the criminal justice system repeatedly throughout the course of his life. He was released from Rikers Island, the notorious New York City jail, in February of this year, reportedly after spending 15 months behind bars. It is true that Neely would not have been available to be killed on the subway last week had he been indefinitely locked away, but we don't lock people up in order to protect them from being choked.
Eide, refreshingly, is aware of these limitations. "Criminal-justice reformers might point out, correctly, that Neely's many past arrests did not stabilize him," he noted. "But nor did whatever contact he may have had with homeless outreach teams, social workers, safe-haven shelters, and outpatient clinics." This is also true, though I'd argue it hints at the fact that the system cannot prevent every harm, no matter how many resources society grants it.
The inverse conclusion is more popular, though, and it traverses typical tribal lines. "We should demand a full accounting from all of these [New York City] officials," says Errol Louis in New York magazine. "Neely, it seems, had encountered many of the clinics, hospitals, and social-service organizations we collectively (and optimistically) call a social safety net, including the Bowery Residents' Committee and Bellevue Hospital." Though Louis doesn't label the carceral system as the perpetrator, he arrives at a similar judgment: The government could have saved Neely, given the chance.
That this is a dubious claim should be apparent from Louis' own accounting of the tragedy. Public and private actors alike sought to intervene in Neely's life for years. He had worked with an Intensive Mobile Treatment team composed of mental health street counselors who provide services to homeless people. The Bowery Residents' Committee, which specifically works in subways, had been in touch with Neely since 2017. He had been in and out of Bellevue Hospital for several years. Outreach workers interacted with him multiple times in the months leading up to his killing.
New York is a city of over 8 million people, many of whom struggle with mental health issues. About one in every 120 New Yorkers is homeless, according to the Bowery Mission, which translates to about 70,000 people. No government, even with the most robust and muscular of programs, will be able to save every resident suffering from poor mental health, a lack of housing, or both, as the two often go hand in hand.
"I don't have food. I don't have a drink, I'm fed up," Neely yelled, according to Juan Alberto Vazquez, a freelance journalist who captured Daniel Penny holding him in a chokehold for several minutes. Neely reportedly suffered from schizophrenia and depression, with his mental health deteriorating after his mother was murdered and her body stuffed in a suitcase when he was 14 years old. "I don't mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I'm ready to die," he said.
He died shortly thereafter. People will argue about how reasonable it was for Penny to initially restrain Neely. But "the system" was not on the subway with him that day. Daniel Penny was, though, and he allegedly choked Neely for 15 minutes. Vazquez's video, which caught a portion of that interaction, shows Neely writhing, attempting to clutch up at a subway seat, one leg slowly kicking. Eventually, another passenger can be heard telling Penny that he was "gonna catch a murder charge."
"My wife is ex-military," the passenger said. "You're gonna kill him now."
Penny maintains he did nothing wrong. "Mr. Neely had a documented history of violent and erratic behavior, the apparent result of ongoing and untreated mental illness," his attorneys said in a statement. "For too long, those suffering with mental illness have been treated with indifference."
It's in this vein that Penny finds unlikely common ground with writers like Louis. "Jordan Neely was already dead," he wrote in his New York piece, metaphorically put to death by government negligence.
Inconvenient to that claim is that the government was deeply involved in trying to help Neely. And he wasn't, in fact, dead. Until a man killed him—something no complaint about the system can explain away.
The post Jordan Neely Wasn't Killed by the System appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>To hear conservatives describe the state of affairs in San Francisco, you'd think the City by the Bay is a harrowing dystopia along the lines of San Salvador, Juarez, St. Louis or Detroit. I can't tell you how many people have warned me against spending time there—or talked about the "poop app" that helps visitors avoid human feces on the sidewalks.
"San Francisco is sunk in a rancid drug-ravaged pit of human misery and city leaders have no idea how to pull themselves out of it," wrote David Marcus in his Fox News column last year. He knows why: "(B)ecause the progressive lunatics running the city believe that every criminal is a victim."
This week, I read a Twitter debate about which American city would essentially collapse under the weight of its own lunacy. Predictably, San Francisco topped the list. "Look what's happened to San Francisco," Donald Trump said during a 2020 campaign stop in Bakersfield. "It's worse than a slum, there's no slum like that."
I suspect that many of the San Francisco doom-tellers haven't been there, but even many who have joined the chorus. Bay Area native Michael Shellenberger's well-known book is called San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities. He makes some solid points—progressives do wreck everything they touch and San Francisco has tons of problems—but his title promotes the "it's a nightmare" theme.
I travel to San Francisco regularly and have visited almost every corner of the city. I spent most of last week there for a wedding on Nob Hill and traipsed around several neighborhoods: Chinatown, North Beach, Alamo Square, and South of Market (SoMa). Not only did I live to tell about it, but left with warm fuzzies even after wandering its streets late at night.
San Francisco remains (arguably) the most beautiful city in the country. Its parks are lovely and mostly orderly and clean. On Sunday, we played miniature golf and frequented food trucks, along with hundreds of young families. People were generally friendly and the restaurants and nightlife were fabulous. Most neighborhoods are surprisingly quiet and safe.
The city's critics aren't entirely wrong, of course. Locals warned us not to leave anything in our cars given surging property crimes. The Tenderloin—the notoriously downtrodden downtown neighborhood—is an open sewer of drug dealing and panhandling, just as critics say. Homeless tents line a portion of Market Street near the main shopping drag. But is it fair to define an entire city that way?
Whenever I mention this, people misunderstand. Yes, some portions of the city are a mess. Yes, the city faces major property crime and homelessness problems. Just this week, the National Guard and California Highway Patrol were sent in to shut down open-air drug markets. Major retailers are exiting because of the theft problem. But conservatives undermine their case when they overstate things.
Simply put, conservatives bash San Francisco because of the city's progressive politics, just as liberals portray Republican states such as Texas as redoubts of sexism and racism. For instance, California lawmakers have banned official travel to 22 supposedly backward states. In both cases, politically minded people embrace stupid narratives that confirm their biases.
The San Francisco Chronicle looked at San Francisco's crime data in 2022 and found that crime rates soared after lockdowns temporarily turned the city into a ghost town, but overall rates have been in a downward trend over five years. The murder rate has increased since the end of COVID, but the city's murder rate is "towards the bottom for major cities," Police Chief Bill Scott told a local CNN affiliate.
It's a mixed bag, but my sense is the city government's lackadaisical approach toward lower-level crime and homelessness has created a real sense of civic disorder. Many property crimes aren't reported, so the crime problem is deeper than the data suggest. Residents understandably are feeling jittery about their overall safety.
So after a high-profile killing—such as when tech entrepreneur Bob Lee was stabbed to death this month on a downtown street—it feeds the narrative of a terribly dangerous city, even if this might not have been a random attack. None of my caveats are meant to downplay the seriousness of the crime problem but to put the matter in perspective.
I lived in Washington, D.C., in the 1970s and 1980s—when the murder epidemic was so severe that local newspapers published a death toll on the front pages every day. Crime rates have fallen dramatically nationwide since then, but have increased in recent years. Crime and homelessness partly explain why San Francisco has lost so much population, but crime isn't nearly as bad as those days.
Marcus lives in West Virginia, which has endured an appalling opioid overdose crisis. Yet that hardly defines an entire state. Isn't it better to figure out how to deal with these problems rather than just score partisan political points? My sense in San Francisco's critics despise the city's politics, so they jump on every bad event to conform to their narrative.
San Francisco is unlikely to ever become a conservative paradise, but even the politics there is self-correcting. Last year, voters recalled their soft-on-crime district attorney Chesa Boudin. The newly appointed DA has vowed to clean up the streets. Note the National Guard intervention mentioned above. If you don't like San Francisco, that's fine, but don't spread tall tales about it.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
The post San Francisco's Got Problems. There's No Need To Exaggerate Them for Political Reasons. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A homeless woman has filed a lawsuit claiming that—after she had been forced to leave a local hospital—Lexington, Kentucky, police officers violently arrested her, breaking her leg. Since her injury, the woman says she has been forced to undergo multiple corrective surgeries.
"The Defendants' mistreatment, insults, harassment, assaulting, battering, and humiliating conduct caused Plaintiff to be arrested and deprived of competent medical care as well as her freedom," the 25-page complaint states.
In March of last year, Linda Trapp, then 61, was staying at Catholic Action Center, a homeless shelter, when she was taken to St. Joseph East Hospital after she fell and hit her head. As she was being discharged around two hours later, Trapp asked hospital staff for a COVID test, as the shelter had a policy of not allowing individuals to return without a negative COVID test. However, the lawsuit claims that hospital staff refused to administer a COVID test—meaning that Trapp would be forced to sleep outside.
The lawsuit states that hospital staff then called for police assistance, as they believed that Trapp would not leave the hospital.
Body camera footage shows one police officer, which the complaint identifies as Myles Foster, becoming verbally aggressive toward Trapp, telling her "I will drag you out and throw you out on the sidewalk!" He continued, "Come on, I will drag you out….you wanna call my bluff, go ahead!"
The lawsuit states that Trapp eventually complied and slowly walked toward the hospital's exit. However, she again asked for a COVID test and her walking cane, which she needs for her degenerative knee condition. (Notably, Trapp later told a local news station that she had been drinking that night and had, in fact, not brought her cane to the hospital.) Foster told her, "It's not that cold tonight you will be alright" in response to Trapp's concerns about being forced to sleep outside.
Throughout the encounter, body camera footage shows Foster continuing to behave aggressively toward Trapp. At one point, the complaint states that "Foster pushed Plaintiff to the ground and threatened to take her to jail." After Trapp stood up, Foster told her "We are not touching you. If I touch you again you are going in cuffs…and you're gonna get hurt because I am gonna put you on the ground."
When Trapp finally reached the hospital's exit, the complaint states that the police officers, as well as several hospital employees, "collectively began to humiliate and make fun of" Trapp. The lawsuit claims that Foster "sarcastically yells, 'Bye Bye!'" while a hospital employee "waves her hand as if to shoo Plaintiff saying, 'Go!…Far!…like Harrodsburg Road!'"
When Trapp again asked for her cane, the lawsuit states that Foster yelled, "Go find a tree branch or something," which was followed by another hospital employee, who shouted, "Go get you a tree branch!" The suit writes that "the individuals and the LPD Officers are laughing and smiling about their concerted behavior towards Plaintiff. Defendant Foster yells to Plaintiff, 'They're [sic] some good trees over there downtown!'"
Soon after, body camera footage shows both officers approaching Trapp, who said, "Oh no, you are not going to hurt me?!" At that moment, Foster "violently grabs Plaintiff's arm and twists it behind her back while forcing her to the ground, face first….After being forcibly slammed to the ground [Trapp] says, 'Because I wanted my cane you broke my knee!'" The complaint adds that "at no time did either officer tell Plaintiff she was under arrest."
The arrest left 61-year-old Trapp with a fractured leg, as well as "abrasions to her face and head." The complaint notes that Foster continued to taunt Trapp, telling her "I don't mess around Linda, or whatever your name is, next time you seem [sic] me you better not act like this. I don't mess around you understand?!"
Eventually, hospital employees, seeing an injured and bloodied Trap, agree to take her back inside the hospital for treatment. During this time, she receives more verbal abuse, with Foster insisting that "Your knee is fine," and a female nurse telling Trapp, "Lord Jesus shut up!" while treating her facial wound. When an emergency room doctor arrived, he "spent approximately 19 seconds" with Trapp, adding that she could get an X-ray "with your doctor at his office" before walking away.
A few minutes later, the suit states that Foster can be heard bragging to another officer about violently arresting Trapp, saying, "She got busted up pretty good…. She was Man-dropped."
The complaint states that Foster told his supervisor that, when he went to arrest Trapp, she "started flailing her arms and kicking and stuff." However, body camera footage doesn't show this—instead, Trapp can be seen simply backing away from the officers with her hands at her sides.
Eventually, the complaint states that Trapp was taken to a local jail, where an X-ray revealed her leg had been fractured. She was taken to another hospital where her injuries were treated, including several corrective surgeries.
Despite the severe injuries resulting from Trapp's arrest, local police have staunchly refused to admit wrongdoing—instead insisting that Trapp was responsible for her injuries.
The Lexington Herald-Leader reports that, in response to the lawsuit, Foster insisted that "after multiple prior warnings were communicated to Plaintiff, she had clear reason to know the basis of her arrest," adding that if Trapp was injured, it was not due to "excessive or unreasonable force."
"She was never told that she was under arrest," John Reynolds, Trapp's lawyer, told LEX 18. "She was never told to put her hands behind her back, she was grabbed and forcefully taken to the ground."
"Defendants violated that duty of reasonable care by using their authority as officers to negligently and forcibly detain, batter, assault, harass, threaten, and humiliate Plaintiff Linda Trapp," the complaint states, adding that Trapp "suffered wrongful arrest, imprisonment, emotional injury severe bodily injuries and delayed medical treatment" as a result of the officers' behavior.
While the lawsuit argues that the officers and the Lexington Police Department have committed a litany of offenses, including assault and battery, negligence, and unlawful arrest, it's unclear if those responsible for Trapp's injuries will ever be held accountable. Wide-ranging qualified immunity often makes it nearly impossible for those abused by police to achieve victory in civil lawsuits, even when officers' conduct is seemingly beyond the pale.
"Linda's part of a marginalized community," said Reynolds. "And you can see that night on the video that she was dismissed, she was literally shooed away from the hospital, and she was wrongfully arrested."
The post Lawsuit: Police Officer Broke a 61-Year-Old Woman's Leg, Then Bragged He 'Man-Dropped' Her appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On April 18, former President Donald Trump posted a video on his Truth Social account titled "Homelessness Plan." In it, Trump alleged that "the homeless, the drug-addicted, and the violent and dangerously deranged" had ruined America's cities, "turn[ing] every park and sidewalk into a place for them to squat and do drugs." He promised, "When I'm back in the White House, we will use every tool, lever, and authority" to "end the scourge of homelessness and make our cities clean and safe and beautiful once again."
How would he accomplish this? "Working with states, we will ban urban camping wherever possible…. We will then open up large parcels of inexpensive land; bring in doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, and drug rehab specialists; and create tent cities where the homeless can be relocated and their problems identified."
Treatment would be catered to individual need: "For those who have addictions, substance abuse, and common mental health problems, we will get them into treatment. And for those who are severely mentally ill and deeply disturbed, we will bring them back to mental institutions where they belong, with the goal of reintegrating them back into society once they are well enough to manage."
Trump's plan may sound magnanimous, but it's anything but. First off, there's no telling what such a plan, or for that matter any plan, would cost. Advocates often say that the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) estimates $20 billion as the cost of ending homelessness in America. But that number was an informal, unverified estimate of the annual cost in 2012. And as Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, told VERIFY in 2021, "It's not so difficult to figure out what it would cost to end homelessness for everyone who is homeless tonight…. The problem is that more people BECOME homeless every day because they don't earn enough to pay for housing – we're 7 million housing units short to meet the needs of low-income people."
For his plan, Trump merely offered that "with all of the money we will save by ending mass unskilled migration, we will have a huge dividend" to put toward ending homelessness. But the canard that low-skilled immigrants "cost" the U.S. on balance is flawed, and if anything, we have too few.
Far from being beneficent, Trump's plan would force the homeless to either go along or go to jail: "Violators of these [urban camping] bans will be arrested," he clarified, "but they will be given the option to accept treatment and services if they're willing to be rehabilitated. Many of them don't want that, but we'll give them the option."
Unsurprisingly, one cannot simply ban the act of being homeless—at least, not without making life worse for those affected. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, "The criminalization of homelessness is aimed at the visual ramifications of homelessness, not the root causes. Not only does it fail to address the underlying causes, but it further undermines the challenges of homelessness." For example: "A criminal record adds to the already difficult situation of finding employment, getting housing, or being eligible for certain services."
Past incarceration, Trump's plan would force people into either mandatory treatment or mental institutions, based on the government's determination of where they deserve to be. As Reason's Mike Riggs wrote in the May 2023 "Debate Issue:"
No policy model can eradicate homelessness. Not everyone on the street wants or can benefit from intervention. Involuntary commitment, even for the short, multiday periods currently allowed under most state laws, often exacerbates feelings of paranoia. Holding patients indefinitely turns them into prisoners. The only comprehensive solution—make homelessness illegal, and aggressively enforce that law—would be unconstitutional and barbaric.
But let's imagine that Trump's plan is implemented exactly as envisioned, and a significant portion of the more than 500,000 people experiencing homelessness are funneled into open-air tent cities. When the federal government set up shelters for unaccompanied minors who came across the southern border, conditions in the facilities were horrid. In one such shelter at Fort Bliss near El Paso, Texas, thousands of children and teenagers were housed in outdoor tents. Whistleblowers detailed unsanitary conditions and unmet medical needs.
Homelessness is a complex problem with numerous causes, and it stands to reason that a solution would be multipronged as well. This week, Reason's Liz Wolfe reported on the different policies pursued by Texas and California. Needless to say, any serious proposal for ending homelessness should be more complicated than simply criminalizing the act of being homeless.
The post Trump Advocates Mass Incarceration, 'Tent Cities' To Address Homelessness appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Homelessness has been rising in America's West Coast cities for more than a decade. Entire blocks of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland are occupied by tent encampments plagued by violence, drug overdoses, and disease.
But the problem is concentrated in a handful of cities; nationwide the homeless population has been shrinking for a decade. To figure out why some places are so much more successful than others, we took a trip to Texas where the homeless population declined almost 30 percent over the last decade. (It grew by more than 40 percent in California in that same time span.) Today, the Lone Star state counts 90 homeless people per 100,000 residents. In California, the problem is almost five times as bad.
Not only does Texas have vastly different politics and policies from the West Coast, but it's also home to three large cities with three very different approaches to homelessness: Austin, San Antonio, and Houston.
From a privately run village of tiny homes just outside Austin to a nonprofit serving San Antonio's homeless with an intensive, no-excuses treatment and skills training program to a single, centralized provider in Houston that's streamlined its approach to quickly house thousands of the city's homeless residents, what we found in Texas was innovation.
But the federal government doesn't fund innovation. For decades, it's committed to a one-size-fits-all approach known as "Housing First." States like California have followed suit, leaving many charities with a choice to either fall in line or turn down millions in federal and state grants.
The result: More people living—and dying—on the streets as governors and big city mayors promise that the much-awaited free, permanent housing is just around the corner.
Our first stop was the city of Austin, where progressive activism exists in the shadow of a conservative state house. It's a boom-and-bust town—a magnet for business and tech innovation, which has lured some of Silicon Valley's top performers. When the ultrarich moved in, housing prices started to resemble San Francisco's, and the homeless population climbed.
Policy-wise, Austin has a lot in common with West Coast cities, which helps explain the huge encampments here. But Austin has an advantage that San Francisco and Los Angeles don't: When you walk over the city line, you're in a more typical Texas municipality, where light-touch regulation allows innovative approaches to thrive.
The outskirts of Austin are home to Community First! Village, a 51-acre community of tiny homes. The project doesn't rely on federal money and, therefore, isn't bound by rules imposed by Washington.
Alan Graham, who founded Community First! Village, attributes homelessness to a lack of a supportive network of friends, family, and neighbors. He seeks to rebuild that network by giving formerly homeless people the opportunity to live in a community again. The homes are intentionally designed with large front porches within a walkable community to encourage socialization among neighbors.
"The single greatest cause of homelessness is a profound catastrophic loss of family," says Graham.
To live here, residents have to respect the law and follow rules like keeping pets leashed, keeping junk off their driveways, and keeping drug use out of the common areas. But behind closed doors? That's their business.
"What we always wanted is for people to live the way that people want to live," says Graham. "Here in the United States of America, we have an extraordinary number of freedoms. We don't want people coming into our homes seeing what we do in the privacy of our own homes."
Graham says there's one rule above all others: You must pay rent. The monthly rent for one of these houses is between $240 and $440 depending on the size and amenities, which residents typically pay out of their monthly social security or disability benefits. Graham says that before the pandemic, they collected 99 percent of rent owed.
"It turns out that people that have skin in the game are bought into the game far more than people that don't have skin in the game," says Graham.
Mobile Loaves & Fishes, Graham's nonprofit, launched Community First! Village with about a dozen homes in 2015 and has since expanded to more than 300. The goal is to reach 500 units by the end of this year to meet the growing demand, while also breaking ground on 127 acres across the street and inside Austin, an expansion underwritten by $35 million of funds from the federal American Rescue Plan Act that will eventually make way for 1,400 more homes.
Community First! Village is located just outside Austin city limits. Graham says it would have been impossible to build it on the other side of the line.
"We are blessed with the reality that there is no zoning, no discretionary land use authority outside of a municipal boundary," says Graham. "And that's a big deal because that's the only tool that NIMBY[s] can sink their teeth into."
"NIMBY" stands for "not in my backyard"—a term used to describe activists who lobby to block new real estate development. Within Austin city limits, developers have to contend with zoning restrictions and preservation laws which have made it hard to meet the huge increase in demand caused by wealthy professionals fleeing coastal cities.
Residents thwarted plans to rewrite the zoning code, which would've allowed more vacant or underutilized properties to be transformed into multifamily housing units with nearby retail. In contrast, existing strict business and residential demarcations make such mixed developments more difficult.
A common refrain among urbanists and disgruntled residents is that Austin is like San Francisco in the '90s: Those who migrated to the city and bought houses early stand to gain from the soaring prices, but many others are getting priced out or pushed farther from the city center.
"The city of Austin itself, which is probably where the most [local] demand [for housing] would be, is hyper NIMBY," says urbanist Scott Beyer, who has studied the interaction between zoning laws, housing prices, and homelessness. He points out that Austin's suburbs have stayed relatively affordable despite large population growth.
Still, many Austinites don't appear to see the relationship between the zoning and land use changes they oppose and the fact that affordability is getting worse and worse.
But such land use restrictions—especially zoning—shaped the ability of each city we visited to respond to its homelessness problem.
Another crucial aspect was the strings attached to government funding. As the operator of a faith-based charity not reliant on federal funding, Graham is free to experiment, including by coming up with cheaper ways to build his tiny homes. Some tiny homes are 3D printed, while others are prefabricated, and still others are bare-bone shacks that don't contain any plumbing and require residents to use shared kitchens and bathrooms.
"People want our government to be risk-free, and as a result of asking [the government] to be risk-free, it lacks innovation," says Graham. He says the average unit in Community First! Village costs about $80,000.
Federal funding requires that homeless service providers conform to the policy approach of Housing First, which focuses on getting clients into apartments as quickly as possible. Services can then be offered as an option, but they're not stipulated, nor is "readiness" for independent living assessed. Graham says this approach is limiting.
"[Housing First is] an important piece of the puzzle, but it can't possibly be the only piece of that puzzle," says Graham. "We need community first."
But Community First! Village may have its own limitations. The pandemic put extra stress on them as an eviction moratorium made enforcing basic rules more difficult, and one resident told us safety concerns have grown along with the population of the neighborhood, raising questions about whether or not to hire a security team, which would be costly and could change the entire nature of the community.
And although they are quickly scaling up, Community First! Village only serves a fraction of Austin's estimated 4,600 homeless population. The city of Austin's lead homelessness agency accepts money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and is therefore subject to the same federal mandates that operators in California are.
Most concerning for many Austinites is the growing visibility of the unsheltered homeless population. In 2019, before the pandemic, the City Council repealed Austin's 23-year-old anti-camping ordinance, which led to so much street camping that voters reinstated the ban with a 2021 referendum called Proposition B.
Austin's combination of street camping, artificially constrained housing supply, and a network of homeless service providers hamstrung by federal guidelines has led to the city beginning to resemble some of the worst failures of the West Coast.
And that brings us to San Antonio, which blazed its own path for helping the homeless.
"We weren't so interested in feeding someone overnight or putting them up overnight…. Our goal was to make them different people, have a different life, and be able to participate in our society," says Phil Hardberger, who served as San Antonio's mayor from 2005 to 2009, a period in which the city's homeless population grew by about 1,000.
But he helped to reverse this trend by partnering with Valero's founding CEO Bill Greehey to build a nonprofit homeless service provider called Haven For Hope on a 22-acre lot owned by the city. To build the campus, Greehey raised more than $100 million, mostly from the private sector, and contributed lots of his own fortune.
Today, Haven For Hope offers room and board, health care, child care, and even a kennel, as well as a comprehensive life skills program that includes job training, mental health counseling, and addiction treatment.
To live in the dorms on the main campus, residents have to agree to learn practical life skills, make it to class, attend counseling, stay clean, and continue along the path to independence.
For people unable or unwilling to follow the program, or who just need immediate assistance to get off the streets for a night or two, there's a separate area called the Courtyard, which offers security, heat, food, laundry, and a shared indoor space with beds. The same counseling and treatment services are offered on this side, but they aren't mandatory.
The nonprofit serves about 85 percent of San Antonio's homeless population, serving about 7,000 people a year. According to internal reports, Haven re-houses about 1,000 clients a year. Ninety-one percent have stayed in their new homes after a year.
Kim Jefferies, Haven for Hope's president and CEO, says that private funding has given them the flexibility to offer services better tailored to the needs of their clients.
Shelters that rely heavily on federal funding are subject to more restrictions because of the one-size-fits-all "Housing First" mandate championed by Democrat and Republican administrations.
The Housing First movement started in the 1980s and took off amid the George W. Bush administration's "compassionate conservatism" agenda.
President Barack Obama completed the pivot to a federal Housing First policy with the HEARTH Act of 2009, which made focusing on rapid re-housing a requirement for those receiving federal funds
The result was predictable: Federal money was spent on pricier permanent supportive housing, and the use of temporary emergency shelters decreased. Facing a critical lack of beds, shelters started turning people away.
In 2018, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a ruling that enforcement of anti-camping laws in cities lacking emergency beds was cruel and unusual punishment and thus unconstitutional. With major cities lacking adequate beds and therefore the legal right to prohibit street camping, entire neighborhoods of Los Angeles and San Francisco turned to squalor.
San Antonio doesn't allow street camping, though like in any large city, it's possible to find encampments nestled beneath overpasses. Jefferies says they work with city officials to notify homeless individuals of their options in advance of an encampment sweep.
"And so [San Antonio doesn't] allow [street camping]. So I think that is helpful in our success in getting people off the streets," says Jefferies.
Beyer says that there should be "a hundred different models" for homeless provision because homelessness is complex, is caused by many different factors, and often requires different solutions. In a recent policy report he co-authored for California's Independent Institute, Beyer analyzed some of the problems with Housing First.
"The intentions were good, but I think also the outcomes could have been quite predictable in a sense," says Beyer. "If you're funding people to live on the street in a state of disrepair… and you say that even despite living like this, you're gonna get free housing… it seems like you would encourage a lot more of that behavior."
Beyer argues that mandating Housing First has crippled policy innovation in major West Coast cities and that the nonprofit sector would benefit from more experimentation in their approaches to mitigating the problems that lead to homelessness.
"I think a lot of that innovation is getting squelched when we have a federal government that only allocates grants based on this one very specific model that we call Housing First," says Beyer.
Jefferies estimates a Housing First approach would work for about 15 percent of the approximately 7,000 homeless individuals who come through Haven For Hope every year.
"[The other 85 percent] need different kinds of stability before they move into that model," says Jefferies. She says that because San Antonio invested heavily in emergency shelter beds in contrast to HUD's shift towards Housing First, the city was better able to adapt. "The approach followed the funding, and so we can have different interventions for different people because we're not totally reliant on the federal government to fund it."
Three years after L.A. voters passed a $1.2 billion bond measure to help the city's homeless population, the city had completed just 1 percent of the promised 10,000 units. And the average cost of building each apartment was about half a million dollars. At the high end, the cost of each exceeded $800,000.
Union Rescue Mission, one of the city's largest and oldest homeless service providers, didn't get any of that funding—because it didn't conform to the Housing First approach mandated by the state of California. Union Rescue Mission CEO Andy Bales told Reason in 2019 that city officials laughed at him for suggesting a different approach.
"Some of my counterparts who depend on [voter-approved referendum fund] money, they're afraid to speak the truth," says Bales. "They can't speak the truth, otherwise they would get in great difficulty and be defunded…. I think pride and arrogance is really holding us back from doing some of the needed things we need to do to immediately solve this issue."
But the winds have changed. In late 2021, an L.A. County supervisor appointed Bales to help oversee the county's response to homelessness.
"Don't be afraid of the dogmatic Housing First, permanent supportive housing people," advises Bales. "Don't be afraid of the NIMBY."
There is one city in Texas where Housing First is working well.
As The New York Times reported last year, Houston has reduced its homeless count by more than 60 percent over the past decade, while placing more than 25,000 people in permanent units.
So how did America's fourth largest city succeed by going all in on Housing First while Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland have failed so miserably?
Ana Rausch, vice president of program operations at the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston and Harris County, says it partially has to do with appointing a single agency as the first point of contact for any homeless person seeking help. While many cities have several organizations in this role, Rausch says this centralization makes it easier to efficiently route clients where they need to go and to track outcomes.
She says that the housing readiness approach in San Antonio, which has a metro region population about one-third the size of Houston's, wouldn't scale.
"You're basically paying to leave people homeless in a courtyard [in San Antonio]," says Rausch. "See which costs more. I've been doing this for 23 years, and the Housing First approach works."
Several studies have shown that Housing First does better at keeping chronically homeless people with serious mental illness off the street than more intensive "housing readiness" interventions.
But other research has cast doubt on its effectiveness, its impact on health outcomes, and whether its results hold up over time.
Besides limiting innovation in homeless services, governments also make housing artificially expensive. Rausch says that the reason Housing First works in Houston but not in Los Angeles has everything to do with the cost of building.
"You can't have your cake and eat it, too, and that's what's happening in L.A.," says Rausch. "They need more affordable housing. They need more physical units built, but they can't do it because they're in their own way."
Houston is famous for not having zoning. Townhouses run up against multifamily apartment buildings sitting atop ground-level businesses. A crematorium neighbors high-end condominiums. Skyscrapers loom over single-family neighborhoods in a city where you just don't have to ask much permission to build.
"We really have never cultivated this sort of NIMBY mechanism in Houston," says Tory Gattis, an urbanist who specializes in Houston land regulation. The result of the city's laissez faire approach is that despite massive population growth over the past decade, housing prices are stable. That's because it's difficult for interest groups to stop a development project.
Houston also has no urban growth boundaries, unlike its West Coast counterparts, meaning that in addition to growing upward, housing can easily spread outward to accommodate both affordable city and suburban living. Without zoning, growth boundaries, or excessive environmental review laws, neighborhood groups can't easily block new housing projects on adjacent land, but master-planned communities and longstanding neighborhoods can create and enforce private deed restrictions to prevent homeowners from suddenly turning a single-family house into a four-story building without community input. Gattis says this is a compromise that more cities would be wise to pursue.
"Protect your single-family neighborhoods. That's where your biggest political opposition's going to be, and that's what Houston's allowed with the deed restrictions," says Gattis. "But then let all the rest of your land open up, whether it's commercial or industrial. Let it go multifamily. If that's what the market needs, let it go."
So a major reason Texas has a lower homeless population than California traces back to zoning and construction costs. Housing First works in Houston because it's so cheap to build. Austin is expensive like a coastal city, but the unincorporated swath of Travis County outside of city limits provided Alan Graham with a spot for his tiny home community.
What's also working in Texas is a willingness to give local social entrepreneurs the flexibility to craft policies that best serve their homeless populations, instead of adhering to one-size-fits-all federal policies.
"The whole regime of government funding of homeless [response] I think drives out a lot of private philanthropy," says Beyer. "I think there would be a lot of market appetite for solving homelessness from the philanthropic sector. That does not happen because people just assume the government is supposed to do it."
Graham believes that there's a role for government but that it shouldn't be micromanaging through overly restrictive grants.
"We believe that government should play a subsidiary role to we, the people in mitigating these profound human issues that are out there like homelessness," says Graham. "But we've abdicated this to the government as a society, and we're reaping what we're sowing."
Music Credits: "Inborn" by Piotr Hummel via Artlist; "Crossing the High Desert" by Lance Conrad via Artlist; "Kill or Be Killed Showdown" by Lance Conrad via Artlist; "Hope and Heisenberg" by SPEARFISHER via Artlist; "Crystalline" by Leroy Wild via Artlist; "Diamonds" by Livingrooms via Artlist; "Deadman Pass" by The Talbott Brothers via Artlist; "Beer House" by Alex Grohl via Artlist; "Martha" by Swirling Ship via Artlist; "Wanderer" by The Talbott Brothers via Artlist; "Finding My Memories" by Yehezkel Raz via Artlist; "Railroad" by Max H. via Artlist; "Who Goes There" by Falconer via Artlist; "Ross Landing" by David Benedict via Artlist; "Country Roads" by Kick Lee via Artlist; "Grey Shadow" by ANBR via Artlist
Photo Credits: DPST/Newscom; John Marshall Mantel/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; JIM RUYMEN/UPI/Newscom; TERRY SCHMITT/UPI/Newscom; Mike Kane/SanAntonioExpress/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Bob Daemmrich/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Scott Coleman/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Taylor Jones/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; FRANCES M. ROBERTS/Newscom; RICHARD B. LEVINE/Newscom; Mario Cantu/Cal Sport Media/Newscom; Jana Birchum/Polaris/Newscom; Bob Daemmrich/Polaris/Newscom; Curt Teich Postcard Archives / Heritage Images/Newscom; Jamal A. Wilson—Pool via CNP/Newscom; Michael Ho Wai Lee/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Brittany Murray/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Wu Kaixiang / Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; Julie Edwards / Avalon/Newscom; David Crane/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Peter Bennett/Citizen of the Planet/Newscom; Facebook/Haven for Hope; Facebook/Coalition for the Homeless of Houston; Flickr/Eric Garcetti (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0); Flickr/Steve Shook (CC BY 2.0)
The post Why Homelessness Is Worse in California Than in Texas appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Two years ago, Portland police shot and killed an unarmed homeless man named Robert Delgado while he was having a mental health crisis in a city park. Now his family is suing, claiming that the actions of Portland police that day and the department's policies violated Delgado's Fourth Amendment rights.
On April 16, 2021, Portland Police received a call to the department's non-emergency number about a homeless man aiming an orange-tipped BB gun at a fence. The caller said the man wasn't aiming the BB gun at any people but "wielding it at the fence." The caller indicated that the homeless man "thinks he's some kind of cowboy…or James Bond."
Zachary DeLong, a Portland Police officer on the Enhanced Crisis Intervention Team (ECIT), responded to the call. According to the complaint, it appears that DeLong was told that Delgado had a gun, though he wasn't seen threatening anyone with it. The complaint also states that when DeLong arrived at the park, he did not see Delgado holding a gun.
The Portland Police Department's ECIT, according to the city's website, "features specially trained and vetted police officers who respond to persons in behavioral health crisis and seek to safely de-escalate situations." But Delgado's family alleges that DeLong did exactly the opposite.
According to the lawsuit, DeLong arrived at the park and saw Delgado shirtless standing alone near his tent encampment; his "hands were empty, and Defendant DeLong did not see a gun." Nevertheless, DeLong immediately retrieved his AR-15 from his car and shouted at Delgado, who responded by "pacing and yelling."
The lawsuit claims that Delgado's hands were empty when DeLong confronted him and that "Defendant DeLong knew or should have known that there was a substantial probability that Mr. Delgado was experiencing houselessness and suffering from serious emotional or mental distress. Per PPB policy, as outlined above, Defendant DeLong had to consider these factors before using force."
Instead of attempting to diffuse the situation, DeLong and a second officer took cover behind two trees "90 feet away" from Delgado, trained their weapons on him, and began shouting "conflicting commands." According to the complaint, these commands suggest that DeLong believed Delgado to be unarmed. "DeLong began yelling commands that showed that he did not believe that Mr. Delgado was holding a gun when approached, such as 'If you reach for a gun, I'm going to fucking shoot you!' and 'Get your ass on the ground!'" The complaint further states that Delgado responded to these commands by shouting "get the fuck away from me" and "just fucking shoot me."
According to the lawsuit, Delgado walked over to his tent a few moments later and picked something up. As he was beginning to stand up, DeLong fired two shots with his Colt AR-15 rifle, one of which struck Delgado in the torso; the second officer, Samantha Wuthrich, fired a single non-lethal round from a 40 mm launcher. DeLong's round would eventually kill Delgado, who bled to death within minutes after the bullet tore through his "spleen, stomach, the left side of his diaphragm, and the lower lobe of the left lung."
DeLong and Wuthrich failed to provide aid after firing on Delgado. The lawsuit claims that "Approximately 5 minutes and 45 seconds" after being shot by DeLong, Delgado was shot again by "Officer Smith," who fired another round from the 40 mm launcher as Delgado lay in the grass, not moving.
Officers finally began to render aid to Delgado seven minutes after DeLong shot him. "By that point," the complaint reads, "Mr. Delgado had stopped moving, had no pulse, and was not breathing. Attempts at CPR and medical aid were not successful."
The complaint also alleges that "as Mr. Delgado's body lay in the park after being killed, a large number of Portland Police officers feasted on pizza nearby in plain view of the public."
Delgado's family is now seeking a jury trial and damages. They seek to prove in court that DeLong violated Delgado's Fourth Amendment rights and that his conduct reflects a pattern and practice of behavior in the Portland Police Department that is a direct result of the city's failure to "train, discipline, and supervise its officers, including Defendant DeLong, in encountering people with mental illness and deescalating situations to avoid the use of force."
Put simply, DeLong had "available alternatives. He used none." Now Portland should pay up.
The post Lawsuit Claims Portland Police Shot Unarmed Homeless Man, Then Ate Pizza While His Body Lay on the Ground appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Affirmative: Jared Meyer
Walking through downtowns across the United States, one could be excused for becoming numb to outbursts from visibly disturbed and impaired individuals. Two decades ago, the idea that major American cities would condone (or in some cases, encourage) this situation was unthinkable. If a person was unable to take care of themselves, the options were moving to shelter or, if illness put themselves or others at risk, a clinical setting. Tent-filled homeless camps that stretch across city blocks or throughout public parks were simply not on the table.
A recent UCLA study confirmed the obvious: More than 75 percent of the unsheltered homeless surveyed have a substantial mental health problem, 75 percent have an alcohol or drug addiction, and the majority suffer from both. These afflictions, not a lack of housing, drive street homelessness in America. Choosing to live with the waste, disease, and violence that accompanies homeless camps is a clear sign that someone is not in control and needs an intervention. The only way to solve this problem is to force people off the streets and into safer settings that can treat the root causes of homelessness.
Imagine if you were suffering from untreated schizophrenia or an out-of-control addiction to opioids and found yourself living in a dangerous street camp. You distrust everyone in the system and perhaps do not even realize you are sick. Would you want your loved ones or the government to be able to get you help even if you did not want it? Many people of sound mind would, by force if necessary.
Moving homeless individuals off the streets works. After Los Angeles cleared its notorious Skid Row in 2006, the number of homeless deaths in the city dropped by half. A 2010 study showed that the successful campaign also led to a 40 percent reduction in violent crime, with no spillover effects into other communities.
It is also clear what happens when cities repeal or refuse to enforce their bans on homeless camping in public places. When Los Angeles began allowing the proliferation of street camps again in 2014, the city saw homeless deaths quadruple to five a day. This is a much higher death rate than U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan saw during the heights of the wars there. The Phoenix government does not enforce its camping ban, and more than 500 homeless people died on the city's streets in the first half of 2022. Most of these deaths were caused by drug use, but almost one in 10 were homicides.
After Austin repealed its ban in 2019, the city saw a 45 percent increase in unsheltered homelessness even as the number of people staying in shelters dropped. Deaths among Austin's homeless numbered 77 just a decade ago, but rose to 256 in 2020 after the camping ban ended (almost none of which were COVID-related). After 2019, Austin also endured double-digit increases in violent crimes involving the homeless. This is unsurprising, as neighborhoods next to street camps have higher levels of armed robbery, rape, and aggravated assault. The victims of these crimes are often other vulnerable homeless individuals.
Some homeless people need more than shelters and services to stabilize and get better. Unfortunately, mental health commitment laws, which states changed in response to past abuses and pressure from civil liberty groups, make it too difficult for those experiencing a major mental crisis to get help. According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, a national advocate for psychiatric treatment, four states require family or friends to refuse to help their loved ones for them to be eligible for some types of commitment. States often do not have "psychiatric deterioration" nor "grave disability" standards, which limits the services individuals can receive when they are clearly suffering from severe mental illness or addiction. Even when the standards for involuntary care are met, states' maximum inpatient hold and outpatient supervision times are often too short to lead to lasting change.
Those who oppose moving the homeless off the streets on individual liberty grounds often fail to distinguish between public and private property. (The United States finds itself in the odd position of overregulating private property while underregulating public property.) As much as some may hope otherwise, roads and most parks remain public property in cities. Government having and enforcing ordinances that regulate what is acceptable in these public places is necessary to protect public safety, personal property, and general order. The popularity of camping bans in referendums and opinion polls shows local residents know that in dense urban areas, allowing individuals to use public space however they choose is a recipe for disaster.
Solving unsheltered homelessness, along with the causal factors of mental illness and addiction, is difficult. But the current "solution" of choosing the streets over shelters and health care facilities is not working. All levels of government need to update their approaches and move individuals off the streets into safer alternatives—without their consent if necessary.
Negative: Mike Riggs
In 1963, nearly 600,000 Americans lived in state-run hospitals because medical authorities insisted they were mentally ill and couldn't live alone or with loved ones. In an address he gave that year to Congress, President John F. Kennedy described the facilities where these men and women were held, many against their will, as "unpleasant institutions from which death too often provided the only firm hope of release." The libertarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, in a 2000 interview with Reason's Jacob Sullum, called them "feudal slave estates."
When a midcentury progressive Democrat and a firebrand classical liberal conclude that a government policy stinks, it stinks.
Kennedy's alternative to mass institutionalization for both the mentally ill and the intellectually disabled (who accounted for an additional 200,000 victims of institutionalization in 1963) was to shift federal funding from state-run hospitals to community treatment centers that could help patients without pulling them from their neighborhoods, families, and homes. "When carried out, reliance on the cold mercy of custodial isolation will be supplanted by the open warmth of community concern and capability," Kennedy told Congress. "Emphasis on prevention, treatment and rehabilitation will be substituted for a desultory interest in confining patients in an institution to wither away."
Szasz, who spent his career arguing against the idea that mental illnesses are actual illnesses, wanted to simultaneously abolish all forms of involuntary psychiatric care and the insanity defense. He insisted that people who behaved violently should be incarcerated regardless of the psychological impetus for their behavior. People who merely acted weirdly or believed weird things, on the other hand, should be left to their own (nonviolent) devices. Szasz insisted that no one has the authority to stop an adult from hurting themselves. A homeless man who attacks a passerby should be tried and punished for assault and battery; a homeless man who claims to be Jesus and uses fentanyl in the open should not.
The Szaszian approach is too Manichean for criminal justice reformers and too soft for law-and-order types, but it at least has a limiting principle. Mentally ill people can be deprived of their liberty only as a form of punishment and only if they victimize someone; they cannot be deprived of their liberty to merely deliver them from temptation or risk.
The Supreme Court contributed to deinstitutionalization when it ruled in O'Connor v. Donaldson (1975) that the state and its agents cannot confine people indefinitely simply because they have been diagnosed with a mental illness. Kenneth Donaldson, the plaintiff in that case, was involuntarily committed to a state-run psychiatric hospital in Florida in 1957 because his father said he experienced delusions. Donaldson spent the next 15 years in a crowded asylum, refused his freedom by J.B. O'Connor, the hospital superintendent, who testified that Donaldson was never violent, suicidal, or in need of therapy. He was simply a person with schizophrenia and thus belonged in the care of the state.
The old institutional model, which vacuumed up people like Donaldson and dismissed their indignation as a medical symptom, was itself a wide-reaching disease. At their peak, state mental hospitals contained three times as many people as are currently in federal prison—at a time when the U.S. population was roughly 60 percent of what it is now.
Scott Alexander, the pseudonymous blogger and San Francisco–based psychiatrist, supports a fusion of the Szaszian and community care approaches. "In my model," he wrote in 2016, "the overwhelming majority of mentally ill people can live okay lives outside of any institution, hopefully receiving community care if they want it. If they commit crimes they will go to prison just like anyone else."
Community care has never received the federal funding that Kennedy intended, but it does exist, even in places with large populations of mentally ill unhoused persons. But no policy model can eradicate homelessness. Not everyone on the street wants or can benefit from intervention. Involuntary commitment, even for the short, multiday periods currently allowed under most state laws, often exacerbates feelings of paranoia. Holding patients indefinitely turns them into prisoners. The only comprehensive solution—make homelessness illegal, and aggressively enforce that law—would be unconstitutional and barbaric.
But there is low-hanging fruit. Allow developers to build more housing to drive down prices. End the drug war so that opioid users know what they're putting into their bodies. Stand up to NIMBY ("not in my backyard") activists, who routinely insist on ghettoizing services for the poor and sabotaging the efforts of private actors like outdoor soup kitchens. And yes, those who are violent or destructive should have their liberties revoked in proportion.
There is no easy solution, but there is a very obvious bad one: locking away people for the grave sin of not having curtains to hide their faults.
Subscribers have access to Reason's whole May 2023 issue now. These debates and the rest of the issue will be released throughout the month for everyone else. Consider subscribing today!
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]]>A California disability rights group is asking the state's Supreme Court to block the enforcement of the CARE Act, a sweeping piece of legislation signed into law by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom last fall. The law, which aims to tackle the state's homelessness crisis, creates "CARE Courts," which enable the state to force severely mentally ill people into court-ordered treatment and housing programs. However, disability rights groups have consistently opposed the measure, arguing that it risks being abused to trap mentally ill people under state control.
"The CARE Act was an attempt to respond to two crises—a shortage of affordable, accessible housing and mental health care—that force many into last-resort living situations," the petition argues. "Singling out people with schizophrenia and forcing them into involuntary outpatient treatment, multiple court hearings, compelled assessments and other statutory penalties is not an appropriate response."
The CARE Act was signed last September, with Gov. Newsom claiming that the new law would "[offer] hope and a new path forward for thousands of struggling Californians and empowering their loved ones to help." Under the law, individuals like first responders, family members, and clinicians can petition to have a severely mentally ill person participate in the "CARE program."
If the individual meets certain requirements, like having a severe psychotic illness that is currently untreated, the case can move forward in two ways. First, if the individual voluntarily accepts treatment, the case is dismissed. If the individual refuses, they are appointed an attorney, and a series of hearings occurs. A judge can ultimately order the individual into a "CARE plan," mandating mental health treatment. This plan is automatically put in place for one year, with a possible voluntary one-year extension.
Supporters argue that the CARE Act will allow the state to tackle its homelessness crisis by helping severely mentally ill homeless people get off the streets and into treatment. However, disability rights groups and civil liberties organizations argue that CARE plans are rife with the potential for abuse.
"Unfortunately, instead of focusing on proven methods that prioritize permanent housing and voluntary healthcare, Governor Gavin Newsom's so-called 'CARE Court' plan would create a new court system that subjects unhoused people with mental health disabilities to involuntary treatment. This is not the answer," wrote the California American Civil Liberties Union in June of last year.
Now, Disability Rights California has taken legal action, asking the California Supreme Court to block enforcement of the law. The petition, which was filed late last month argues that the CARE Act violates due process rights by coercing individuals into restrictive court-mandated treatment plans using "vague" and "undefined" language which the petition claims could lead to "arbitrary and discriminatory decision-making."
Further, the petition argues that the CARE Act violates equal protection rights by singling out those with a psychotic illness like schizophrenia for court proceedings. "No other California mental health statute distinguishes between individuals based on diagnosis, rather than severity of need," the petition states.
Overall, the petition argues that CARE Act will lead to gross violations of many basic rights guaranteed under the California Constitution. "Thousands of unhoused Californians with mental illness will be threatened with court orders, forced into involuntary treatment and swept off the streets, not because they are a danger to themselves or others, but because a judge has speculated they are 'likely' to become so in the future," the petition states. "Although designed to address the State's homelessness crisis, it will not further that goal. And on its face, the CARE Act violates essential constitutional guarantees of due process and equal protection while needlessly burdening fundamental rights to privacy, autonomy and liberty."
While it is unclear whether the California Supreme Court will take up this challenge to the CARE Act, this latest action makes a clear argument against using the power of the state to coerce individuals into medical treatment.
"The CARE Act sets up a compulsory new court system authorizing the deprivation of liberty and autonomy in conflict with Californians' basic constitutional rights," Mike Rawson, the director of litigation at the Public Interest Law Project, said in a January press release. "Such coercive systems and treatments have been proven ineffective and will only serve to perpetuate institutional racism and worsen health disparities."
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]]>Hialeah, Florida, police officers Rafael Quinones Otano and Lorenzo Rafael Orfila have been fired and charged with armed kidnapping and battery. Orfila has also been charged with official misconduct. Prosecutors said that after a shopkeeper called police to complain about a homeless man bothering people, the two drove that vagrant to a wooded area almost seven miles away, then knocked him out and left him there. They later sent a private eye to find the man and give him $1,350 in exchange for signing an affidavit saying he wasn't beaten and that he did not want the officers punished.
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]]>Police in two Georgia towns—Alpharetta and Blackshear—arrested, searched, and even issued criminal citations against a man for holding a sign intended to raise awareness for homeless veterans. Jeff Gray, a U.S. Army veteran himself, says the police tried to stop him from exercising his First Amendment rights. Now, officials in both cities are facing a federal lawsuit.
"Jeff Gray doesn't need a government-issued permission slip to speak — the First Amendment is his permission slip," said Harrison Rosenthal, an attorney for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment nonprofit that filed the lawsuits on Gray's behalf. "Speaking out in public areas is a core First Amendment right, whether government officials recognize it or not."
Since 2011, Jeff Gray has uploaded videos of himself engaging in what he calls "civil rights investigations" in cities across the southeastern United States. In these videos, Gray peacefully tests whether local law enforcement will respect his constitutional rights—often by holding a cardboard sign with a message about homeless veterans or recording police during routine traffic stops. Frequently, his efforts result in arrests, "I've been arrested at least eight or nine times," Gray tells Reason. "What I've learned from these investigations is that if they think that you're a homeless person, they don't treat you as an equal human. They treat you as less than human."
In January 2022, Gray was harassed by Alpharetta police as he stood outside city hall holding a sign that read "God Bless Homeless Vets." Video footage released by FIRE shows Gray peacefully standing with the sign, occasionally saying "God bless the homeless veterans" to passersby. But Gray was soon interrupted. According to the lawsuit, a city councilman told Gray there was "no panhandling here" and directed a nearby police officer, Arick Furr, to order Gray to leave the area.
When Gray refused to leave, Furr demanded Gray's identification. According to the lawsuit, "Gray declined and asked Lt. Furr to describe the 'reasonable, articulable suspicion that crime is afoot,' to justify his demand that Gray show him an identification card." Furr responded by again telling Gray that "panhandling" is illegal in the city, adding "I'm not going to deal with you," before handcuffing Gray. Making matters worse, Furr turned off Gray's camera despite his objections. According to the lawsuit, in a later disciplinary report, Furr conceded that he "knew that he should not have manipulated the camera and should have allowed the camera to continue to record."
Another officer, Harold Shoffeitt, soon joined Furr. The pair, after attempting to interrogate Gray, eventually released him. However, Furr created a "CRIMINAL TRESPASS WARNING" against Gray ordering him not to return to the area for one year.
Gray also faced police harassment in the small town of Blackshear. According to that lawsuit, Gray was engaged in a similar demonstration in August 2021 when he was stopped by the local police chief, who told Gray that he could protest only if he first obtained a permit, adding that the law was "kind of silly, but that's what the rules are." Gray refused to leave and was issued a criminal citation for violating the local ordinance, though the citation was later dropped.
In the lawsuits against both cities, FIRE challenges a local law. In the case of Alpharetta, the suit claims that the city's anti-panhandling law is overly broad and a content-based restriction on speech, arguing that simply asking others for money in a public space is clearly protected by the First Amendment. And even if the law were constitutional, the law would not apply to Gray, because he was not panhandling.
In the suit against Blackshear, FIRE argues that the city's law requiring formal permission to protest is also clearly unconstitutional, writing that "the public parks, streets, and sidewalks of the City of Blackshear, including the sidewalks in front of Blackshear City Hall, are traditional public fora, immemorially held in trust for the use of the public to communicate thoughts or discuss public questions."
In addition to other claims, the lawsuit against Alpharetta also singles out Furr and Shoffeitt for retaliating against Gray for engaging in First Amendment–protected speech, illegally compelling him to identify himself, and interfering with this right to film police activity.
"I have been harassed, trespassed, handcuffed and arrested countless times for peacefully exercising my First Amendment rights," Gray said in a Monday press release. "My intention is to ensure that all Americans from the wealthiest millionaire to the poorest homeless person can exercise these rights without fear of consequence from our government."
With these lawsuits, FIRE hopes "that cities will take a look at their ordinances and their statutes and their regulations and dust off old dusty law books and make sure there's nothing unconstitutional lingering in there," FIRE Attorney Adam Steinbaugh tells Reason. "If you have an old law that's just sitting around and it's unconstitutional, sooner or later, a police officer's going to pick up that book and throw it at somebody."
The post Police Harassed a Man Holding a 'God Bless the Homeless Vets' Sign. He's Suing. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Geraldine Tyler is a 94-year-old woman spending the twilight of her life in retirement, as 94-year-olds typically do. But there isn't much that's typical about it.
Tyler has spent the last several years fighting the government from an assisted living facility after falling $2,300 behind on her property taxes. No one disputes that she owed a debt. What is in dispute is if the government acted constitutionally when, to collect that debt, it seized her home, sold it, and kept the profit.
If that sounds like robbery, it's because, in some sense, it is. But it's currently legal in at least 12 states across the country, so long as the government is doing the robbing.
In 2010, Tyler moved out of her Minneapolis condo, which she owned, in response to a series of local incidents that made her feel unsafe. That included a nearby shooting. She relocated to an apartment in a different neighborhood but struggled to afford both her rent and the property taxes on her condo, accruing that $2,300 sum.
The vast majority of what Tyler ended up owing, however, was not the property tax itself. It was the additional $13,000 in penalties, interests, and fees added by the government, upping her total to about $15,000—more than a 550 percent increase.
She didn't have the $2,300, much less the $15,000. So the state foreclosed on the condo and sold it to satisfy the debt. That's to be expected. What Tyler didn't expect: After selling the property for $40,000, the government pocketed the remaining $25,000 instead of putting it back in Tyler's hands. This despite no party claiming she owed anywhere near a $40,000 debt.
What the state took had little to do with the amount of debt itself. Had Tyler's condo been valued at, say, $300,000, it would have proceeded the same way. The government would have just been quite a bit richer.
Which is what happened to Tawanda Hall of Oakland County, Michigan, when she, too, accrued a property tax debt. Hall, who lived in the house with her husband and children, set up a payment plan with the local authorities. She eventually fell $900 behind schedule. The total bill—after penalties, interests, and fees—came out to $22,642.
Not unlike Tyler, the government then seized the home, sold it to collect the debt, and kept the profit. Unlike Tyler, the Halls' home was worth more than $300,000.
The state kept the change. It totaled more than $286,000.
What also sets Tyler and Hall apart is that they've had different fortunes in front of federal judges. But that may change for victims of home equity theft everywhere as one received notice on Friday that she will get to make her case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.
It is standard practice for governments to seize properties whose owners fail to pay their taxes. People at city council meetings across the U.S. will debate just how much those taxes should be—they vary widely—or how much local treasury departments should be tacking on in interests and penalties for those who fall behind.
But neither Tyler nor Hall have argued against such a taking.
"We agree that the government can seize the property to collect a debt," says Christina M. Martin, a senior attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation who has represented both women. "What it can't do is take more than it's owed."
Whether or not you'll meet such a fate, should you fall behind on your taxes, depends on where you live. Among the states that allow home equity theft—when the government not only satisfies the debt but also keeps the profit—are Oregon, Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota, Minnesota, Illinois, Alabama, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Maine. That list used to be longer. Several states have abolished it.
But the process by which the government steals home equity also looks different in those states that permit it. "In Nebraska…people are shocked about how the law actually operates," says Jennifer Gaughan, chief of legal strategy at Legal Aid of Nebraska, which has represented clients similarly situated to Tyler and Hall. In that state, people who fall behind on their property taxes are bought out, without their knowledge, by private investors. They receive no correspondence.
That changes after three years go by, when they finally get notice in the mail. Included in that letter is that they have 90 days to satisfy the tax burden, the 14 percent interest, and additional fees. It's a Herculean task for individuals and families to accomplish when considering they were struggling to pay the original debt, much less a multiyear accumulation and the associated penalties. If they fail to pay within the short period, the county treasurer gives the deed to the private investor, who then takes the home, sells it, and keeps the change.
Nebraska isn't the only state with an unsavory public-private partnership, which is a distinguishing factor in how states execute home equity theft. Arizona and Illinois, for example, operate similarly, allowing investment companies to do the government's work for them. The prize is someone's home equity. That's contrasted with states like Minnesota, where Tyler lives, which sees stolen equity deposited into government coffers.
"It's usually elderly people…people who own their homes outright who don't have a mortgage, and there's usually some kind of intervening situation," says Gaughan. "It's not just poverty. It's illness, or something happens in their lives….And then they don't have notice of it. And then [the home] is being taken."
In other words, home equity theft targets the most vulnerable people simply by the nature of how it operates. If you fall behind on your taxes, then it stands to reason that you are low-income, or dealing with a life-altering event, or both. Someone unable to pay a tax debt is unlikely to be able to pay that same debt plus the litany of fines and fees that expand it multiple times over. And someone in such a situation will be even more crippled when their last remaining asset is taken from them—their house—and the profits kept. If you didn't have enough money in the bank to pay your taxes, then you probably don't have enough money in the bank to buy a new house.
"I had one person tell me they were suicidal because they lost everything they worked for," says Martin. "It's hard enough to lose your home, but when you lose all your life savings, that's just beyond devastating. It's completely shocking. It often destroys people."
At the core of home equity theft cases is the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. "Nor shall private property be taken for public use," it reads, "without just compensation." It would seem fairly straightforward.
It has not been.
Tyler's case arrived before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in October 2021. The question before the judges: Was it constitutional when the government seized the 94-year-old's Minnesota condo valued at $93,000, sold it for about half of that, and then kept every last cent, all to satisfy a $15,000 debt?
The answer they arrived at was yes. "Where state law recognizes no property interest in surplus proceeds from a tax foreclosure-sale conducted after adequate notice to the owner," wrote Judge Steven Colloton, "there is no unconstitutional taking."
In other words, according to the 8th Circuit, Tyler—and the many people also in her shoes—simply have no recourse when the government profits off of their poverty. "In every other debt collection context, the debt collector is only allowed to take what is owed, plus the cost of collecting the debt. But here, the government gets to tack on penalties, interests, fees, and then they get to take everything that's left over after that?" asks Martin. "That can't be right."
Maybe it can't be. Hall—the Michigan resident who saw almost $300,000 taken from her in excess—also sued. She wishes it didn't have to go that far. "[I was] running around trying to find out who can I talk to, what can I do to stop this from happening?" Hall tells Reason. "There was really no one there to work with us or help us or even tell us what route to go." Her case fed into the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, and she was joined by seven other parties who had also met that grisly fate. Would the judges rule similarly?
They did not, and their opinion spared no prisoners. "The Michigan statute is not only self-dealing: it is also an aberration from some 300 years of decisions by English and American courts, which barred precisely the action that Oakland County took here," wrote Judge Raymond Kethledge. "The government may not decline to recognize long-established interests in property as a device to take them."
Hall was lucky, although that word feels perverse here. The court ruled that her suit had been prematurely dismissed, and it resuscitated her claim. But she still has to go before a trial court and win to get her six figures in equity back. "We all have problems sometimes and fall behind," Hall says. "To take someone's home…to have them homeless because of a little late payment I think is unfair."
There are some things she cannot get back, however. Her husband, Prentiss, had pneumonia when they lost their home. He rushed back to his job after the government took the entire value of their house—depriving them of their life savings, in other words—though he was still too sick to be there. At work, he fell on his head, sustained a severe brain injury, and died.
For the last several years, it has been unclear if Tyler will see an end to her case or if her legal challenge—with the bureaucratic hurdles that prolong such disputes for years—will outlive the 94-year-old.
She got closer on Friday, when the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear her appeal, giving the highest rung of the judiciary the opportunity to end home equity theft for everyone.
"This case identifies a pressing national problem that has festered for decades in the lower courts," reads her petition. "This Court should put the controversy to rest."
Tyler is not alone in her challenge. She has attracted the support of advocates of diverse professional affiliations and backgrounds. Those who have filed briefs in support of her include the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, the Wisconsin Realtors Association, AARP and the AARP Foundation, the Buckeye Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Cato Institute, among others. There aren't many things that unite people these days. Perhaps outright government theft meets that bar.
"We're not asking for anything unusual here," says Martin, who will be arguing the case in front of the high court. "We're asking that the government not [receive] self-dealing, preferential treatment that allows them to just take a massive windfall, usually at the expense of the most vulnerable people."
Should Tyler win, it would be a fitting metaphor for justice: a 94-year-old woman who had everything taken from her and who, in the last big fight of her life, toppled that giant.
The post They Fell Behind on Their Property Taxes. So the Government Sold Their Homes—and Kept the Profits. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Like many cities on the West Coast, Redding, California, is experiencing a homelessness crisis. And, like too many cities around the country—as I detail in my book and have highlighted in many columns over the years—officials appear to have determined the problem can be best dealt with by making it difficult or impossible to share food with people in need.
Homelessness in Redding is a challenge city residents have recognized and organized to address. Last summer, for example, a group of "regular guys" in Redding partnered with a local taco truck to offer free lunches to those in need. More recently, an obituary for a charitable local resident highlighted her compassionate history of sharing homemade coffee and sandwiches with hungry residents.
Many of Redding's homeless have come to rely on meals shared by another group in the city. That loosely organized group of charitable individuals, which a KRCR report this past summer notes, is not affiliated with any religious organization or government entity. Every Saturday for the last three years, its members have provided free meals from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. to more than 150 people in Redding's Martin Luther King Park. The volunteers provide those in need with everything from haircuts to homemade meals that they can eat on-site and or take with them.
"Every Saturday morning, the Martin Luther King Jr. Park in central Redding is transformed into a public, popup potluck banquet," local outlet A News Café reported last week. "Although the meals are free to anyone who shows up, the intended honored guests are the unhoused, the hungry, the at-risk, the struggling, the poor, the weather-beaten and the lonely." Donated meals often feature "homecooked dishes prepared by volunteers in their own kitchens," the station reports. Volunteers abounded in the park—and included local politicians fishing for votes.
Recently, one volunteer approached the city, asking if it might be possible for Redding officials to provide volunteers with keys to unlock the park's restrooms (so they can be used by those giving and receiving services) and electric outlets (so volunteers could prepare some food on site). Those simple requests, detailed by A News Café's Doni Chamberlain in an excellent piece on the crackdown, opened a Pandora's box of red tape. Redding officials soon informed the group that it could no longer share freshly made food without jumping through a number of cruel and unnecessary hurdles.
"The requests for restroom keys and outlet access triggered official knowledge of the meals in the MLK Park," Chamberlain explains. "Therefore, the city couldn't feign ignorance about the potlucks in the park, or turn a blind eye, or un-ring the bell of information. Suddenly, potlucks in the park were in the city's crosshairs."
Redding city government aimed and fired.
"The immediate order: no more potlucks in the park, because what the volunteers were doing was against a host of food-handling safety regulations," Chamberlain writes. "For starters, if the group wanted to continue feeding people at the MLK Park, they'd need a crowd permit and a food permit."
The "food permit" requirement would mean any meals volunteers wish to donate must be prepared in a (costly) commercial kitchen.
Monique Welin, one of the founders of the charitable feeding operation in Redding, tells Chamberlain the group is optimistic it can navigate the new red tape and continue ultimately to feed those in need. Welin says she hopes someone can donate a food truck to the group so they can prepare food in the park. While donating a commercial kitchen on wheels would no doubt be perfect, that perfect is the enemy of all the good Welin's group has been doing for the last three years.
Though it's not clear yet if the Redding group will have to fight the city to continue their feeding operations—or even if they would be willing to do so—other cities and towns that have senselessly targeted people sharing food with those in need are increasingly facing such pushback. For example, a volunteer organizer in Oshawa, Ontario—a Toronto suburb—was fined recently (nearly $200) for sharing food with those in need. A woman in Arizona was arrested for doing the same last year. But those women are fighting back. Ashley Wickett is fighting the ticket she received under the Oshawa ban. At the same time, 78-year-old Bullhead City, Arizona, resident Norma Thornton, represented by the Institute for Justice, sued the city over its ban in October.
There's no shortage of people in need these days. Neither is there a shortage of good Samaritans volunteering to help hungry neighbors. Though there are no easy solutions to homelessness, prohibiting people from sharing food with those in need won't make the problem go away and unnecessarily infringes on the rights of the homeless and those who want to help them.
The post Redding, California, Uses Public Health Red Tape to Ban Sharing Food with Homeless appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Some people live together by choice. Others share space out of necessity. Lack of affordable housing forces many families to adjust, but the zoning police remain rigid in Cobb County, Georgia.
Even during a nationwide housing crisis, code enforcers northwest of Atlanta continue to enforce a narrow vision of suburbia. One rule limits overnight parking based on property size. Families can have one car for every 390 square feet of living space, which effectively prevents more than two vehicle owners from living together in a 1,000-square-foot unit.
Teen drivers are out of luck. So are adult children, college students, mothers-in-law, and any guest who stays longer than one week. The city does not concern itself with individual circumstances, nor does it care if vehicles remain in good condition with current tags. It counts newer models and clunkers the same.
Cobb County resident Austin Childs calls the policy discriminatory in a change.org petition. "This code disproportionately affects lower income families," he writes. "Many young people are living at home longer than ever before due to the insane cost of living. Help me get this law changed."
While he waits for signatures, the zoning police in other jurisdictions are moving forward with rigid rules of their own that also punish lower-income families disproportionately. Common restrictions include occupancy caps, prohibitions on multifamily housing, and building height limits. Officials in Shawnee, Kansas, even criminalize roommates: A 2022 ordinance makes it illegal for friends to split rent in single-family residential zones.
Besides being elitist and cruel, policies like these are unconstitutional. The Institute for Justice, where we both work, represents three clients who recently fought back with separate lawsuits.
The first case is unfolding in Calhoun, Georgia, where officials told Cindy Tucker in 2021 that her nonprofit organization, Tiny House Hand Up, could not build 600-square-foot homes on its own land. City zoning laws only allow the construction of larger houses.
The second case involves a tiny home on wheels. Officials in Meridian, Idaho, evicted Chasidy Decker in 2022 after she rented a spot with recreational-vehicle hookups next to her landlord's home in a neighborhood with similar units nearby. Zoning officials would rather have Decker on the street than living in her professionally built, 252-square-foot residence.
Meanwhile, Seattle officials invited a constitutional challenge when they restricted affordable housing construction in 2019. Ironically, the city dubs its initiative the "Mandatory Housing Affordability Program." The misguided effort does the opposite by placing special burdens on anyone building in certain zones. One victim is Anita Adams, who wants to add an extension on her Seattle home to accommodate family members. To get a building permit, she either would need to construct additional "affordable" housing units or pay nearly $75,000 into the program. Both options are dealbreakers.
All of these cases highlight something that affordable housing advocates have long understood: Multiple factors contribute to housing shortages, but the root of the problem is a lack of concern for property rights.
Rigid and discriminatory zoning ordinances, which tell people what they can and cannot do on their own land, have driven up prices and reduced housing options for decades. Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden all came to the same conclusion.
So did the petition signers who want to overturn Cobb County's parking rule. "This code discriminates against multi-generational households which are becoming ever more common due to the state of the housing market," one man writes.
Another petition signer frames the issue more broadly: "The county shouldn't be able to tell me how many anythings I can own… especially based on my square footage."
Zoning officials shrug off such concerns, often without explanation. When they defend their positions at all, they often point to subjective goals like protecting the "character of the neighborhood" and conserving property values.
Using justifications like these, zoning police meddle in nearly all aspects of daily life. Code enforcers have tried to stop residents from planting vegetable gardens, having front-yard barbecues, and stacking firewood next to side-yard fences.
Officials in Pagedale, Missouri, even fined residents for having mismatched curtains. And officials in Lakeway, Texas, tried to shut down a home-based day care after golfers complained about seeing play equipment behind a backyard fence near the eighth hole.
Enough is enough. Unless zoning police have good reasons, they should stay out of people's living rooms, yards, and driveways. Finding affordable housing is hard enough without the intrusion.
The post Zoning Police Continue To Find New Ways To Punish the Poor appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The pandemic didn't produce many more homeless people, but it made a lot of them worse off.
That's the major takeaway from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) latest annual report on the country's homeless population. The data released today shows that homelessness stayed effectively flat over the past two years, but the people who are homeless are more likely to be living on the streets (as opposed to in shelters or transitional housing.)
Overall, 582,462 people in the country lacked permanent housing in 2022. That's a small 0.3 percent increase from the last comprehensive count in 2020 when 580,446 people met the federal government's definition of homeless.
That slight uptick masks a more troubling 3.4 percent increase in unsheltered homelessness reported between 2020 and 2022. This year, an estimated 233,832 people are living on America's streets, in abandoned housing, or in other areas not fit for human habitation.
Worse still, the number of chronically homeless people—defined as someone with a disability or who's been homeless for at least a year within the past three years—increased 16 percent during the past two years to 127,705 individuals.
This latest HUD report is the first to collect comprehensive data on how many people were sleeping on the streets during the pandemic.
Typically, federally funded Continuum of Care (COC) organizations perform yearly point-in-time counts of the unsheltered homeless in late January by sending out teams of volunteers to literally count people sleeping on the streets.
But in 2021, HUD waived the requirement that COCs perform full point-in-counts of the unsheltered homeless people out of social distancing concerns. That left a big hole in the data.
We do know that a lot of shelters slashed capacity in 2020 out of the desire to accommodate social distancing. The shelter system's "decompression" sent thousands of shelter residents out on the street. Other residents voluntarily vacated shelters for fear of catching COVID.
On the flip side, billions in emergency COVID funding was spent converting motel and hotel rooms into "voucher beds" for the homeless. But neither shelter beds lost to social distancing nor hotel-to-shelter conversions were reliably reported to HUD in 2021, clouding the data even more.
Top line figures in today's HUD report show that the overall number of shelter beds (including "voucher beds") increased by some 29,000 from 2020 to 2022. That wasn't enough to stop the overall 7,752-person increase in the unsheltered homeless population.
The news isn't all bad. The number of homeless families declined by 5.5 percent. Veteran homelessness is down 11 percent.
The HUD report and accompanying Biden administration media releases credit the American Rescue Plan's inclusion of emergency rental aid and homelessness funding as well as the extension of the federal eviction moratorium for suppressing the increase in homelessness.
There's likely some truth to that. Moratoriums and rental aid meant fewer people missed rent payments and/or were evicted. That stopped some people from ending up homeless.
Still, evictions remained well below historic averages for months after eviction moratoriums at the federal, state, and/or local levels were lifted or struck down by courts. That's even true of places that were quite slow to disperse federal emergency rental assistance.
The hot rental market of 2022 has done more to push up eviction filings and resulting homelessness, something the HUD report acknowledges. That hot rental market in turn is a product of a lack of housing supply across much of the country. The U.S. has an estimated housing shortage of some 4 million homes.
On a national level, there's also a shortage of shelter beds and housing. HUD reports that there are only 418,642 beds available in shelters and transitional housing, compared to the 580,000 homeless people.
There are only 348,630 sheltered homeless people, suggesting there is significant spare shelter capacity out there. Still, even if all unsheltered homeless were moved inside, there would still be a shortage of beds. New supply is still needed.
Cities like Houston that build a lot of housing and allow a lot of different types of housing to be built have made tremendous progress in housing the homeless.
Cities that make it incredibly hard to build, like Los Angeles, continue to top the charts in terms of the size of their homeless populations. That's in spite of Los Angeles in particular spending a lot of money trying to get people into housing.
And if cities make it hard to build housing generally, you can be sure they make new homeless shelters and supportive housing even more difficult to build. Organizations trying to establish new shelters during the pandemic often were delayed or prevented from doing so by restrictive zoning codes and intransigent local officials
On the heels of the release of the HUD report, the White House announced a new goal of reducing homelessness by 25 percent by 2025.
In setting that goal, it acknowledged the role that limits on housing supply play in driving up homelessness. The White House cited Biden's Housing Supply Action Plan as part of the solution, alongside more federal resources and assistance to local communities.
But the parts of the White House's Supply Action Plan intended to incentivize local zoning reform have been duds thus far. In truth, there's only so much the federal government can do to encourage Los Angeles to be more like Houston.
Seriously reducing homelessness isn't an impossible goal. But the numbers in today's HUD report are a reminder that it's something state and local officials have to do on their own.
The post New HUD Report Shows Steady Pandemic-Era Increase in Unsheltered Homeless Population appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Progressives loves cities, yet refuse to address the degree to which their policies have made urban life a bigger chore than needed. Conservatives depict cities as dystopian hellholes. They delight in highlighting the crime problems, poorly functional school systems, homeless encampments, and other urban problems that seem unsolvable.
The message from the former: We should all live in densely packed urban areas, where we can stroll to cafes and stores and take the bus to work, but we can't (or won't) make the streets safer, the schools better or the transit systems less miserable. The message from the latter: Stay away from cities and hole up in placid but uninteresting suburbs.
There is a third way, of course. It means supporting reform policies that improve life in the city. Like everything these days, the right v. left culture wars have tainted debates about urban governance. Urban policy need not be so partisan—but it becomes that way for obvious reasons. Democrats dominate the politics of virtually every big city and Republicans often dominate the outskirts.
Lefties hector people for wanting to flee. They bloviate about the car culture and try to shut down charter schools. They elect district attorneys who are lackadaisical about prosecuting street crime, pass rent controls that drive up the cost of housing and have never met a tax increase they don't like. They make it inordinately difficult for small businesses to get through the regulatory thicket.
Righties gleefully point to, say, the phone app that helps people navigate the piles of human poop that are an unfortunate reality on San Francisco's homeless-filled streets. They use the laundry list of urban failures as proof that Democrats turn everything they touch into a disaster. They don't seem to care about cities, but use them as a punching bag to highlight their opponents' failures.
It's time to break this impasse. Healthy cities are a boon not just for those who live in them, but for our entire society which benefits from the culture, diversity, and intellectual stimulation that they offer.
Conservatives are right that liberals have controlled our biggest cities for decades and they have become a mess. In the 1950s, Detroit was one of the world's wealthiest cities. By the 1980s, it had turned into the definition of blight. The city even has an agency that knocks down empty houses. Locals joke about the city's rural sprawl—as abandoned neighborhoods become vacant land.
Western cities have fared better than many industrial Midwestern metropolises. Our cities have continued to grow, but recently we've seen that trend reversed. San Francisco remains one of the most beautiful cities in the country, yet it lost 6.3 percent of its population from 2020 to 2021. Los Angeles lost 160,000 residents in 2021. That's largely a function of failed policy. At this rate, our great cities might resemble the Motor City 40 years from now.
What to do? The progressive approach has been to throw money at the myriad problems—housing, transportation, homelessness, crime, and education—but not change any of the ways those public services are provided. That's because progressives generally are hostile to the marketplace and have an inexplicable faith in governments and the unions that control government agencies. Yet union control results in overpriced and lower-quality public services. Union contracts crowd out other services.
In the mid-2000s, Anaheim pioneered an innovative approach. It relaxed zoning laws to promote construction. The city changed the culture within its government agencies to be more "freedom friendly" in its approach to permitting. Although the city later abandoned these goals, the core idea was to let individuals rather than government make more decisions.
Every city needs innovation and competition. School choice enables urban residents to stay in their neighborhoods rather than flee to the suburbs. Transit systems have the hallmarks of any government-run agency. They are dirty, bleak, and increasingly unsafe. Is it any wonder that transit ridership is falling dramatically almost everywhere? The problem isn't transit per se, but how that transit is provided.
The progressive answer is to limit car use and impose "road diets" that boost congestion and try to force people to get out of cars. The alternative answer should be to make transit more appealing by encouraging market alternatives and customer-friendly reforms to the existing public systems. Choice always is better than coercion.
In other examples, community policing can approach crime problems in a more humanitarian and results-oriented way. Cities can reduce regulations and let nonprofits build low-cost housing for the homeless—a far better approach than building $800,000 government-funded units. There are plenty of ideas, almost all of which involve community participation, competition, and market-based alternatives.
If progressives are serious about promoting urban living, they should unite with conservatives who are serious about reforming government services. Our cities can remain great places, but it means breaking out of our self-defeating partisan rut.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
The post Politics Is Getting in the Way of What Makes Cities Great appeared first on Reason.com.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie dig into the release of the Twitter Files by journalist Matt Taibbi and CEO Elon Musk.
1:32: The Twitter Files drop
33:48: Weekly Listener Question:
Here in my hometown of NYC (where apparently the carpetbagger Gillespie has chosen to make his home), just earlier today, the Adams administration stated its intention to increase involuntary hospitalizations for homeless individuals suffering from severe mental illness. Essentially, they are seeking to expand the interpretation of the legal standard from hospitalizing those who are likely to cause "serious harm" to themselves or others to those "whose mental illness prevents them from meeting their basic survival needs of food, clothing, shelter, or medical care." Notwithstanding the legitimate concerns over "the state" and "involuntary hospitalizations" appearing in the same sentence, or nightmare scenarios about who may be labeled "unable to meet their basic needs" (perhaps someone consuming a large soda?), would the Roundtable care to weigh in on where the line may be here? At what point, if ever, should the state involuntarily hospitalize and/or medicate someone to protect themselves or those around them?
52:41: This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi Reveal Why Twitter Censored the Hunter Biden Laptop Story," by Robby Soave
"Twitter Is More Like a Traveling Circus Than a Public Square," by Steven Greenhut
"Twitter Quits the Biden Administration's Ham-Handed Crusade Against COVID-19 'Misinformation'," by Jacob Sullum
"Eric Adams' Plan To Involuntarily Hospitalize Mentally Ill Homeless People Will Face Legal Challenges," by C.J. Ciaramella
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsor:
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post What Twitter's Suppression of the Hunter Biden Laptop Story Tells Us About the Media appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced Tuesday that he is directing police and other first responders to remove people with severe mental illness from the city's streets for involuntary psychiatric evaluations and hospitalizations, but the new policy will almost certainly face legal challenges from civil liberties groups, who say it tramples on well-established constitutional rights.
In remarks yesterday, Adams, who has also ordered aggressive clearings of homeless encampments in the city, characterized the new policy as a way to ensure mentally ill people on the streets receive compassionate care.
"The man standing all day on the street across from the building he was evicted from 25 years ago waiting to be let in; the shadow boxer on the street corner in Midtown, mumbling to himself as he jabs at an invisible adversary; the unresponsive man unable to get off the train at the end of the line without assistance from our mobile crisis team: These New Yorkers and hundreds of others like them are in urgent need of treatment and often refuse it when offered," Adams said.
Adams' policy directive states that, "If the circumstances support an objectively reasonable basis to conclude that the person appears to have a mental illness and cannot support their basic human needs to an extent that causes them harm, they may be removed for an evaluation."
The policy relies on an expanded interpretation of New York's mental health laws, which allow judges to compel someone with serious mental illness to take medication or undergo supervised psychiatric treatment if two physicians determine that the person's mental illness is "likely to result in serious harm to himself or others."
"The common misunderstanding persists that we cannot provide involuntary assistance unless the person is violent," Adams said. "Going forward, we will make every effort to assist those who are suffering from mental illness."
However, New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) Executive Director Donna Lieberman said in a press release that Adams proposed expansion is "likely to violate" state and federal constitutional limits on when people with mental illness can be involuntarily committed.
"The Mayor is playing fast and loose with the legal rights of New Yorkers and is not dedicating the resources necessary to address the mental health crises that affect our communities," Lieberman said.
Adams' policy directive itself notes that "case law does not provide extensive guidance regarding removals for mental health evaluations based on short interactions in the field."
The Supreme Court ruled in the landmark 1975 case O'Connor v. Donaldson that mental illness alone is not a justification for indefinite custodial confinement, and that "a State cannot confine, without more, a nondangerous individual who is capable of surviving safely in freedom by himself or with the help of willing and responsible family members or friends."
"May the State fence in the harmless mentally ill solely to save its citizens from exposure to those whose ways are different?" Justice Potter Stewart wrote in the Court's majority opinion. "Mere public intolerance or animosity cannot constitutionally justify the deprivation of a person's liberty interest."
Since the ruling in O'Connor v. Donaldson, most state's laws surrounding involuntary psychiatric evaluations and commitments require that the person be a danger to themselves or others. Adams is also calling on the state legislature to amend New York's involuntary commitment law, Kendra's Law, to clarify that "likely to result in serious harm" encompasses basic survival needs such as shelter and food.
Such a change could have broad implications for homeless and disability rights, and give the state much more power to confine people against their will.
The NYCLU already opposes Kendra's Law in its current form. The organization argues the law unconstitutionally expanded the circumstances under which the state can compel people against their will to undergo mental health treatment.
Civil liberties advocates are also worried that police are not qualified to determine on the spot when someone is mentally ill and unable to care for themselves.
"I'm also concerned about when someone out on the street, a police officer makes the determination that someone because they smell, because they haven't had a shower for weeks, because their clothes are disheveled, they're mumbling to themselves. That in and of itself doesn't mean that you're a danger to yourself or others, or even under the watered-down standard that it means that you're likely to result in serious harm to yourself or others," civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel told Gothamist.
The potential for police abuse is not hypothetical; it's happened before. In 2009, NYPD officers raided the apartment of fellow officer Adrian Schoolcraft after Schoolcraft blew the whistle on illegal quotas in his precinct. Schoolcraft's brothers in blue then had him involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward for six days. They also made a challenge coin celebrating their handiwork, which depicted Schoolcraft as a squealing rat in a straitjacket being hauled off in the back of an ambulance.
The only likely delay in a legal challenge to Adams' new policy will be the time it takes advocacy groups to find a client affected by it, and they won't have to wait long.
The post Eric Adams' Plan To Involuntarily Hospitalize Mentally Ill Homeless People Will Face Legal Challenges appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Earlier this month, a federal appeals court upheld a St. Louis ban on sharing "potentially hazardous" foods with the homeless and less fortunate, Courthouse News reports. The ban was challenged by Pastor Raymond Redlich and a colleague, who believe they have both a duty and a right to provide food to people in need.
The suit grew out of a Halloween 2018 incident in which police ticketed Redlich and Christopher Ohnimus, both employees of New Life Evangelical Center in St. Louis, and ordered them to appear in court for handing out bologna sandwiches to homeless people. The citation alleged the pair was "'operating [without a] permit,' and that probable cause for arrest existed for 'operating prepared food [without] proper permits.'"
While the city later agreed not to prosecute the pair, Redlich and Ohnimus sued anyways to protect their right to continue sharing food with those in need. They allege the city ban violates their rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments—including their freedom of religion, expression, and association.
Last year, the U.S. District Court in St. Louis ruled in favor of the city. This month, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court ruling, holding "government regulation of 'inherently expressive' conduct—such as distributing sandwiches to the homeless—does not necessarily violate the First Amendment if the regulation furthers 'an important or substantial government interest' unrelated to the suppression of free expression."
"Some might think that the suit is a lot of baloney, but it… raises interesting issues," St. Louis city attorney Julian Bush told St. Louis Today in 2019, shortly after the lawsuit was filed against the city.
The lawsuit is not baloney at all. But the St. Louis ordinance—and the courts' deference to it and those enforcing it—are pure hogwash.
The ordinance contains several absurd requirements that do not pertain to and should not apply to people donating food to needy people. For example, as the ruling details, the ordinance (which has been amended since 2018) requires a person to provide a 48-hour notice to the city related to their "event;" mandates the purchase of a $50 temporary food-service permit to distribute potentially hazardous foods; and requires the presence of a handwashing station, potable water, and "food-grade washtubs." All this to hand out some sandwiches?
Alas, the ordinance also hates sandwiches. Most of them, at least. It prohibits the serving of any sandwiches that contain meat, poultry, eggs, or fish, citing food-safety justifications. But the same ordinance allows the serving of potentially hazardous foods "requiring limited preparation, such as hamburgers and frankfurters," apparently because those foods "only require seasoning and cooking." (Note: a bologna sandwich requires neither cooking nor seasoning.) Apparently, St. Louis and the Eighth Circuit believe "sandwiches containing MEAT, POULTRY, EGGS, or FISH" are less likely to cause foodborne illness than hamburgers and hot dogs, which are, after all, "sandwiches containing MEAT."
If that makes little or no sense, then chew on this excerpt from the Eighth Circuit's ruling:
It is an imminently reasonable proposition that a municipality has a substantial interest in preventing the spread of illness or disease among its citizens, including its homeless population. And the evidence before the district court belies Appellants' claim that the City failed to make an adequate showing with respect to the interest served by the Ordinance. The City introduced evidence that it has traced incidents of illness among its homeless population to illegally distributed food dating back to 2012.
Beyond taking liberties with the English language (using "imminently" in place of "eminently"), it appears the Eighth Circuit did nothing more than take the government and its "evidence" at their word. (That's particularly maddening for many reasons, not the least of which is that an appellate court hearing a case brought to it after a lower court grants summary judgment is required to do much the opposite.)
Now, about that "evidence." The Eighth Circuit relied on reports of purported cases of foodborne illness among the homeless in St. Louis that the city says it traced to "illegally distributed food dating back to 2012." But exhibits in the case show those "cases" involve a former police officer who appears to have a preternatural ability to diagnose cases and causes of foodborne illness among St. Louis's homeless population.
In an August 2012 email titled "Parking Problems in Downtown West," which focuses mainly on parking and noise complaints, former St. Louis police officer Kenneth Kegel referenced the existence of "complaints" from unnamed "residents that on weekends, groups are coming downtown and providing food to the homeless." Kegel also referred in the email to "occasions where individuals have gotten sick as a result of the provided food."
That's it. That's the relevant evidence the court relied on. In his email, Kegel does not declare nor imply firsthand knowledge of such foodborne illness cases. Neither does he cite the name of any person or persons who may have such knowledge. Nor does he claim he or any medical professional diagnosed any symptom(s) of foodborne illness—or distinguished any potential sources or causes of such illnesses—something even experts find increasingly challenging.
In other words, the evidence provided to the courts by Kegel is at best, pure speculation that is entirely irrelevant to the immediate case. Even if everything Kegel wrote is 100 percent true, for a court to rely on it isn't just laughable. It's eminently unreasonable and unfair.
When it comes to sharing food with the homeless, such unreasonableness and unfairness aren't confined to St. Louis, as I've detailed many times (including here and here). Even as the ranks of homeless and others in need swell today, senseless bans on sharing food with them persist. Such bans are maddeningly common, as I detail in my book, Biting the Hands that Feed Us: How Fewer, Smarter Laws Would Make Our Food System More Sustainable, citing examples in New York City, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Birmingham, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and elsewhere.
"Sharing food with people who are hungry is one of the most pro-social things imaginable," Freedom Center of Missouri attorney David Roland, who represents Redlich and Ohnimus, told me this week. "Maybe the Eighth Circuit didn't see it that way in this case, but we will continue the fight to make sure that people can freely provide food for the needy."
Continuing the fight, Roland says, means his clients are seeking a re-hearing. Given the righteousness of their case and cause and the courts' shoddy treatment of the plaintiffs, they sure deserve one. And that ain't no bologna.
The post Federal Court Upholds Cruel, Unconstitutional St. Louis Ban on Sharing Food with Homeless appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>One hundred and twenty days in jail, $1,431 in fines and fees, and up to two years of probation. These are the possible punishments a 78-year-old woman recently stared down for feeding the poor.
On March 8, 2022, police arrested Norma Thornton of Bullhead City, Arizona, for violating a city ordinance that criminalizes sharing food in a public park if that sharing is specifically motivated by charity. A former restauranteur, Thornton has spent her retirement years making hot food and doling it out to people in need. But that mission became significantly harder after the cops caught wind of it and broke up her criminal enterprise at the picnic tables in the park.
"I'm not making a big impact. It's not that much," she says in a recent video filmed about her case. "But at least some people have enough food to survive."
Before taking Thornton into custody, an officer can be heard on his body camera footage saying that the impending arrest was going to be "a PR nightmare." He was not wrong. The local press made Thornton's story a front page one, ultimately prompting the government to drop the charges but with the caveat that it would move to jail her should she have the audacity to reinvigorate the project.
So Thornton is suing, alleging the ordinance violates her right to equal protection, her right to due process, and her privileges and immunities of citizenship. She is not seeking financial damages but rather the right to continue giving out food to those who are hungry.
"It violates her fundamental right to assist people who she encounters in need," says Suranjan Sen, an attorney at the Institute for Justice, who is representing Thornton. "From the very beginning of this country, through the Underground Railroad to the Great Depression and beyond…this country grew and prospered because of people working to help each other out in private acts of charity."
Bullhead City's ordinance does have some exceptions. And it's those very exceptions that may render it unconstitutional. You may share food in the park, so long as it's not with the needy: Passing around food among friends is legal, for example, but it crosses over into unacceptable territory when it is given to those who cannot otherwise afford it. In practice, homeless people have been targeted by the cops for giving food to each other, because the metric by which police enforce the law is by keeping an eye out for folks who appear to be poor. Should a homeless person pass as otherwise, then it's likely he or she would be able to circumvent criminal enforcement.
This makes sense when considering the spirit of the law, which was passed to incentivize the unhoused to go to a shelter as opposed to seeking help from good Samaritans. But such attempts fail to consider the limitations of the state. As the Institute for Justice notes, Bullhead City's largest shelter has a whopping 46 beds, which are often all taken, and which precludes any remaining people from eating breakfast and dinner there; only lunch is available to those not living at the shelter. In effect, the law assumes that the government is capable of addressing this problem without any partnership with the public it claims to serve. (It's also worth noting that "the unhoused in Bullhead City tend to sleep in the desert," not in the park where Norma distributed food, according to the Institute for Justice.)
The government said that Thornton may continue her operation with a permit. Putting aside the absurdity inherent to that—why should someone need a license to help people?—carrying on with her efforts will not be as easy as they make it seem. She must seek that permit 5–60 days in advance, and the terms limit her charity to one two-hour "event" per month. It is also prohibitively expensive. "She spends half of her monthly income buying food for this to share with people," says Sen. "She doesn't have hundreds of dollars to put down every time she wants to share food. She doesn't have the money to get $1,000,000 in liability insurance coverage every time she wants to share food."
Bullhead City is not the first place to try solving homelessness by criminalizing it. A year ago to the day, I covered the case of Joshua Rohrer, a homeless veteran who was arrested and jailed in Gastonia, North Carolina, for panhandling. (His service dog was tased in the process; the animal was later hit by a car and died.) Such attempts at banning begging and charitable giving are plentiful. A Massachusetts' panhandling ban was deemed unconstitutional in 2020 after the state's highest court questioned its lopsidedness: How can it be legal to ask for money if it goes toward a ticket for a show, for example, but illegal if it goes to help someone without means?
That's not unlike the dilemma faced by Thornton, who wouldn't have been arrested that day had she been sharing food with a wealthier bunch. "We're seeking to establish that you cannot target people for criminal treatment specifically because they perform an act with a charitable motivation," says Sen. "This is a form of illegitimate discrimination."
The post This 78-Year-Old Woman Was Arrested for Feeding the Poor appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>California will soon decriminalize jaywalking, which will do away with enforcement of a policy that critics say allows police to punish pedestrians with needlessly expensive fines, often in racially-motivated ways.
In September, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Freedom To Walk Act, which will decriminalize jaywalking in the state. Critics have long noted that anti-jaywalking laws, which criminalize crossing the street outside of designated crosswalks, often levy harsh fines on pedestrians and do little to increase public safety. They argue those laws give the police a reason to write hefty tickets disproportionately to black and Hispanic pedestrians. California, which pioneered anti-jaywalking statutes, is reversing course—a decision that other states will hopefully replicate.
The Freedom to Walk Act will leave California's anti-jaywalking statutes on the books, but will prevent police from ticketing people who jaywalk safely until 2029. However, the law does not completely eliminate pedestrian safety requirements. After it goes into effect at the start of the new year, police will still be able to ticket individuals who cross the street when a "reasonably careful person would realize that there is a danger of collision." This leaves the door open to uneven enforcement, albeit for an offense involving directly reckless behavior.
Jaywalking tickets can often accumulate and lead to burdensome debts for low-income individuals. Jason Sarris, a formerly homeless man, told The New York Times that his jaywalking tickets and tickets for similar offenses amounted to nearly $5,000 in fines, making it difficult to begin rebuilding his life. "I couldn't afford to pay [the tickets]," Sarris told the Times. "I was well known as a homeless person, and I got targeted."
At least in some localities, low-income and homeless pedestrians do appear to be particularly likely to receive jaywalking tickets. For example, according to a 2019 analysis by The Salt Lake Tribune, two-thirds of Salt Lake City's jaywalking tickets were handed out in a one-block radius of an area known to be a hub of the city's homeless services. In Bakersfield, California, 92 percent of jaywalking citations occurred in low-income census tracts. In 2020, an unarmed homeless man named Kurt Reinhold was fatally shot after an Orange County police officer stopped him for jaywalking, an incident which California Assemblymember Phil Ting (D–San Francisco), who introduced the Freedom To Walk Act, said inspired his law.
Jaywalking tickets also appear to be disproportionately handed out along racial lines in many localities. In San Diego, for example, black pedestrians received 16 percent of all jaywalking tickets between 2015 and 2021, despite making up only 6 percent of the city's population. In New York City, 90 percent of jaywalking tickets written in 2019 were handed out to black and Hispanic pedestrians.
"Jaywalking laws do more than turn an ordinary and logical behavior into a crime," Jared Sanchez, senior policy advocate for CalBike, said in Ting's press release. "They also create opportunities for police to racially profile."
Decriminalizing jaywalking is a commonsense measure that would make it harder for police to single out homeless and minority pedestrians. By embracing reform, California is reaffirming the right to safely cross the street without worrying about hefty fines or police harassment.
The post Decriminalizing Jaywalking in California Will Help Reduce Police Harassment appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>California's state government is coming to the aid of an Anaheim-based nonprofit whose plan to open a group home for formerly homeless women was shot down by the city at the behest of NIMBY neighbors.
It's a case that tests the power of California housing officials to set limits on localities' ability to say no to new housing. Should the state prevail, Anaheim could have to permit far more housing than just group homes.
On Monday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and the state's Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) filed an application to intervene in a lawsuit brought by the nonprofit Grandma's House of Hope against Anaheim in Orange County Superior Court earlier this year. That lawsuit challenged the city's refusal to issue House of Hope a conditional use permit to establish a 15-person group home serving formerly homeless women with mental health disabilities.
"The support and assistance that transitional housing providers like Grandma's House of Hope deliver are essential in addressing California's homelessness crisis and the shortage of housing for people with disabilities," said HCD Director Gustavo Velasquez in a press release. "Cities and counties across the state will be held accountable for attempts to evade fair housing and anti-discrimination laws."
For close to two years now, House of Hope has been locked in a contentious battle with Anaheim city officials and neighborhood opponents over its proposed group home.
Its original plan was to host up to 21 women at an 8-bedroom house in a single-family neighborhood on West Street near Anaheim's downtown. They'd receive therapy and other services from seven House of Hope staff members, several of whom would be on-call 24/7 to respond to emergencies. The plan would be to move these women into permanent housing within 18 months.
It's something House of Hope has succeeded with at its other group homes, including some in Anaheim. The nonprofit reports a 65 percent success rate at placing program participants in permanent housing within 9 to 18 months and has partnered with the Orange County government on various programs over the years.
But their proposal for an additional Anaheim group home proved controversial with a vocal set of nearby residents. They argued their neighborhood was already "oversaturated" with group homes and that adding another one would threaten public safety, strain sewer infrastructure, and overtask emergency services.
At an August 2021 Planning Commission meeting, 36 residents showed up to argue against granting House of Hope the conditional use permit it needed for the group home.
Despite a recommendation from city staff to approve the group home, the commission voted unanimously against the nonprofit's application. Their findings stated that the house would threaten public health and safety.
A similar scene occurred at an October public hearing before the Anaheim City Council.
At the hearing, House of Hope founder Je'net Kreitner tried to allay fears that a new group home would become a burden on the neighborhood. She said that House of Hope had agreed to reduce the number of people staying at the home from 21 to 16. Far from just picking people up off the street, she stressed that residents would only be placed in the group home after extensive screening and consenting to psychiatric treatment.
During the hearing, Kreitner held up a phonebook-thick binder that contained House of Hope's contract with the Orange County Health authorities outlining its transitional housing program and "good neighbor" policy as evidence that hers wasn't a fly-by-night operation.
"Our case managers are dedicated to following this by the letter," Kreiter said at that meeting. Anaheim had a growing homeless population that needed to be addressed, she said, adding, "we are trying to do that for you."
This did little to mollify opponents at the city council hearing. They complained that the neighborhood was already oversaturated with "lucrative" businesses like House of Hope. Speakers expressed fears that the formerly homeless women staying at the nonprofit's group house might wander around the neighborhood at night, create traffic through excessive GrubHub orders, and put undue strain on water and sewer infrastructure.
Those arguments proved convincing for the city council, which also voted unanimously to reject House of Hope's application.
All out of administrative options, the group sued the city in January 2022.
In the background of House of Hope's struggle to open its shelter has been a slow-burning dispute between Anaheim and state housing officials about the city's general treatment of transitional housing.
Back in 2013, HCD told Anaheim that its permitting requirements for transitional housing violate a state law requiring local governments to treat transitional housing the same as residential housing in the same district. Since Anaheim doesn't require conditional use permits for single-family homes, the department said it couldn't require them for transitional housing within single-family homes.
The city committed to bringing its transitional housing regulations in line with state law as part of its 2014 Housing Element—a periodic report that cities must produce outlining how they'll meet state-established housing production goals.
But that never ended up happening. Indeed, while House of Hope's doomed permit application was winding through the approval process, the Anaheim Planning Commission endorsed piling even more regulations on transitional housing.
Over the past two years, HCD has also been warning Anaheim in technical assistance letters, phone calls, and in-person meetings that its treatment of House of Hope specifically was illegal and could provoke more serious state intervention.
Anaheim continued to blow off these warnings, however. At most, the city said it would commit to changing its transitional housing regulations as part of its 2023 Housing Element.
Its patience exhausted, HCD, along with Bonta, asked the court earlier this week to let it join House of Hope's lawsuit against Anaheim.
Its lengthy petition repeats complaints that Anaheim is violating state law designed to streamline the approval of transitional housing. By committing to and then failing to remove illegal regulations on transitional housing in its Housing Element, the city is also in violation of the state's Housing Element laws, argues the state. Their application also claims that by shooting down a group home for mentally disabled women specifically, Anaheim is violating state anti-discrimination and fair housing laws.
The state is asking the court to prevent Anaheim from requiring conditional use permits for the House of Hope project or similar projects.
It's also asking the court to declare the city's 2014 Housing Element "not substantially" compliant with state Housing Element law.
That could open the door to even more sweeping state remedies.
Cities without substantially compliant housing elements can lose access to some state funding. The state's "builder's remedy" also prevents cities without compliant housing elements from using their zoning codes to deny housing projects with a certain amount of below-market-rate housing.
If the court declares Anaheim's housing element out of compliance, a developer could theoretically build a project of unlimited density anywhere in the city.
California, for all its housing woes, has many laws on the books intended to boost housing production and put some outer limits on cities' ability to shoot down new development. Until recently, those laws have largely gone unenforced.
That's starting to change, as the fight over the House of Hope shelter illustrates.
Both HCD and the State Attorney General's office have created new units dedicated to enforcing state housing laws. Increasingly, they're using whatever tools those laws give them to override local regulations and get housing built.
In August, the two departments launched an unprecedented audit of NIMBY capital San Francisco's housing policies and practices with the explicit intent of uncovering violations of state housing law.
The message is clear: shooting down individual projects for specious reasons or keeping blatantly illegal regulations on the books isn't going to fly anymore.
The post California A.G. Says Anaheim NIMBYs Can't Block Women's Group Home appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>California may now have a new method for treating the mentally ill and getting the homeless off the streets—even if it is against their will.
The Community Assistance, Recovery, and Empowerment (CARE) Act, was signed into law last month by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. The law creates CARE Courts, a new form of civil mental-health court designed to usher untreated, severely mentally ill individuals into medical treatment and other forms of state support.
While many have lauded the law as an important step toward getting treatment for the most severely mentally ill Californians—many of whom are homeless—civil liberties organizations have expressed concerns about the bill's potential for abuse and the expansion of state power. While some severely mentally ill people certainly need treatment, the potential for coercion is cause for serious concern.
According to the bill text, CARE plans can include mandates to enter "behavioral health care, including stabilization medication, housing, and other enumerated services." Those who do not complete the directives of their CARE plan risk involuntary hospitalization or being placed under a conservatorship.
According to a California Health and Human Services Agency FAQ, the process would work like this: someone in one of several listed positions, including family member, first responder, clinician, and adult protective services, can a petition arguing that an individual meets the requirements for participation in the CARE program.
The requirements are that: the person must be over the age of 18 and currently suffering from severe psychotic mental illness (such as schizophrenia) that is not currently stabilized in voluntary clinical treatment; a CARE plan or agreement would be the least restrictive way to ensure the respondents stability; and the respondent is likely to benefit from such a plan or agreement. Additionally, the person must either be unlikely to "survive safely in the community without supervision and the person's condition is substantially deteriorating," or "the person is in need of services and supports in order to prevent a relapse or deterioration that would be likely to result in grave disability or serious harm to the person or others."
A CARE Court would then review the petition to determine if the respondent meets the criteria for involvement in the CARE program. If there is insufficient evidence that the individual meets necessary criteria, or the respondent voluntarily accepts services, the case is dismissed. If the criteria are met and the respondent declines services, an attorney is appointed to the respondent, and a series of hearings takes place.
If, after the end of these hearings, the court again determines that the respondent does meet CARE criteria, it will order the county behavioral health agency, the respondent's attorney, and a "voluntary supporter" to attempt to persuade the respondent to enter into a CARE agreement, which is a voluntary "settlement" which requires the respondent to enter into certain stabilizing medical care and resources.
If such a voluntary agreement is not reached, the court will order that the respondent be clinically evaluated. During a followup hearing, the respondent will have an opportunity to respond. If the court again finds that the respondent meets the CARE criteria, the court will order that the respondent, their counsel, and the county health agency develop a CARE plan. This plan can stay in place for up to one year, with the possibility of a voluntary one-year extension.
While CARE agreements can provide relief to mentally ill individuals who want help, the coercive nature of CARE plans should give pause to those concerned about the bill's ability to become coercive—and its potential to be overzealously used.
While those brought before CARE courts would receive an attorney, according to the information available from the California Health and Human Services Agency, it is unclear whether a mentally ill person could effectively refuse a CARE plan. Further, while mentally ill individuals are theoretically supposed to collaborate on their CARE plans, it is unknown if they would have meaningful veto power over provisions like mandated medication or hospitalization.
Civil liberties groups, disability rights organizations, and journalists who have been reporting on the issue for years have all expressed opposition to the bill, citing its potential for abuse. The CARE Act "merely create[s] a new legal framework for the same failed approach, making mental illness tantamount to a crime," wrote The Los Angeles Times editorial board in July. "But the only real step forward is Newsom's separate but related commitment to fund thousands of affordable housing units, some of which counties could use to bolster their slim stock of supportive housing." This refers to the California Comeback Plan, a $22 billion program that claims it will create over 84,000 new housing units and "exits from homelessness."
CARE plans, though presented as an alternative to much more restrictive court-ordered guardianships, seem startlingly similar to them. Both systems may strip adults of their rights to make personal decisions, and both have the potential to ensnare individuals who aren't incompetent. "In the worst cases of guardianship abuse, functioning adults are completely stripped of their autonomy: where they live, where they can go…even how and where they will die," wrote C.J. Ciaramella in the May 2022 issue of Reason. "Even with comparatively strong oversight…bad actors, conflicts of interest, and crushing caseloads can undermine those protections."
In addition to civil rights concerns, the CARE Act asks much of county health agencies and other local services, demanding that they massively expand their capacity to provide housing and mental health services. How exactly the state will expand these services with its current staff and resources (and how much the taxpayers will pay for it) is unclear.
Only time will tell if CARE plans are utilized as a last resort solely for individuals who are truly a danger to themselves and others. But there's no reason to think that a system that gives local governments new power to force people off the streets will be immune from abusive coercion and ineffective at solving the actual housing affordability problem.
The post California's 'CARE Court' Won't Help the Homeless appeared first on Reason.com.
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