AMERICA’S HOMELESS ENCAMPMENTS
Ronald J. Pawley
September 21, 2019
“Homelessness is like public education - something that for far too long we haven't put the resources or love or attention to.”
Eric Garcetti
America the beautiful is become plagued with so-called Tent Cities; allied along with other unwanted, disgusting negatives like garbage, feces, and so much more - weed-thatched enclosures, paper houses, and great junk piles.
Advocates for tent cities are couching them as simply “semi-permanent settlements of micro-housing.” Ridiculous, according to Ronald J. Pawley. This is not a quick fix.
These homeless encampments are located in many cities both liberal and some conservative. Those cities can be rich and poor, some small, some large.
Tent cities are becoming notable in church parking lots also. Many cities are beginning to attempt to remove tent cities, known as temporary encampments.
Some removal efforts are attained with force, some are responding with more tolerance and some are legalizing these unwanted sites through zoning ordinances.
The scourge of tent cities has some predictable consequences as it attempts to cope with a dramatic rise in the positions of the homeless, and the return of encampments to the streets and open spaces of American cities.
Unfortunately, many tent cities are zones for bare survival as many families fall into the quicksand of an aimless, defeated life.
The thought of tent cities seems unrealistic to the point of being ludicrous to most Americans.
In recent report, it was stated that: for homeless people across America, these circumstances are an ordinary part of daily life. … Homeless people, like all people, must engage in activities such as sleeping or sitting down in order to survive. Yet, in communities across the nation, these harmless, unavoidable behaviors are treated as criminal activity under laws that criminalize homelessness and prohibit panhandling
. The majority of U.S. cities have now passed ordinances making it illegal, in certain areas, to camp, rest, loiter, sit, lie, or loaf in public places, or to share food or sleep in cars. Citywide bans of these activities increased sixty percent in the past five years, the fastest growth since the early 1980s. Another recent study focuses on the criminalization of “efforts to feed people in need.” In Share No More, the National Coalition for the Homeless describes municipal laws that “restrict or eliminate food-sharing” — for instance, by prohibiting individuals or organizations to share food with homeless people without a permit, and by requiring that groups that distribute food meet strict safety regulations. Such laws against sharing food with a destitute person — surely one of the most basic acts of civic compassion — constitute the fastest growing anti-homeless
The new tent cities have been shaped by anti-homeless laws; but their growing ranks are the results as well of a long-term crisis in shelter policy and management.
Are cities and states and the federal government looking for low-cost solutions to such a contentious problem of dismissing homelessness that largely disregards the more fundamental problem of guaranteeing decent housing for our citizens. As such, it’s all too clear that the tent cities, are becoming campsites of social welfare and poverty organization.
