| > If so, find it mind boggling that you could be arrested in America for falling asleep on the pavement/sidewalk!? Yes, but it's a little more complex/subtle than that may make it seem. Some things to consider: * Arrested doesn't mean convicted. A cop may take someone in ("arrest" them) to get them off the streets and give them a night in jail to sober up. Then they get let out without pressing charges. In some cases, this may end up being a net benefit for the person, in others it obviously isn't. Your country probably does the same thing. I assume "drunk tanks" are pretty universal. * Police officers have a lot of discretion on which laws they enforce. There is a downside to this in that it lets them use that discretion in biased ways, but—ignoring that for the moment—it does mean that many times cops are more lenient and compassionate than the law implies that they should be. You rarely hear about those stories on the news but talk to a cop or do a ride-along and you'll see that they spend most of their time not arresting people and instead giving them warnings. * Honolulu has a famously bad homeless problem, while also being heavily dependent on tourism for its economy. There are a lot of "beach bums" that move to Hawaii without any plan to provide for themselves and if Honolulu doesn't do anything about them at all, they can end up harming the place's overall economy, which would then make it harder for the city to afford the services these people need. Doing nothing is not as innocuous as it might seem. * In general, a society must do some enforcement of public spaces. Otherwise, they cease to be public spaces. I live in Seattle which also has a lot of homeless people. Some of them build encampments in public parks. This means that, de facto, those are no longer public parks. They're private property because the public no longer has access to them—the squatters in the encampment will run them off. The name for a place where you can choose to be and no one can kick you out is "private property". If you don't want all of your public spaces to turn into private spaces, then you do have to prevent people from unilaterally privatizing them to some degree. Of course, it's not black and white and there are good discussions to have about where you draw the line. Obviously people need to be able to spend some time in a public space. Is napping OK? Sleeping overnight? In a tent? In a shelter made from pallets and tarps? Many of the laws that draw the line harshly are driven by the observation that when you give a little, some people (not all) will try to take more and more. So it's not so entirely that lawmakers are heartless sadists who don't even want to have to see a homeless person, so much as a fear that if you let someone take a nap, they'll sleep overnight. Let them sleep overnight and they'll build a structure. Let them build a structure and they'll start fires. And at that point, it becomes really hard to keep that place available to the public. It is a hard problem and anyone who thinks it is black and white is choosing to not see all of the complexity. |
One who has no home has fewer options on where to plop with all their things.
Individually, one could analyze each situation, collectively and systemically speaking, you will ALWAYS have homeless people when there is no housing safety net. there are a myriad of things can can occur in individual lives.
Homeless tourism is something that should be worked out between the desirable locations and the locations of origin that likely kick the responsibility can down the road in running homeless OUT of town, and hence to SF or wherever.
Honolulu and beach bummmery is something I've no knowledge of. Actual homelessness is something that doesn't occur much anywhere else I've seen in the world to the same level as it does in USA. I suppose that many places have folks migrating to the city from countryside regions in the hopes of a job and potentially falling on their face. I'm not sure where those folks are in many nations that I've seen (about 50, mostly Europe, South America, Asia, and North America)