What is being called for here to adopt as public policy is what is vividly described in the new issue of the quarterly magazine "City Journal", (see our post from October 30 http://parkwayblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/homelessness-in-la.html ) and it’s nightmarish.
City orders homeless to abandon tent city
By Jocelyn Wiener - jwiener@sacbee.com
Published 11:00 pm PST Saturday, November 3, 2007
Residents of an informal tent city that has cropped up on a vacant field along North B Street in recent months are packing up their campsites this weekend, saying city and railroad police have threatened them with citation and loss of their belongings if they do not leave by early Monday morning.
About 60 tents remained in the dusty Union Pacific lot Saturday morning; homeless campers said some of their neighbors already had moved on in search of new sites.
Advocates for the homeless – and the homeless themselves – say enforcement of the city's illegal-camping ordinance is unfair in the face of an affordable housing shortage and inadequate shelters.
"All the shelters have wait lists," said 30-year-old Terri Jennings, who had come to the field with her husband a few days earlier after being run off another spot. "They're hurting more homeless than they're helping out here."
Mark Merin, an attorney who filed a lawsuit in August challenging the city's and county's illegal-camping laws, said Sacramento should consider the example of the city of Los Angeles.
In April 2006, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that citing people for illegal camping when the city was so short on shelter beds amounted to "cruel and unusual punishment." Los Angeles currently has a moratorium on such citations.
Merin said he asked Union Pacific to allow the homeless to stay – and to provide portable toilets.
"If there's no other place for our homeless guests to go, a tent city seems to be a temporary solution," said Sister Libby Fernandez, director of Loaves & Fishes, one of three organizational plaintiffs named in the lawsuit.
