We appreciate the voices on the city council who spoke up in opposition to yesterday's homeless criminalization motion. It has been a long fight to get councilmembers to acknowledge the harm caused by over-policing houseless people.
They questioned the urgency of this motion, and why that same urgency hasn't been present in efforts to house people. They acknowledged that arrests and sweeps make it harder for people to connect to the few services we do have available.
Importantly, they also acknowledged that enforcement strategies have already been tried, and they've consistently failed. We need to put real resources behind programs that work. Stop letting pilot programs languish. Stop focusing on shiny new things and get creative.
We can't keep having this fight. Continuing to push enforcement and criminalization is a distraction from the solutions we actually need. It pits housed and unhoused people against each other, and treats arrests and trauma as a reward for angry neighbors.
City council needs to be honest with the callers who were angry about the consequences of homelessness. Arrests won't get trash off the street, but providing bins and dumpsters will. Arrests won't give anyone access to a bathroom. These are just symptoms of a much bigger failure.
The fundamental problem is that people don't have a home to live in. Until we fix that, everything else is just a mitigation strategy. We can provide street services that acknowledge and address these issues. What we can't do is arrest our way out of it.
We hope the councilmembers who spoke up yesterday will continue to uplift real solutions while opposing motions that punish people for having no place to go.
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