If you are in the position to do so. Go buy a tent and give it to a homeless without one.
Do not give tents directly to people in Fremont, near San Francisco. Give them to the charitable organizations, or you may face fines and arrest. The Fremont City Council has decided that homeless people aren’t people, don’t deserve help, and it is a crime to try to help them with any camping supplies.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/fremont-homeless-ban-controversy-20163355.php
Or do it anyway while knowing the risks, and publicize any consequences you face as much as possible. Civil disobedience is highly effective.
Tents are super cheap these days. Chances are if they wanted a tent they could scrounge up enough cash in a day for one. Probably should just give them the cash.
The police keep taking their tents and ripping them up.
Not an American here, why do they do that? Do they not get some kind of backlash from people or smth?
People consider the homeless a public nuisance and ask for the police to remove them.
Basically, there are lot of areas that are technically owned by someone but not really maintained. Little patches of land near gas stations, etc. Or public places like parks or under underpasses. Slowly, you get tent cities that pop up and will be tolerated for a few months, until people start calling the police.
The police are supposed to warn people beforehand to clear out - we all know how much American cops respect procedure and humans rights of course. But after that warning is given, they’ll come through and trash everything. Identification documents, medications, personal photos - they don’t give a shit if they’re tossing out someone’s insulin. The ID being tossed can be especially devastating - if you lose all of you ID documents - how do you prove who you are to get new ones? This is a problem social workers/advocates deal with all the fucking time.
They do but THIN BLUE LINE and BLUE LIVES MATTER. Middle class people are fed a constant stream of fear, homeless people going crazy because drugs and murdering your family is a common trope. So they support the pigs when they engage in their asshole behavior.
Not an American either, but cops do the same in France.
Most of the homeless people who live in tents are immigrants. The government is full of authoritarian racists, and the cops are violent racist bastards who have order to move these people out of the sight of the good citizens. There are videos of cops tearing down tents with cutters and spraying repellent on belongings and mattresses.
Why is there so little reaction? Because most people think it’s a good idea to protect the real estate market where they live. And even when people mobilize (yellow jackets, retirements, Palestine…), they get nothing but police violence.
I’m Canadian, and backlash from who? The homeless people they’re brutalising?
If you’re in a cold area, most tents are just 3 seasons, so not suitable for winter. Ice fishing tents and the like are better options when it’s really cold out.
Better than nothing, though.
Not having an address is a huge hurdle to get a job. There should be laws against it or else it just creates a downward cycle.
In my country it is illegal too. A place of residency is required to get bank accounts and jobs. But we also have some sort of vanity addresses which the social net provides to those without a home. These address are used to receive correspondence and allows homeless people to be official citizens of a town.
Imagine what happens to foster kids who age out. Imagine applying for jobs at 17, knowing that you’ll need to support yourself, and then trying to figure out whether putting down the group home as your “permanent address” is a smart idea or not. (About a third of girls who age out end up pregnant quickly, another third will end up in sex work.)
Something like half of homeless people were in the foster care system. The foster care system in the United States is disgusting - group home positions are poorly paid and unpleasant, which incentivizes the wrong kind of people to want to work in them. “Troubled teens” are vulnerable to all kinds of extra abuse - look up what was happening with cops and kids at the Tulsa juvie last year.
These are people who have never been loved. People who were put through the meat grinder of the human soul that is DHS care, were thrown out on the street and told to figure it out.
When I wrote my statement, I wasn’t even thinking about foster care kids.
Horrifying.
Thank you for the information.
Absolutely agree with you, but, unpopular opinion probably, I also don’t want a lazy ass who can’t or doesn’t want to get a job to be homeless. Like, I don’t care how much of an asshole you are and how many drugs you take and that you don’t care to hold a job, I still want you to have shelter, food, and basic necessities. Let alone kids of these people.
Laws against not having an address? That just (further) criminalizes poverty.
I think they’re saying laws against discrimination for not having an address.
Now that makes a lot more sense than the way they worded it.
Unfortunately not gonna happen under this Reich.
No, reread what they said. Laws against employers requiring an address. Don’t be so quick to assume.
Even reading what they wrote, the context and intent were there, but the way it was written doesn’t align with their intent.
It’s pretty easy to infer what they meant based on context. Provided you’re trying to understand what they mean and not divorcing all intent from the words.
But if I can’t get upset at things someone clearly didn’t mean, why bother going online at all?
Not to brag, but I can get angry without even reading comments these days.
“It” means the huge hurdle. It could have been better, for sure, but it’s fine.
I believe it’s the other way around: laws against the discrimination of people who do not have an address.
I would say: make a law forcing governments to provide a free administrative address on demand where you can get your mail.
I was thinking making it illegal to require an address and use email for communication. Public libraries usually have free WiFi. They can check their emails there. If they do not have their own devices, they can use a public computer.
Why would a physical address be required at all?
No, you see it’s illegal for anyone to sleep under a bridge, not just the poors.
Sadly there are some people who believe that.
