In true American fashion dating all the way back to its founding, you only matter if you own property.

"That includes California, which is home to one-third of the country’s homeless population."

Why do these statements never follow immediately stating that California is also 10% of the ENTIRE country's population and it's where all of the livable weather is if you have no option but to sleep outside. Of course a lot of them are in California. We need a new deal.

In case you ever need led hardproof that America is not a Christian Nation.

Trying to decide if the war is on homelessness or on the homeless. 🤔

Sounds like the solution is for the homeless people to protest by refusing to sleep in shelters, forcing the police to arrest them all, overcrowding the jails and clogging the court system until the entire system grinds to a standstill.

So what do I know, I haven't been homeless in 15 years

Well now this really makes for a trio of facts that paint a horrifying picture:

• Private, for profit prisons exist
• Prison slave labour is legal
• Homelessness can now be made illegal

Guess I should buy some stocks in companies that use prison labour.

Forcing people into shelters or jail is super fucked up. If I decide I want to camp out in a tent and remove myself from the capitalist grind I should be able to do it unmolested. These fucking vampires think they own every grain of sand.

So, where are they supposed to sleep? In a jail cell?

I'm going to misuse a couple of lines from Star Trek: The Next Generation, but I still think they work. Just imagine Q is all homeless people, and not evil, and Worf is SCOTUS:

Q: What do I have to do to convince you that I'm human?

Worf: Die.

For communities that do this, the goal is to...

A) Drive out the homeless so they go to other, more charitable communities, and become someone else's problem, and then...

B) Point out the higher rate of homelessness (and higher taxes necessary to deal with it) in those other communities and say, "Look how awful those communities are!"

I was hoping the ruling was narrow and that nuance would make available solutions to move forward, but no. This is a broad decision that allows criminalizing using a pillow in public (that is part of the law in Grants Pass, which was ruled as acceptable). Justice Sotomayor said it correctly: sleeping is a biological necessity. If you don't have a place to sleep, you have to choose between not living and going to jail.

Oh lord, this is the worst news to come from this week.

If sleeping anywhere for someone without a permanent place to live is allowed to be made illegal, we should have rotating shifts to keep the Court majority awake in their homes so that they will have to flee to Harlan Crow's yacht.

This is really interesting in contrast to where I live in Ontario, Canada. A municipality wanted an injunction to make it crystal clear they could evict a homeless encampment on municipal property. Instead, they got a judgement that doing so would violate those people's Charter rights. This ruling means basically every municipality in the province now legally has to do something about the homelessness crisis.

As I recall, Gavin Newsom has basically been pushing to look at available shelter space, and clear portions of encampments based on that available space. Problem has been, legally, CA couldn’t clear encampments unless it could demonstrate that it had beds for everyone. As a result, CA has a lot of unclaimed shelter beds. Some counties don’t have enough for everyone, but they do have enough to start moving large portions of people inside.

That said, the conversations around this seem to miss one of the fundamental reasons why people are not excited take a shelter bed. Many shelters have been dirty, hostile, or down right unsafe. People have felt safer in tent communities where they could know and chose their neighbors.

I’m of two minds on this. The all or nothing rule on shelter beds was weird, but shelters need to be safe, help people get care, let people keep belongings, and not kick people out every morning at the crack of dawn.

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.

Overall, the dissent is good. But it makes 1 fundamental mistake of constitutional analysis:

The Constitution cannot be evaded by such formalistic distinctions

It's not as if these folks can just go off into the woods and build a cabin. There's no where to go that isn't owned or protected. You gotta sleep somewhere, it's not a choice, people need to sleep.

In Star Trek, there were Sanctuary Districts to herd all the undesirables to in the 2020s.

In reality, we can't even be bothered to do that.

Talk about kicking someone when already down..

Time to camp on SCOTUS lawns.

So. Unless you have permission to be on someone's private real estate, to you're now forbidden to sleep. Nothing dystopian about that.