Homeless People’s Bill of Rights

By: Catherine Hall

If you didn’t realize it while reading the “Banished” book, homeless people are disproportionately criminalized and negatively affected by our law enforcement and justice systems. 

In “Banished”, Beckett & Herbert discuss how people are given stay-away orders that demand they do not trespass into certain areas of a city, often disrupting their daily lives and their necessary activities. This tactic of dealing with unwanted people is not new, nor is it geographically restricted to the Pacific Northwest. One can draw the comparison between Seattle and its equally liberally-leaning California counterpart, Berkeley. Like Seattle, we here in the East Bay have struggled with our own anti-homeless laws, most poignantly Measure S (perhaps more commonly known as Sit/Lie). As Captain Upson said in his talk, Measure S was defeated in November - but let me qualify that by saying it was barely defeated, and with the probability of again being a bone of contention on our ballot next time around. The clash between Berkeley storeowners and the homeless population is intense and definitely not going away anytime soon. 

To be fair, I get it: seeing the visibly homeless makes you uncomfortable. It reminds you of all those frightening rumors your roommate told you about physical assaults perpetrated by the People’s Park community. It makes you clutch your purse a little tighter as you walk by, and hope that no one asks you for the change you might have at the bottom of your backpack. It brings out the inequalities that exist within our system, a system that has been proven to be exponentially more divided along class lines as time progresses. And honestly, no one likes the pungent stench of an unbathed body that has been victim to the natural elements for days without a shower or toilet. 

Stay-away orders and Sit/Lie laws are just two of the many ways local governments attempt to sweep people who are homeless out of their districts. Some cities have been known to provide one-way bus tickets out of town, and others prefer to make the social act of sharing food illegal. But all of these legal “solutions” are really just bandaids that move the untouchables to another location for another government to deal with. In no way do they get at the root causes of homelessness, consequently perpetuating the vicious cycle that a homeless person must face as they try to find a place to simply exist. 

“Why don’t they just go sleep in a shelter?” “Why don’t they go find a bathroom to use?” “Why don’t they go hang out at the shelter so they don’t have to sit on the sidewalks?” The answer is simple: the resources do not currently exist. Shelters do not provide enough beds to house every person who is homeless. And even if they did, many shelters have rules and regulations that restrict a person’s way of life, like mandatory get-out times and curfews which make it difficult to have your own schedule. Public bathrooms are few and far between, some even cost a few coins, and most storeowners often will not allow you to use the bathroom unless you buy something from them. Many shelters are not open during the day, for lack of funding or for other reasons, so clients are mandated to be somewhere else even if they have no place to go. A person must first be provided with the opportunity to legally participate in life-sustaining activities, like spending daytime or sleeping in a shelter or using a bathroom to relieve bodily functions, before they are criminalized for doing so. If not, their very existence is made illegal. 

To respond to all of this, the California Homeless Person’s Bill of Rights, or AB5, is a new piece of legislation that would protect people who are homeless from being unfairly discriminated against by our law enforcement and justice systems. The original authors, homelessness advocacy organizations like Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP) and Jericho, got their inspiration from Rhode Island, where a Homeless Bill of Rights was passed just this last summer. It is currently being backed by State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, a democrat from San Francisco. 

A December 4^th article from the Berkeley Daily Planet, part of which I quote here, clearly describes the main points of AB5 - “The Act would guarantee homeless people freedom from discrimination in law enforcement, employment, housing and shelter, and public benefits. It protects people’s right to use public space, to keep personal property, and to engage in life-sustaining activities. It also guarantees people the right to counsel in any case where they’re being prosecuted.” Importantly, it would establish the need for public hygiene centers so that people could take care of business in a clean and private manner (one thing that I am skeptical about, though, is where funding for this project would come from, considering our debt-ridden state…). 

Currently, there are several debates surrounding a few key parts of the bill, two of which I include here because I find them to be the most important. In the most recent version of the bill that came back from Tom Ammiano's office, it is stipulated that local laws would supersede the Bill. So for example, if Measure S had passed in Berkeley, the passage of the Bill in its current form would still allow enforcement of no sitting and lying on the sidewalks. Obviously, this knocks out the teeth of the Bill and would most likely cause local municipalities to hurriedly create a myriad of local anti-homeless laws. Second, there is a very valid debate surrounding the fact that having a Bill of Rights for a specific category of our population is unfair and gives certain privileges and protections to those within that category. As an LA Times article asserts, it “essentially turns the homeless into a protected class”. That would be fair to say if people who are homeless were on an equal level to those who are housed - but they are not, and therefore their right to exist must be protected.