One of the most longstanding principles of functional legal systems is that the law must be capable of being obeyed. (See Lon Fuller's famous book "The Morality of Law" for the canonical discussion.)

When legal rules are literally impossible to obey for some people, they cease acting as legal rules and just become status crimes. If it's illegal to sleep outdoors, then anyone who doesn't have the money to sleep indoors becomes a criminal no matter what they do.

If you're seriously interested in engaging with this question, I've written about it some from pp. 1059 onward of this law review article.[1] Jeremy Waldron, a really important philosopher of law, has also written several articles on the subject, his "Homelessness and the Issue of Freedom" is particularly important.

[1] http://paul-gowder.com/Equal_Law_in_an_Unequal_World.pdf

I personally believe based on how US laws and public opinion works is that its better for them to leave the city and start somewhere the cost of living is not that high and they can get some kind of job (even if it is low paying).

I travelled to San Diego when I was first homeless because that's where the soup kitchens and homeless services are. It was possible to eat every day.

Most small towns don't have the resources to provide such services to the homeless. If you are completely indigent, the nearest big city is your best bet for finding some kind of help.

We need to fix affordable housing and health care in the US. Those two things would go a long way towards reducing this issue.

But no one wants to do that and most Americans see zero connection between the lack of affordable housing and the high numbers of homeless people, which just flabbergasts me.

I find it very frustrating to keep running into comments like this on HN. I was willing to go almost anywhere in the Western US to get off the street. There are damn few places that aren't senior housing, aren't trailers, aren't the absolute muddle of nowhere where it would be along drive to even get groceries (thereby adding to the expense of living there because you need a car, etc) and can be had for under $500 per month.

Even small towns aren't that cheap.

I would like to actively foster the development of online incomes in small towns and rural areas. The internet savvy people are also mostly in the big cities and many rural places lack high speed internet.

If we could somehow supply good internet to such areas and help people earn money online so that the lack of good jobs isn't an issue, now you are talking about a real solution. But most of the people saying that homeless folks need to just move someplace cheap aren't talking about helping them make money online. They are just ignoring the fact that these people simply cannot currently get their needs met at all outside of the big city and are being arrested for being in the big city where services are.

I run a bunch of websites. I can't get Patreon support sufficient to let me develop them full time. I didn't get the economic development job I applied for last December.

I think I have actual workable solutions that don't just throw people to the wolves. And I can't get traction because basically no one really wants this solved. They just want to blame the homeless and not actually work on real solutions.

There is a nationwide shortage of affordable housing. This is not unique to big cities. So sending people to small towns with no services and poor job prospects isn't currently a fix. And it is starting to make me spit nails to hear that.

Meanwhile, tech giants want to eliminate like 80 percent of jobs and replace it with UBI. Then articles that state that in the first paragraph fail to actually explore this dystopian vision and, instead, wax eloquent about how do gooder social workers will live so much better with UBI to supplement their underpaid job. They don't actually get into what life looks like if we hand everyone $10k annually with no hope of ever having a job again because robots are doing everything.

And people wonder why I'm suicidal so much of the time. Good god.

This has caused a lot of people to start living in a very small area which has severely strained the resources of the city (water , sewage, garbage ).

This also created a feedback loop as since cities has more opportunities and now you can find housing on the cheap, more and more people start coming to the city even if they cannot afford living there.

Life is hard and it becomes harder when you are homeless and I am not undermining this. But your solution is a tried and tested solution which didn't work before and there is no indication that it will work in the future.

Gist : There is no point in concentrating all resources in the same place.

First, when I say affordable housing, I don't mean "government owned or subsidized projects built to serve poor people." I mean that as literally as can be meant: Housing that is affordable for a certain subset of the population.

Historically, the US had a lot of small, cheap rentals and those have largely gone away. For example:

The United States saw a decrease in single room occupancy housing during the period of 1960s and 1970s urban decay. For example, in Chicago 81% of the SRO housing stock disappeared between 1960 and 1980.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy

Second, I'm not suggesting building affordable housing only in big cities. The entire US needs additional affordable housing.

For every 100 families living in poverty on the West Coast, there are no more than 30 affordable homes

https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-pove...

The history here is that we had savings rates that exceeded 50% some years during WW2, the soldiers came home and had money in the bank and also help from the government to buy housing as part of their benefits. So the ladies with factory jobs were asked to give up their factory jobs and go home so men could have jobs and many of them were happy to do that (though not all) and this is where we get the Baby Boomer generation.

It is a historical anomaly where the US had an extremely large middle class population with working class values that had survived the Great Depression and they were thrilled to be homeowners. And houses built in the 1950s were typically 1200 sq ft and held an average of like 4.5 people, IIRC. Today, the average new home in the US is over 2400 sq ft and holds one less person on average than in the 1950s.

Meanwhile, we have a terrible homeless problem and single young people are expected to rent a two or three bedroom place designed for a nuclear family and get roommates. We used to have SROs, boarding houses and other things as a common market based option for young people just starting out who weren't married, didn't have kids and didn't have a lot of money. We have largely eliminated those options and then wonder why there is a problem.

The 1950s probably saw Peak Nuclear Family (tm) for the US. All of our housing policies and financing mechanisms are rooted in that era and it is like a ghost continuing to haunt and terrorize us. Meanwhile, our demographics have diverged and we have more single young people, single parents, and childless couples and virtually none of our housing is designed for these people. It is almost all designed for a breadwinner dad, a homemaker mom and 2.5 kids to live happily ever after in, never mind that this is practically a myth today.

I'm well aware that building poverty housing has the potential to deepen the problem. I'm absolutely not talking about building poverty housing. I'm talking about building stuff that isn't insanely oversized, isn't aimed at a small subset of the population -- the mythical old fashioned nuclear family with a stay at home mom that is nearly extinct -- and isn't insanely expensive.

That's vastly different from what you are talking about.

And your "I'm not American, but I know better than you do what is best for your country, never mind that I am completely misinterpreting your statements" isn't any more pleasant to deal with than when upper class Americans tell me that we should ship all the poor people to rural hell holes or something.

The housing market is same everywhere in the world and generally suited towards nuclear family because they are ideal tenants (in terms of money and stability).

Homeless ness is a global problem that exists everywhere in the world. Its not a US only problem. You can dismiss my opinion as "oh this foreign guy , he knows shit about my country and he is touting opinion like he is some genius", but you are trying to overreaching in your "if only the housing market was perfect" solution.

And rural America is not a hell hole. You need to see real hell holes in life my friend. Good for you , you came out of poverty to get a stable job but please don't undermine others peoples experiences judging them from a narrow lens.

But I don't really see any point in trying to hash this out further.

I agree that non-incarceration facilities would be preferable. But as a person who has actually represented the homeless I am 100% certain that a large number of the homeless would refuse to live in a homeless shelter if it meant giving up booze and drugs.

Those are typically being used to self medicate for a legitimate issue, probably a biological issue. Substitute their prescription medication for their deadly condition and see how you feel then about the idea of requiring them to give it up.

They may or may not have a proper diagnosis. I don't think that is relevant.

When we know for certain how to completely and reliably cure addiction and mental health issues and reliably identify all health issues in a speedy fashion, then I might have some sympathy for such an attitude. But we aren't there yet.

If your mental health issues have utterly ruined your life to the point where you are homeless, that fact can help make you suicidal. To the degree that mental health issues can lead to suicide, I think it is reasonable to suggest they can be deadly.

Alcohol also kills germs. I loathe alcohol. I had a nightcap pretty much daily for about a year while doctors acted like I was crazy and failed to figure out how to treat my condition. I began getting better. I stopped drinking alcohol when I found other treatments that worked better.

I'm convinced I would have died had I not consumed alcohol for a year.

I knew someone briefly with a mental health issue who lived in fear of winding up homeless. She also drank alcohol very heavily for a time and felt enormous guilt about it. But she had surgery for something at some point and when they opened her up, they discovered some badly infected organ. They removed it and marveled at the fact that she wasn't dead.

I think her heavy drinking saved her life. After that surgery, she was able to get clean and sober, in spite of her mental health diagnosis.

However, many people use alcohol to self-medicate for legitimate issues. The fewer services available to you, the more appealing alcohol and other drugs seem. Alcohol is, after all, cheap and readily available.

Sometimes it is as simple as trying to be able to withstand a cold, wet night. Sometimes folks are in pain (a variety of things can cause this, from tooth decay to sore feet to serious issues). If you cannot afford psychiatric medications, alcohol is a way out. It might not be ideal, but it is available. More available than health care in many cases. After all, you are speaking of folks that don't have actual shelter, a proper toilet, sanitary conditions, or a place to store or cook food regularly.

I'll add that simply being homeless can be a deadly condition as can a myriad of things that you might go to the doctor for. Seriously, if you simply couldn't get anything to treat your condition, what do you think your options would be? What if daily life made you absolutely miserable and you couldn't find a way out?

And that is the entire point. Not having access to the things "normal" society does makes things different.

It's disturbing when people even rhetorically-suggest breaking with common decency and dogwhistle encourage strong-man fascism.

Ok, but keep in mind that many of them probably turned to these as an escape from the reality of their condition and are now addicted. Perhaps a better thing to do would be to help rehabilitate them instead of vilifying them as addicts?

Basically the question is: what do you do with a crazy person, or someone who has relegated themselves to squalor?

The answer for both is that we continue to try to rehabilitate. That means not just throwing them in a hole. A simple example would be to take the money we spend on incarcerating them and spend it on multifaceted programs.

Prison should not be a panacea. Reminder: the US incarcerates more people than the next two biggest encarcerating countries combined, even though our population is 1/5th the size. Either our people are the scum of the earth, or we just find locking people up an acceptable solution to most problems.

That means not calling names in arguments, not using the site for ideological battle (regardless of your ideology), and not attacking your fellow users (regardless of how wrong they are or you think they are).

This doesn't really describe jail. Jail is designed to punish people, and all too often, to hold people suspected of crimes. We have rape jokes about jails. Access to healthcare seems to be missing, especially if you have issues with mental health. You really cannot have belongings: For someone homeless, that could mean they don't have belongings later on, even if they were only held for a short time. If you happen to be a homeless person that works (yes, they exist), it also means you probably just lost your job.

But that is not how it works in a land where a bunch of bankers can break all of the rules of sound lending and then demand that the government relieve them of them of the consequences of their actions and suffer few or no penalties. Literally the only people who have gone to jail over the 2008 mortgage banking crisis were whistleblowers who called out malfeasance on the part of their employers.

We can start jailing homeless people _after_ the CEO of Wells Fargo is in jail.

Your desire to organize society according to simple, elegant and absolute rules is understandable - it is in fact the quintessential engineer's mindset.

But society is not a microprocessor, or a factory, or even a neural net. It's far, far more complicated than any of those things, and can't be governed by the same approach.

This is why things like empathy, transgression, forgiveness, and rebellion exist within a society but not within a codebase. Trying to eliminate those things from a society is effectively trying to collapse the complexity: to dramatically simplify the system in order to make it possible to manage problems through absolute rules.

While this is an understandable approach to an engineering problem, I rather enjoy the beautiful complexity of society, and would hate to see you have your way with it.

In real life, the very poor are put-upon, berated, judged, harassed, kicked and even murdered for the crime of being poor.

The point is that the law already places a greater burden for the poor to comply than the rich. The rich don't need to sleep under bridges or steal bread, the poor can't help it, therefore the law itself unjustly discriminates against the poor.

If your society is failing to provide this, then it's a failure of society, not a failure of the individual.

If society does provide for it in a way that is adequate, humane, and without severe inconvenience then sure, prosecution can be an option (right after providing a humane option of a place to sleep). However, I doubt this is the case.

If your laws don't provide for humane treatment of people in your society, then you need new laws.

And staying in jail... well anyone that think that's an adequate place to sleep is confusing a place that's meant for punishment vs a place that treats people humanely and offers them shelter.

It's a decision. Every country is different, for better or for worse.

I would rather sleep in my car on the side of the road and get fined than continue driving in a sleep-deprived state. I usually get away with using restrooms in restaurants when I am out, but if it was refused and there were no public restrooms, you bet I would find an alley.

Society's rules do not mean as much when there is no viable alternative.

Should homeless people be able to sleep in your yard? if so, do they need to provide proof there was no viable alternative? its inhumane to force them to sleep outside, shouldnt you be forced to let them into your house? does being homeless give them a special right to violate your private property? why cant anyone sleep in your yard?

the issue is complex, but I do not agree with "Society's rules do not mean as much when there is no viable alternative."

Let's say your friend is shot and you are driving them to the hospital. There is no parking at the hospital. You need to park. Will you just say "oh well" and head home. Sorry buddy, no parking. Nope, you need to park. You will do it illegally. It is like that. Not that we don't get parking tickets because we parked on the sidewalk to go to the mall.

your counter example is not quite there. I dont think anyone is saying they can't sleep in ALL public places, just that there are limitations on where they can sleep in public.

for instance, is it OK for you to park in front of a hospital in such a way that it blocks ambulances from entering? no.

Well it’s a ninth circuit decision, and a 2-1 at that...

Society's rules are different from society's laws.

There's a place in Vancouver where you can walk around naked and buy dope and booze in public and no one will blink. Some people know about it, some don't, the police don't care.

Law is a fiction, a tool we use to manage human wickedness (good folk need no law.) Sometimes it works and sometimes it's stupid and vicious.

Throwing people in jail for having no better option than to sleep in the street, instead of giving them a house like Utah does, in this country, this richest of nations, is pathetic, and should not be lawful.

Self-reference? If so, agreed. The biggest hole in your comment is that in America, at least, it's possible for a law to be declared invalid in some contexts (e.g. sleeping on the street) but not others (e.g. urinating on it). You dance around this somewhat in your comment, so it's curious you take such a binary view.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html