Zion

the growth of America's homeless encampments and how communities are responding:

In the past decade, homeless encampments have been across the country. The reason why people put tents under bridges and stuff, then on the streets is to avoid police harassment. Police will constantly hear complaints even though the homeless person didn't do anything, but they would ask them to leave in a certain time or just kill them.

When the city evicts an encampment by clearing all their belongings and its often called a “sweep”.

These are ways how police and politicians  are harassing homeless people:

• 33 percent of cities prohibit camping-wide and 50 percent prohibit camping particular public places, increases of 69 percent and 48 percent from 2006-16, respectively.

• 50 percent have either a formal or informal procedure for clearing or allowing encampments. (Much more use trespass or disorderly conduct statutes in order to evict residents of encampments).

• Only five cities (2.7 percent) have some requirement that alternative housing or shelter be offered when a sweep of an encampment is conducted.

• Only 20 (11 percent) had ordinances or formal policies requiring notice prior to clearing encampments. Of those, five can require as little as 24 hours’ notice before encampments are evicted, though five require at least a week, and three provide for two weeks or more. An additional 26 cities providing more than a month.

• Only 20 cities (11 percent) require storage to be provided

The most current reason why there's homelessness because of eviction because of rich privileged people who come to the neighborhood because they like the neighborhood, etc. The rich people is willing to give more money than the tenant that's been living there,  the house owner would usually take the higher amount. So sometimes the tenant that has been kicked out doesn’t have enough money live anywhere else so now there choice is to be houseless. So they will end up sleeping on the streets, but then that's when police start harassing them and keep telling them to leave, or they will make an excuse to kill them (for being home

In America, there is a subtle culture that has been going on since our “great nation’ has been founded. As soon as the original immigrants formed this government there have been laws against poor people, homeless people, and disabled people. Many of those laws have been meant to degrade us, silence us and humiliate us.

Tibu

Our corporate entertainment system is designed to make us hate ourselves for being poor. It sells us extremely expensive products very casually, which in turn makes us feel like it is only natural that we should have the amount of money that they are expecting us to. Yet we do not. Because most of our time as low-income citizens are spent holding up the richest of our society. And our government approves of this since it was built by the richest.

As our nation has progressed, there have been many laws to keep us down. In the early 1880’s to as recently as the 1970’s one of those laws were called the Ugly Laws. These laws deemed it illegal for “any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself to public view” This basically made it legal for the cops to arrest or ticket anyone who looked ugly, dirty, who were disabled, or maybe just didn't have nice clothes.

The thing about the Ugly Laws is, as any poor person or homeless person we know that we are the people who have the less-than-nice clothes or are sometimes dirty because our water was shut off, or disabled because we can’t afford good health care. The government back then knew that and that was the main reason that they created those laws.

Something that I have come to realize is that the Ugly Laws of the United States didn’t end in the 1970’s, they just got quieter, more subtle. Instead of using the Ugly Laws to justify arresting and brutalizing homeless and poor people, they now call us a “risk to society” and say that because of our poverty, we are more likely to steal and cause harm to the wealthier class.

The reason why I brought up the Ugly Laws because it shows the United States true nature. No matter how many Presidents, Mayors, Senators and government officials say how much they want to stop homelessness and how much they want to prevent it and “get people off the streets” they represent a country that is based on a foundation of causing homelessness and criminalizing homeless people instead or preventing it.