Just when you thought that the social experiments of Radical Left Left could no longer get in touch with the reality of everyday Americans, Washington Democrat Rep. Pramila Jayapal and Florida Democrat Rep. Maxwell Frost has a new bill that would export the disastrous homelessness policy from Seattle to the entire nation.
Their “housing not handcuffs act” would effectively give the green light to the homeless camps, crime and public health crises with crippled cities such as Seattle, all under the guise of compassion.
This is your warning.
For those of us who have witnessed the decline of our once meager cities, the starting point of this bill is not only misled, but offensive. The legislation, introduced on the occasion of the one -year anniversary of the subsidies of the Supreme Court, would prohibit any federal agency to criminalize “Liveloring activities” on “Public Land”.
Near the center of Seattle and along I-5, a homeless community of tents at the nickname the Treline-Levens on the edge of the highway and border of Redwood trees in Seattle, Washington, on Friday, July 22, 2022. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Sounds reasonable until you read the definitions. So -called “living activities” include “moving, resting, sitting, standing, lying down, sleeping, protecting themselves and personal property against the elements, eating and drinking.” In other words, your local park, squares and even post office parking spaces can become permanent residence zones for drug addicts, where local authorities are powerless to intervene.
Jayapal and Frost claim that the fines or arresting people who are already struggling is counterproductive. This is a classic straw man argument.
Nobody suggests that a simple fine will solve the complex problem of homelessness. But to get rid of communities of the ability to maintain order and safety, a surrender is not a solution. It is an open invitation for the type of chaos that has become commonplace in Seattle, where a tolerant culture camps has allowed to become magnets for drug use and violent crime.
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The “Seattle model” for homelessness has been an abject failure. I have treated it, and many other extreme left-old proposals from blue cities, in detail in my book, “What is the killing of America: within the radical left tragic destruction of our cities.”
For years, the city has thrown money on the problem, a constellation of non-profit organizations finances and policy is established that priority gives “law” to camp in public over the rights of authority-true citizens to enjoy their communities. The result? A humanitarian crisis on an epic scale.
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Homeless camps filled with drug addict criminals took over primary school ownership. Downtown Seattle looked like a Helscape, ravaged by Zombie, wasting fentanyl addicts away, bodies twisted in almost impossible pretzels while they slowly committed suicide. The most recent points-in-time count found more than 16,000 homeless people in King County, a number that keeps climbing despite hundreds of millions of expenditures. Why bring this policy to Topeka, Kansas, Lansing, Michigang or Orange County, California?
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The “housing not handcuffs act” would nationalize this failure. It would happen that federal agencies tackle the very real public safety and health problems that arise from camps. The language of the bill is so wide that it not only protects sleeping, but also storing personal property to the same extent as ownership in a private home. “It even grants them privacy rights over their public camps. Imagine the implications: vast, non -regulated camps with the same legal protection as you in your own house.
Andrea Suarez dismantles a tent while waste is piled on a homeless camp on March 13, 2022, in Seattle, Washington. The accumulation of waste at such locations has become a major problem in Seattle, because the city tries to move the unmarried public areas. ((Photo by John Moore/Getty Images))
This is not a compassion; It is a breach of duty. It is a blow to the face of entrepreneurs who have to clean up human waste from their retail points, the parents who have to explain to their children why they cannot play in the park, and the countless victims of crimes committed in and around these camps.
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The proponents of this account will tell you that the solution is more housing. And although nobody does not agree that affordable housing is a piece of the puzzle, they conveniently ignore the fact that many of the chronic homeless people struggle with serious mental disorders and addiction. It is not enough to just offer a roof. We need an extensive approach with treatment, personal responsibility and, yes, the enforcement of basic laws that keep our communities safe and livable for everyone.
The “housing not handcuffs act” is not a serious proposal to tackle homelessness. It is a radical approach to open tires of our public spaces, a bill that would turn into a potential Seattle of every city in America. It is time for the rest of the country to wake up and see what happens when progressive commonplaces collide with reality. The result is not a utopia of “housing law”; It is a landscape of human suffering, dirt and fear. We can and must do better.
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