PPCSinc Blogs

The good news on Wednesday was that homeless people in Los Angeles will no longer be committing a crime if they fall asleep on a city sidewalk. A law had actually been passed making it a crime to sleep on a sidewalk. Several homeless people had to file suit to overturn the law.

There are an estimated 90,000 homeless people in Los Angeles county, and an estimated 11,000 shelter beds. In a room somewhere, someone should be asking the question “Where will the other 79,000 sleep?” 

The less-than-good news in today’s paper comes from Dallas, where a church has opened it’s parking lot for 150 homeless people to sleep on the pavement, because police were arresting homeless people found sleeping in public places. The Deputy Police Chief said that the city would be looking at whether the church had the proper permits to allow people to sleep on their parking lot. The article reported that the city of Dallas has 5,000 homeless people, and only 1,300 shelter beds.

Closer to home, in St. Louis the hotline that people call to get into shelter is forced to turn away seven out of every ten people looking for shelter, because all the beds are full.

I don’t mean to minimize the concerns of a community that is looking for answers to the problems homelessness causes. I appreciate that people do not want to step over sleeping homeless people on their way to work. It makes us uncomfortable. (It’s also less than comfortable for the person sleeping on the concrete.) But criminalizing homelessness is not the answer. It is demeaning to the homeless person, it ties up the time of the police and the courts, and it is expensive for the community.

One thing we humans all have in common is that we each have a body. And that body has needs. And one of those needs is sleep. Part of being human is that we take up space…even when we are asleep. Homeless people have to be somewhere, and by definition they don’t have a home to go to.

It’s a crime that in a country where we spend so much money on (insert your own pet peeve extravagant excess here), that people are hungry and homeless. We shouldn’t put them in jail for it.