A reason to not ban homeless camps

Unpopular opinion alert

There’s a bill being considered by the Idaho Legislature intended to prohibit camping in public places, and as it is intended to deal with homeless encampments, the bill has received some amount of attention. My interest in it, initially, had to do with a side effect of the legislation, as it also would prohibit, in cities with more than 100,000 people, RV drivers like me from parking for the night and catching some winks.

Photo by Milan Cobanov on Unsplash

The relevant portion of Senate Bill 1141 says prohibited public camping or sleeping means:

lodging or residing in a temporary outdoor habitation used as a dwelling, lodging, or living space, which includes sitting, lying, or sleeping for a prolonged amount of time, and may be evidenced by the erection of a tent or other temporary shelter, including a motor vehicle … or a recreational vehicle … and may include but is not limited to the presence of bedding, pillows, cooking appliances, heat sources, the storage of personal belongings or food, or digging or earth breaking.

Commercial drivers would be exempt from the prohibition, the bill says. There is no definition for “prolonged amount of time.” Does that mean one hour? Eight? Ten? Is it a full day? Nobody knows, including the legislators who are likely to pass the bill and send it to the governor.

Being a driver who sleeps overnight in my RV while parked in Boise, Meridian, and Nampa often, this will, of course, impact me, and that makes me feel a certain kind of way about the government’s attempt to impede my freedom, if for no other reason, because it can.

But as I thought more about it, the bill also struck me as being very wrong for other reasons. I have always viewed legislation as a linear proposition: It is either making us more free or less free. It tends to be that people support legislation that prohibits the things they don’t like at that given moment. I, on the other hand, find that government should only legislate in the interest of protecting life, liberty, or property. The law shouldn’t use used to shield us from things that offend our sensibilities.

This notion came back o me when, as I was questioning Senate Bill 1141’s RV restriction, a friend asked me, “Do you really want people camping overnight in Julia Davis,” one of Boise’s crown jewel public parks? That’s as if to ask, “Do I support homeless encampments that have sprouted up in places like Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco?” No. Of course not.

However, I’m not on a quest to ban things or prohibit behavior I don’t like, especially those that don’t hurt me just because they’re unsightly. Moreover, the mere existence of such encampments represent the tail end of policy failure and, quite literally, need to be seen.

In other words, lawmakers have a tendency to pass policies — rent control, wage controls, urban renewal, gentrification, zoning, entitlement programs, and so on — that lead people down a path toward homelessness and toward the development of homeless encampments.

Elected officials then try to cover up their policy failures by passing laws that push homeless populations out of sight and therefore out of mind. They don’t consider the impact of their regulations and laws and economic planning on the masses, including housing affordability. “Oh my gosh, there are a bunch of tents lining the street and forming under the bridge! I wonder what we did to cause that,” says no one in government ever.

On one extreme, you have taxpayer-funded projects like those in Boise that turned a hotel into a homeless shelter. On the other end of the spectrum are policies like those being considered at the Legislature intended to make encampments illegal in some respect or another. What the two policies have in common is that they hide the existence of the original problem, the primary beneficiary of such coverups being politicians who no longer get held accountable for their policy actions.

Proponents of “tough-on-encampments” policies will argue that their laws will force the homeless into shelters. This may or may not be true. As the great economist Thomas Sowell observed, there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. What are the tradeoffs of this policy? One side effect of invisible homelessness is that it would tend to reduce the likelihood that potential donors to homeless shelters because they don’t “see” — quite literally — the need. Another potential side effect is that politicians feel they need to continue to fund other failed programs like the aforementioned homeless hotels, as well as taxpayer funded starter homes and housing projects.

So it may be unpopular to say but I will say it: The homeless should have their encampments so that ordinary humans can be aware of the plight of such people, and feel obligated, at minimum, to act or to examine what caused such disasters in the first place.

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