Austin's new law against camping in public places is now in
effect, and in a few days, if all goes as announced, enforcement of
the law will begin. Although this is called a "camping" ban, it
prohibits sleeping or preparing to sleep in public places as well
as setting up lean-tos or tents.
Trespassing on private property is already a crime. Every place
is either public property or private property, and a law above city
ordinances requires human beings to sleep. So in effect, the new
law is a law against being homeless. As virtually everyone who is
homeless would have a home if it were within his or her power to
get one, the law is against people's existences. The homeless
become criminals by being alive.
In the Nineties a war on poverty is a war against the poor.
Nothing is new in the attempt to outlaw poverty. Many societies
have tired it. Central Texas owes most of its German population to
attempts of German princes to eradicate poverty by exiling the
poor. This, and other experiments in transporting the poor, showed
that the poor's only fault was lack of opportunity, but the world
has run out of places to send the poor. Now, in the view of the
city council, the place to send the poor is jail.
Hardly any measure in Western law has ever been so harsh. Yes,
England had its debtors' prisons, but one had to do something,
namely fail to pay a contracted debt, to be committed to debtors'
prison. The Austin ordinance seems like the premise of a science
fiction movie: don't sleep or go to jail. How long can a person
live without sleep? How long can a person force him- or herself to
stay awake? This is a law with which people cannot comply, no
matter how much they may try to do so.
Yet, the city council must want homeless people, so many of
their actions create more homeless people. Every big tax break and
subsidy given to big corporations to entice them to move to Austin
must be paid for by someone, and the tenants of Austin pay the
increased taxes. When rents go up, those who have barely managed to
pay rent are forced onto the streets. When the big corporations
move to Austin, they move their employees in from other places.
Yes, we always are promised these moves will create jobs for
Austinites, but time and again the new jobs are only the menial
sorts of jobs that are already here—and a person with a
minimum wage job is already priced out of the Austin housing
market. The better paying jobs are filled from out of town, the
out-of-towners move here, bid Austinites out of the housing market,
and more Austinites become homeless. Growing the Austin economy, as
the city council does it, requires that some of our citizens be
sacrificed to homelessness. What is hard to understand is: why
those who have been sacrificed for the sake of the economy are
hated so much that it must now be made a crime for them to
sleep.
Callousness, though hardly admirable, is understandable. But
this new law is beyond callous. It is smug,
kick-'em-while-their-down sadism, and now it is not only policy but
also the law in the city of Austin. Is it madness or method? No
doubt, baiting homeless people serves to distract those who are
hurt by the council's policies but remain housed, but it raises the
question: Who or what will be next as the misery index in Austin
rises? The more IBMs or Motorolas or Sematechs or Samsungs or 3Ms
lured to Austin with its inadequate housing base, the more homeless
there will be. How much jail space does the city council think it
has? When the city runs out of jail space, can concentration camps
be long in coming? Indeed, official camps for the homeless are
being proposed.
The Twentieth century is replete with examples of societies that
have gone down this road of making people criminals, not for
anything they do, but for what they are. The city of Austin has
taken a step down that road. We know when a society goes far enough
down that road, it cannot find the resolve within itself to turn
back. Now, the city of Austin still can turn back. Will it turn
back? Or will it take the next step?
