Imagine being among the poorest of the poor in Kentucky and you discover the Safer KY Act passed: your immediate reaction would be that the state legislature doesn’t know how to address the issue of homelessness and instead just wants to clean up unsightly images. This is in response to camp cities in California where lax enforcement of homelessness laws and the recent student protests on college campuses have left once beautiful public spaces looking less than glamourous. While all of that is negative, one has to question the severity of force involved regarding the new Safer KY Act according to the description laid out by WBKO News, a subsidiary of ABC.
Starting out with where the homeless are not permitted to camp out, they are not allowed to camp anywhere not designated for sleeping including under bridges, sidewalks, or parks. While the efficacy of taking some of those options away from the structurally poorest citizens away is dubious in the short term, the law get worse by suggesting that people cannot sleep in parking lots in their cars either. This is often what people do whenever they become homeless to avoid sleeping in tents and to stay functionally employable and so they have transportation, a pre-requisite for work in many parts of the spacious United States. Additionally, where exactly do touring musicians get to sleep in given that they sleep in parking lots in their touring buses? How does this help Kentucky, which is lagging behind its neighbors in population growth, become more competitive in attracting more people in terms of permanent residents and tourism when the prospect of becoming poor becomes criminalized?
The second issue that can be drawn up is that any new permanent housing for the homeless must come with substance abuse and mental health planning, something that is great on paper but slows the development of housing down immensely. To put this issue into context, the criminalization of people sleeping in their cars will happen almost instantaneously once the law kicks in whereas the new housing if it happens will take time to plan and build. Attempting to plan something as meticulous as mental health resources and substance abuse resources and then make it a dependent part of housing assistance isn’t a practical step toward helping innocent poor people who just need to be housed to avoid being thrown into jail. Furthermore, mental health resources should be planned separately of substance abuse counseling as there are crossover elements, but the issues deserve more attention from a policy glance separately rather than being bundled in a reactionary stand against what they see as a creeping Californication of homelessness nationwide.
The third issue is what gun control advocates will probably cry foul about the most, but what I would complain the least about regarding the bill: the use of force to get homeless people off of their property. By no means am I suggesting that I am unsympathetic to the plights of homeless people as witnessed by my commentary above, but private property owners pay taxes and maintain their property to have autonomy over their own dominion for a reason. If a massive number of people start accumulating onto your yard when you have a family with children, that can become an imminent threat to your and their safety to which it needs to be dealt with. While the level of force should be restrained to the point most possible, a drug-addicted homeless person violently throwing themselves at you in a rampage shouldn’t be able to get away with violating your safety because of sensitivity to their poverty. For all the rage that the most incendiary part of the bill might cause, it actually spurs the least amount of response from me given that it’s a reaffirmation that private property rights are sacred.
In conclusion, the Safer KY Act is not a particularly great bill when written because it makes the living situation for the poorest people in one of the poorest states of the country even worse in the short and long term. It makes aid conditioned on lofty promises that the state and local government may become derelict on, thereby failing the most at-risk people, while subjecting the local economy to the strain of those who are afraid of becoming destitute wanting to move somewhere where they won’t be criminalized for being poor in the wrong place.
Sources: Homeless community and advocates speak against Safer Kentucky Act (wbko.com)
The Conservatarian Millennial 