The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article yesterday which acknowledged that many municipalities around the country (such as Nashville, Sacramento, and Lacey, Wash.) are relaxing municipal codes — or just not strictly enforcing existing laws — to allow tent communities to form.
Nashville is one of several U.S. cities that these days are accommodating the homeless and their encampments, instead of dispersing them. With local shelters at capacity, “there is no place to put them,” said Clifton Harris, director of Nashville’s Metropolitan Homeless Commission, says of tent-city dwellers.
With budgetary cuts across the country, it’s just not a worthwhile use of police time to break up makeshift communities that are likely to form elsewhere.
After years of enforcing a tough anticamping law to break up homeless clusters, Sacramento recently formed a task force to look into designating homeless tracts because shelters are overflowing.
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Some communities may be “less inclined to crack down quite as hard on people” because of the recession, said Barry Lee, a professor of sociology and demography at Pennsylvania State University.
Champaign even gets a mention.
Pastors in Champaign, Ill., last week asked the City Council to allow people to live in organized tent communities of as many as 50 people. Legalizing the camps is more compassionate and cost-effective than forcing “poor people who are camping because they have a lack of better choices to constantly have to fear being rousted and cited by police,” says Joan Burke, advocacy director for Sacramento Loaves & Fishes, a homeless-assistance agency.
This is clearly a national issue, and one that governments in several cities much larger than Champaign are dealing with in a progressive, practical, and compassionate way.