Illegal to Feed Homeless in Parks
 

Las Vegas Makes It Illegal to Feed Homeless in Parks

Perhaps the coming of the Antichrist is in Vegas, just got lost and picked a desert?... his kinda' town.

I heard about this on NPR last week. I intended to make a thread about it. Society is lost: right is wrong, good is bad. I fear for us, I fear for our future.

You might get more discussion in these threads if you linked to a news article that doesn't make you jump through hoops to read it. I don't feel like registering at the NYT or finding an anonymizer. You could also quote the first paragraph or two of the article in your post.

Judging from the lack of response by others, I assume they aren't reading the articles either.:)

Well, you shoulda already heard about this one!

He did something like that awhile and got his ass handed to him, for pasting tmi.

Yup...
Can't win I guess.
But, I'll do it for the one who can't be put-out by regitering for the Times.

Las Vegas Makes It Illegal to Feed Homeless in Parks

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
Published: July 28, 2006
LAS VEGAS, July 21 — Gail Sacco pulled green grapes, bread, lunch meat and, of course in this blazing heat, bottles of water from a cardboard box. A dozen homeless people rose from shady spots in the surrounding city park and snatched the handouts from her.

Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Gail Sacco, a retired restaurant owner, has for years been giving meals to homeless people in a Las Vegas park. The city has outlawed the practice.

Monica Almedia/The New York Times
Recipients of Ms. Sacco’s handouts say that they are far from shelters and that they get little public assistance.


Huntridge Circle Park is about three miles from most soup kitchens.
Ms. Sacco, an advocate for the homeless, scoffed at a city ordinance that goes into effect Friday making it illegal to offer so much as a biscuit to a poor person in a city park.

Las Vegas, whose homeless population has doubled in the past decade to about 12,000 people in and around the city, joins several other cities across the country that have adopted or considered ordinances limiting the distribution of charitable meals in parks. Most have restricted the time and place of such handouts, hoping to discourage homeless people from congregating and, in the view of officials, ruining efforts to beautify downtowns and neighborhoods.

But the Las Vegas ordinance is believed to be the first to explicitly make it an offense to feed “the indigent.”

The ordinance does not apply to the famous Las Vegas Strip, which lies mostly in unincorporated Clark County, but it demonstrates both the growing pains the city has endured as tourism has boomed, and the steps Las Vegas is taking to regulate where entrenched populations of homeless people can gather. And eat.

“The government here doesn’t care about anybody,” said one homeless woman, Linda Norman, 55, taking a bottle of water and already perspiring in morning heat approaching 100 degrees at Huntridge Circle Park, a manicured, well-watered three-acre patch of green in a residential area near downtown. “We just want to eat.”

Las Vegas officials said the ordinance was not aimed at casual handouts from good Samaritans. Instead, they said it would be enforced against people like Ms. Sacco, whose regular offerings, they said, have lured the homeless to parks and have led to complaints by residents about crime, public drunkenness and litter.

“Families are scared to go to the park,” said Gary Reese, the mayor pro tem and a City Council member who represents the area around Huntridge Circle Park. The city, Mr. Reese added, had just spent $1.7 million in landscaping and other improvements there.

“I don’t think anybody in America wants people to starve to death,” Mr. Reese said. “But if you want to help somebody, people can go to McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken and give them a meal.”

He said that the police would ignore “isolated cases” of violating the ordinance, and predicted that the law would ultimately help the homeless because they would be forced to seek meals at soup kitchens run by social service organizations that could provide other assistance as well.

But Maria Foscarinis, director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty in Washington, said the prohibition would do more harm than good. “Nobody wants the poor and homeless living in public spaces,’’ Ms. Foscarinis said, “but this kind of response is terribly misguided.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, which opposed the ordinance, said it was preparing a legal challenge. The group’s general counsel, Allen Lichtenstein, called the measure absurd and said it was an unconstitutional infringement on free assembly and other rights.

Mr. Lichtenstein accused Mayor Oscar B. Goodman, who supports the new restriction, of waging a campaign against homeless people, whom the mayor has openly criticized. At a June meeting of the City Council, Mr. Goodman suggested that panhandlers with signs asking for food be sued for “false advertising” because soup kitchens provide free meals. “Some people say I’m the mean mayor,’’ Mr. Goodman acknowledged, but he defended the ordinance as part of the effort to steer the homeless to social service groups, and said the city was taking part in a regional initiative to end homelessness in 10 years.

The ordinance, an amendment to an existing parks statute approved by the Council on July 19, bans the “the providing of food or meals to the indigent for free or for a nominal fee.” It goes on to say that “an indigent person is a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive” public assistance.

Violating the ordinance is a misdemeanor, and can be punished by a fine of up to $1,000 or a jail term of up to six months, or both. Diana Paul, a spokeswoman for the city, said the police would begin enforcing it after briefings from city lawyers.

Mr. Lichtenstein said the ordinance allows a picnicker to offer food to a middle-income friend but not to a poor one. “If you have a picnic, are you supposed to have everybody give you a financial statement? This is a clumsy and absurd attempt to make war on poor people.”

The ordinance says nothing about offering money to the homeless, and allows offering food to poor people on adjacent sidewalks, something Ms. Sacco said she was considering.

Las Vegas already prohibits 25 or more people from gathering in parks without a permit, and allows the police and city marshals to bar people on the spot for certain periods. The A.C.L.U. has filed a federal lawsuit attacking those restrictions, and Mr. Lichtenstein said he would seek to add this new ordinance to the suit.

Bradford Jerbic, the city attorney, did not reply to a message left at his office. Mr. Reese, the mayor pro tem, said Mr. Jerbic had assured officials that the ordinance was legal and would hold up in court if applied “sensibly.”

And Mr. Goodman, a lawyer, said he did not fear a court fight either.

“For 35 years, I represented reputed mobsters and was never afraid to go to court,’’ he said, “and I am not afraid to go to court against the A.C.L.U.’’

Some cities, like Fort Myers, Fla., and Santa Monica, Calif., have scaled back restrictions in the face of community objections or lawsuits. The Santa Monica ordinance, which governs public gatherings in parks, faced a federal lawsuit in 2003 by Food Not Bombs, a group that has drawn controversy in several cities for serving regularly scheduled hot meals to the homeless in city parks.

The city eventually eliminated a provision requiring a permit to distribute food on public property, but with the backing of a federal appeals court last month, it requires a permit for giving out hot food to groups of 150 or more. Carol Sobel, a lawyer who represented the plaintiffs, said they still feed the homeless in parks but make sure the groups have fewer than 150 people.

In New York, Angela Allen, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeless Services, said: “The city has not created any policies around feeding in the park, but we believe there are better ways of serving the homeless and all of their needs for both food and shelter. No one should ever go hungry."

On Monday, Orlando, Fla., adopted a prohibition on feeding groups of 25 or more people in downtown city parks and other public facilities without a permit.

Social service providers said they had mixed views of the Las Vegas ordinance. Las Vegas has a severe shortage of shelter space for the homeless, but operators of soup kitchens said they could feed many more people than they do.

“We don’t want to discourage people to give out food, but it has to be done intelligently and with the right format and in the right area,” said Charles Desiderio, a spokesman for the Clark County chapter of the Salvation Army.

Homeless people and Ms. Sacco, a retired restaurant owner who has been serving pots of soup and beans for several years in Huntridge Circle Park, said that it could be difficult to travel to soup kitchens and that the police often forced the homeless from areas where shelters were located.

Huntridge Circle Park is about three miles from most of the soup kitchens downtown, a difficult walk when the weather is hot.

Another reason the homeless do not flock to shelters here, Ms. Sacco acknowledged, is that the chronically mentally ill who make up a sizable part of the homeless population typically resist treatment and services.

“I don’t have no money for a bus,” Nalinh Khamsoukthavong, who said he was “about 50,” and gave a rambling explanation of his plight that involved promised help from several people, a visit to his native Laos and a series of deceitful bosses. “I have to walk, and I don’t have food.”

Huh, I was able to read it with no registration issues... but I didn't respond to this one because I wholly disagree with rkzenrage and Flint's position on the matter, and didn't feel like starting off an argument about it. But since I've gone this far:

I have no problem with this ordinance. Especially as the mayor specifically said that cases of individual giving would be ignored, and that this was to stop the scheduled, large-scale feeding of homeless people in public parks when there are soup kitchens and other locations that already provide that service. I believe that the neighbors' complaints that this has caused large numbers of homeless people to congregate in the park, leading to increased crime, are legitimate. And I fundamentally feel that most (not all, but most) homeless people are unwilling to help themselves, and giving them continued handouts is doing nothing to improve their situation anyway.

There. Now yell at me and tell me why I'm heartless.

Thanks for posting it (although you really didn't have to post the whole thing. I got the idea after 4-5 paragraphs.)

I'm torn on this. Bottom line is I oppose the law. I think it's silly to put a law like this on the books.

On the other hand, the city has a very good point. Homeless people congregating in a park will scare others away. I've seen it first hand here in D.C. A nice park that has turned into a sort of homeless campground is now really a dump, and I would be nervous taking my kids there. Also, if a kitchen is giving out free food 2-3 miles away, that's close enough. If I was hungry, I would walk 2 or 3 miles to get something to eat. It's not that far. I might even set up camp closer to the food.

But it's overkill to make a law about this. IMHO.

Or perhaps they're already registered to read NYT's screeds and don't feel like making the obvious comments so the liberals can jump all over them about how heartless they are.

Look...a public park isn't a homeless shelter. If you're looking for a warm fuzzy feeling by proving what a noble soul you are for feeding the homeless, part of your job is finding a place to do it without turning the park (which was built for other purposes) into one.

There's a lovely big park down the street from my house. It's also a working farm. It closes at sunset, and overnight camping is not permitted.

I can imagine the patrols the rangers would have to run to empty the place (nearly 700 acres of farm, woodland and stream, including a trout hatchery) at night if free food was being dispensed there...they'd be working long after the do-gooders went home, patting each other on the back.

It's not about being liberal it's about being compassionate. Taking the food to where the homeless already are is not going to make them suddenly propogate... they are not plants.

"Oh, great, now we'll never get rid of them! ...and they'll only bring their friends!"

Let's give them gift cards to some of the upscale restaurants in the area. That'll keep them out of the park! Let them eat cake - somewhere away from us well-fed folks.

It's the same old "they don't help themselves, they're lazy, unsightly, inconvenient, criminal" rationalizations. If minimum wage was enough to provide food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, and maybe a few amenities, there would be fewer of these folks in the park.

I disagree. Word gets around. "Did you know they hand out sandwiches at the park at 3pm?". One tells another and so on. Then they hang out around the park -- because, hey, that's where they hand out sandwiches.

I used to work in the Pioneer Square area of Seattle - right by where the original "Skid Row" was in the depression. There were always lots of homeless in the area - because there was a shelter in the area. Same deal.

It always upsets me to hear these arguments since a big reason why many people are homeless is because they're mentally ill and can't help themselves.

Unlikely. Homelessness is not a temporary condition for most of these folks -- it's a lifestyle.

I understand that most of these folks can't improve themselves because they have mental issues. I am compassionate to their situation. But you can't help a situation if you don't really understand it.

How much per hour do you reckon that would have to be?

Maybe there would just be fewer minimum wage jobs, and MickeyDburgers would cost north of $15 each. Or maybe that would simply expand opportunitidades por nos hermanos y hermanas hispanicos sin documentos.

Perhaps you'd get to order it as "Doble hamburguesa con queso, por favor. Aqui esta America. Habla español."

And no, using estar vs. ser wasn't a mistake.

So, next logical step is to outlaw shelters?
I've been homeless, once as a child. You assume much.
This is about just helping to feed them, not building them homes there. But I guess we cannot be burdened by those trying to help some people who are hungry... the hungry are so very inconvenient and look so bad with the landscaping.
This law is so much better than one that outlaws having too few beds in shelters and clinics, nice priorities there.

OK, so feed them at your house. Problem solved.

Not really. You can bet that neighborhood zoning issues would come up for that much faster than they did for public parks.

Why doesn't some genius politician create a program so these people could EARN some food in exchange for grounds maintenance? I'm sure sandwiches and coffee would be cheaper than overpaying the lazy-ass city employees. At the same time it may improve their social skills and in turn be a type of therapy.

Nowhere did I say or convey that. The point was that the homeless go where there's help. You made the point that there would not be more homeless in a particular area just because there were handouts. I refuted it.

Notice that I used the word most when describing the long-term homeless.

I'm not against feeding them. I just thing there's better places to do it than the park.

I also recognize that feeding them is just putting a band-aid on the problem. I suspect that more and better facilities for the mentally ill would go a long way to easing the problem.

{insert rant about how zoning is controlled by the evil rich property owners who hate people here}

So what's the answer?

Can't feed 'em in the park,
Can't feed 'em in the square,
Can't feed in your home,
Can't feed 'em anywhere!
Do you want them to go to hell?
Do you want that, MaggieL?

Seriously. It's a matter of choice, and the continuum goes from kill them all to help them all. Do you want to spend your money or your conscience?

It may very well be, but that's not the issue - if a place is zoned residential, setting up what amounts to a soup kitchen (or any other business/organization that generates foot traffic) would almost certainly be prohibited. And if the foot traffic is homeless people, you can bet it will be enforced double quick.

Heck, getting a homeless shelter or soup kitchen through zoning in a commercial area is hard enough.

The answer is, if you want to feed the homeless, in addition to finding the food, and perhaps preparing it (and accepting the liability if it harms the people you give it to), you have the additional job of providing a place to distribute (and perhaps eat) it. You're not entitled to turn a public park into a soup kitchen. Yes, it's a logistical hassle...but this is a logistical undertaking.

I'm not the one who is proposing doing (only part of) the job. If you want the warm fuzzy feeling, you do the the work.

Bingo. The homeless problem really took off in the 80s when the Reagan administration drastically cut federal funding to mental hospitals. Many of the patients left the hospitals and hit the streets.

The problem is far from simple.

A solution requires coordination between local, state and federal governments. It also requires cooperation from private volunteers who hand out sandwiches in the park, and the charity organizations that run kitchens and shelters.

If better facilities were available for the mentally ill, and if areas were set aside where the homeless could squat without hassles from the police, hell, maybe even with the protection of the police, and if bathrooms were set up that they could use, and if job training/help was more readily available for those that wanted it, the problem would decline.

Lots of locations just pick them up and give them a bus ticket.

Passing laws restricting behavior is really just a band aid on a symptom, it isn't going to do much to fix anything.

What's *your* answer? How much per hour would minimum wage have to be before your shiny, happy fed/housed/healthcared/amenitied criteria would be met? It's obviously such a simple solution, let's see you put a price tag on it.

The collectivist crowd here seems to be doing a lot of handwaving about how if only there wasn't so much poverty, un- and under-employment and untreated mental illness, there would be less homelessness.

Duh.

I'm reminded of the folks who used to buy soft pretzels at 30th Street Station and then amuse themselves while waiting for their train by feeding the remains to the pigeons. They were never commuters, and didn't have to deal every day with the bird exhaust encrusting everything (including few available benches on the platform)...they got their strokes and moved on.

I sometimes fantasized a giant mutant pigeon carrying them off to feed to her young...their companions screaming to them "Charleen! Charleen! Drop the car keys!"

I wish this thread was what I misread it as.

Illegals to Feed Homeless in Parks

Agree with all of this... has nothing to do with the mean-spirited legislation that we are discussing. It is in the vein of the NY downtown "clean-up". I was there during that and it almost made me believe in evil.

So since you're neither evil nor mean-spirited you'll be opening a soup kitchen at your place?

I personally don't rate the "right to cheap and tasty fast food" very high on the big-picture scale.

Bravo! Bravo! Thank you for saying this! Whatever happened to social policies that accomplished multiple objectives?!

While you're talking about opening soup kitchens in homes, as some sort of analogy to doing it in public parks, just remember that the people closest to being "at home" in the public park are the homeless.

It's very easy and fun to criticize others and not stick out your own neck, isn't it?

Right, when you talk about "the homeless" just remember how they got "homeless" to begin with.

Who would choose a lifestyle of homelessness?

Actually, my answer is to set up a regular free meal truck at the Norristown Farm Park. ;) Maybe even leave a case of Jiffy Pop behind, so they'll start fires at night.:rolleyes: Duh right back at ya.

The answer? Well, I don't have the means to feed them all in my home, and I have too much compassion to kill them, so it would be somewhere between the two. Maybe provide facilities (oh no! collectivism!) where they can satisfy the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If that's all they want, so be it. If they want more, they can find a job, but they won't need a job that would cause a $15 McBurger, because their basic needs would be met.

BTW, if homelessness isn't caused by un- and underemployment and untreated mental illness, what does cause it?

Maggie, why are you so against helping people? If it's the cost, it would be alot cheaper to help these folks than it has been to develop the Osprey. How about we use some of that cash?

I'd say that the local homeowners are the closest to being at home in the park. They effectively have a soup kitchen being set up in their backyard.

But that's the whole point, there are facilities provided, just like there are public parks provided. Except the public parks are being usurped for other purposes.

But if you feed them they lose the ability to survive in the wild without handouts. They become dependent on people to survive and when winter comes and the tourists go home, they will suffer horribly. Well, that's why You shouldn't feed the critters in the National Parks, anyway. Most of the people they kicked out, when they closed the PA State Hospitals, some years ago. These people need help but the courts have ruled you can't help them against their will. They can't be locked up unless they're dangerous to others....being a danger to themselves, doesn't count.

I've no first hand experience, but everything I've read says the shelters are generally hell holes. Your life and possessions are at risk every night you're there. We saw some of that in New Orleans where the people were tossed into the dome without supervision. Of course to make the shelters safe, you would have to run it like a jail or at least a strictly controlled dormitory. That would drive many of the homeless away, just as fast. Catch 22?

The same thing applies to any kind of structured employment, no matter what you pay. Certainly not all, but a large portion of the homeless, don't want a regular job....nothing with rules.

It's much easier to be compassionate when it's not your backyard, and doesn't create problems for you. But, if these homeless people were drawn, by the good samaritan, to the playground your kid uses, it's much tougher,...... much, much tougher. Even if you stand watch over your kid the whole time they play, you don't want Aqualung sitting on the next swing.

Aside ~Public Park, owned by the city. Public property, right?
All the public or just legal residents of that city and their guests? Who owns it, if the residents of the city paid for it? I can remember, as a kid, being shooed out of a park in a town where I wasn't a resident, for that very reason. Of course when you're a kid raised in a climate of respect for authority, legality isn't questioned. :D

Whereas the homeless effectively have one being set up in their home.

You're pretty lose with the word "help", there, Scooter.

You may believe a handout is "help", and you're welcome to hand out all of your stuff that you like if you really beleive it's helpful. But since at least the Johnson administration I've seen way too much welfare state accomplish exactly nothing (other than providing employment to the useless apparatchiks that run the programs), while robbing people of their initiative and self-respect.

You can claim it's "help". I'm not convinced. And you're certainly not entitled to despoil a public park to do it.

Exactly...you're prepared to spew glib allusions as to how a civilized society would already set the minimum wage so anyone making it could live comfortably...fed, shelted, medical care and some unnamed "amenities" provided (Cable TV? Cellphone service? Crack cocaine? What?)

But you don't even know how much that would be...there's no limit to your largess with employer's money in setting the price for unskilled labor.

And don't you run with the same crowd that tells us how our economy can't afford to do without the illegals who work for less than the prevailing wages?

Whom are you addressing?

I'm in agreement with most of what you say in this post, but I'd be wary of waving the Superdome around as a scarecrow...most of the wild stories in the press about what supposedly went on there turned out to be urban legend.

That said, in the same situation the cops would find it difficult to confiscate my legally owned weapons, as the NO cops seemed to think they were entitled to. Fortunately we now have some state laws explicitly forbidding that, with federal laws perhaps to follow.

As we all know, homeless folks cook their own food from healthy ingredients in spacious, sanitary kitchens.

My point was that a massive increase in the minimum wage would price some goods that use unskilled labor in their production out of reach of the very people most likely to need them. Or cause minimum wage jobs to dry up.

I think that's why Sexxvet is dodging the question as to how much he thinks the minimum wage should be to solve all these problems.

You mean like the WPA?

Squatting someplace doesn't make it your home. Having the homeless consider the parks to be their home is what this law is intended to avoid.

I am not evil, no one is.
I am not mean-spirited, like your post, and did work in them, while I still could and still support them. I have also fed the homeless in my home, several times.
Criticize away... those in pain always want to share it.

Actually, it does.

I deal with a lot of homeless people. From Robert the homeless, crazy guy who sometimes sleeps on the porch, to a variety of folks in bad circumstances, folks who have lost everything to crack use (and continue to use), and people who have alienated their families.

There need to be limits set, otherwise they do keep coming and coming and coming, from all over.

Las Vegas is a sort of mecca for the homeless in the Western US. I have a friend who lives there (actual native Las Vegan, former emergency dispatcher, husband was a cop, her children are cops, so she's speaking from real experience, rather than just NIMBY type bitching) who tells me that it's worse than it ever has been.

Nice modest proposal. I'm for it.

Soylent Green is people!!

Does what?
I don't know what you are referring to in my post, specifically.
But, if you are saying, it will bring them to the park, feeding those who are already there... so?
Good, then we know where they are so we can help them and then they will not be homeless any longer, right? Problem solved.

Is it just me or is it sick to anyone else that someone would think it is a bad thing to feed a hungry person in any circumstance, ever?

My old boss, before he went nuts and stopped coming to work, used to talk about the shelter system in Britain.

They had a lot of strict rules, including one that I found very interesting. You were only permitted to spend one night at a shelter within a specified period of time. Shelters were placed about one day's walk apart. You got a bed, a meal, and were sent out.

There are some shelter programs that just house and feed people. I don't think that these are of much value, beyond making people dependent on their services. The successful programs are the ones that focus on transition to permanent residence, Ready-for-Work programs, and so forth ... but those beds are going empty, because people refuse to sign up for them.

Philadelphia has several programs, like Horizon House, that I believe I've discussed before, specifically designed to assist the seriously mentally ill homeless. They have psychiatrists, social workers, nurses, and case managers, provide apartments, life skills training, etc.

Only about 15% of homeless people are identified as mentally ill. Off the top of my head, I think the rate for the rest of the population is about 10%. Based on my own personal experience, that five percent difference is probably attributable to two things ... classifying substance abuse as mental illness (which it isn't) and getting a psych diagnosis by manipulating the system into calling you crazy for three hots and a cot and some nice cozy medications.

Trust me, I know a lot of homeless crazy people, but I also know a lot of homeless manipulators. Talked to one tonight, in fact. By a careful combination of talking about suicide interspersed with requests to go to rehab, this person has been hospitalized since early May. Not all at the same place, but the individual has gone from facility to facility this way. The most recent place was too demanding. They actually wanted the patient to participate in treatment, and so, on cue, the suicide card is played, including a refusal to contract for safety, and a threat to "flip out" and throw a computer off a shrink's desk to add flavoring. Even managed to sob on the phone, blaming the facility before last's changing of medication, for today's "instability."

Yeah. Sure.

My hospital is closer to the client's significant other, and unlike a rehab, we allow visiting.

But you know what? The insurance company agrees to pay, and the person will be brought in.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

This is your tax dollars at work, people. Aren't you proud?

Causes the homeless to propagate.

If you feed them, they will come.

We can't have them fed then. That is the reason for the law. Back to square one.

I wonder how many taking part in this discussion know what it is to be truly hungry?

Man, I havent had anthing to eat in fifteen minutes! Of COURSE I know!

In America there is hunger, but not one single sign of starvation.

http://cellar.org/showpost.php?p=243852&postcount=14

One-on-one charity, while it might be thought admirable by some, doesn't count in this case.

I said "opening a food kitchen"...making a public announcement that food is available to the hungry for the taking at (or very near is good enough) your home. Otherwise you're not demonstrating a willingness to bear the burden of a convergence of large numbers of "the needy" on your home.

You can fling accusations of "mean-spiritedness" or "sickness" around if you like...but then that's awfully hard to distinguish from criticism, isn't it? As for sharing pain...well...I'm sure my pain is not in the same league as yours; you've certainly shared a lot of it here.

Hypocrisy is a different animal from mean-spiritedness though...

-------

By the way, perhaps I should mention that the mental hospital where Wolf works is on the same property as the Farm Park...in fact the farm itself used to be worked by inmates of the hospital to raise some of their own food.

In most grocery stores you can get a dozen eggs for $1. Good luck with the project rk