Help the homeless, go to jail: Fremont passes hard-line law criminalizing encampments
More than 200 people packed into a Fremont city council meeting Tuesday as leaders voted to make it a crime to help homeless people by providing them with food, clothing, or other assistance.
Fremont, California
https://www.city-data.com/city/Fremont-California.html
Mean prices in 2022: all housing units: over $1,000,000; detached houses: over $1,000,000; townhouses or other attached units: over $1,000,000; in 2-unit structures: $871,684; in 3-to-4-unit structures: $882,000; in 5-or-more-unit structures: $724,990; mobile homes: $226,331
Median gross rent in 2022: $2,745.
This happens when housing construction is constrained.
Fremont exists on a strip of land between the mountains and San Francisco Bay. It cannot expand outwards. It can only expand upwards.
That's what Fremont looks like. It is full of low-height residential buildings.
You want people to be in houses, then you're going to have to adjust zoning and planning restrictions to permit Fremont to grow upwards.
Don't do that, and people will simply bid what they are able and willing to bid to try to force someone else out of the limited supply of housing so that they can live there. Some people will not be able and willing, and those people won't get housing in Fremont. If you don't like that, then you need to remove restrictions on vertical growth.
I mean, I agree that it's unaffordable, and that building up is a solution to that, but homelessness is rarely caused by housing costs being too high.
Most people who can't afford the rising cost of living in an area either add roommates or move somewhere cheaper.
To end up in a tent in an encampment is almost always correlated with drug use or mental illness.
Which isn't to say we shouldn't take care of those people. We should. But lack of housing is almost never the limiting factor there.
Morons who decided to support such law are free to give up their houses. These can be used for homeless people instead.
Utterly disgusting.
I am sure the problem will disappear now.
