The home secretary, Suella Braverman, has described rough sleeping as a “lifestyle choice” while defending her decision to restrict the use of tents by homeless people on the streets of Britain.
According to Whitehall insiders, Braverman plans to crack down on tents that cause a nuisance in urban areas such as high streets – amid growing numbers of rough sleepers and what the government considers a rise in antisocial behaviour.
The home secretary has also proposed the introduction of a civil offence, which could lead to charities being fined if they provide homeless people with tents, the Financial Times reported.
Writing on X, formerly Twitter, Braverman defended her proposals, saying: “The British people are compassionate. We will always support those who are genuinely homeless. But we cannot allow our streets to be taken over by rows of tents occupied by people, many of them from abroad, living on the streets as a lifestyle choice.
“Unless we step in now to stop this, British cities will go the way of places in the US like San Francisco and Los Angeles, where weak policies have led to an explosion of crime, drug-taking, and squalor.
I live in San Francisco. Here, we have a large homeless population that comprises a number of subcategories. One of the major subgroups could be reasonably described as recreationally or perhaps volitionally homeless; they prefer life on the streets and the possibility of moments of fleeting drugged joy, to a grinding, dull, depersonalized life in state-provided shelter. All of them, however, the result of neoliberal and reactionary political, economic, educational, and carceral policies that allowed people to become disconnected and disaffected to the point where they rocked up on SF’s streets for its mild environs, lax legal system, and plentiful meth and fenty.
What you describe as “voluntary” homelessness sounds to me like the devastating physiological effects of drug addiction.
Sure, and lack of opportunity, support systems, affordable housing, mental and physical health services, etc.
Most hard drug addiction has its roots in systemic failure(s).
It sounds like the feds are starting to step things up on the drug enforcement side. I’m curious to see what happens with that.
Also in the bay area and have walked past a number of situating that aren’t normalized elsewhere (e.g. People bent over at the waist passed out, people passed out/blissed on the side of a major sidewalk (into embarcadero), etc.)
I like a balance approach to enforcement and ensuring shelter for everyone. A few things, here, aren’t working.
All of that said, I’ll go into SF any ol’ day and have a good, safe time. I’ll drive or I’ll take Bart. There’s a lot of undeserved SF hate. It isn’t perfect, but it sure is good to be in.
There is a feral quality to SF that is starting to remind me of NYC in the late-‘70s and ‘80s.
You can see the establishment of other ways of being that assume zero input or oversight from organized systems. For example, the red-light running is legion and increasing. I regularly pop out for a single errand on my bike and witness three different drivers blowing through solid red lights.
The SFPD decided they want paid, but not to do the usual. So here we are.m and that’s why the feds and state police are getting to do the work.