Cities Criminalizing Homelessness Amid Urban Boom

More cities—many of them "revitalizing" their urban cores at the same time as a national recession and a real estate market beset by diminishing supplies of low-income housing—are criminalizing homelessness.

1 minute read

July 23, 2014, 2:00 PM PDT

By James Brasuell @CasualBrasuell


Anti homeless bench

Laurie Avocado / flickr

A report by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP) "found that laws placing restrictions on loitering, begging, sitting and lying down in public have increased nationwide since 2009. Eighteen percent of cities now ban sleeping in public and 42 percent of cities ban sleeping in vehicles," according to an article by Xander Landen.

The cause of the ebbing of humanitarianism has everything to do with recent trends in urbanism, according to the NLCHP: "an overwhelming increase in urban homelessness after the recession and a widespread initiative to revitalize cities’ downtown areas incited the crackdown on the homeless."

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