~ Jon and Simon round off the year with a trip into the weeds talking about reaching the Mark Jenner period in the Spycops saga, Labour’s disgusting joining in on European far-right efforts to undercut human rights laws, the real reasons why housing is under so much pressure, and the latest stories from our newswire. The post Anarchist News Review: What have human rights ever done for us? appeared first on Freedom News.

Zohran Mamdani and President Donald Trump had a surprisingly chummy meeting in the Oval Office last week, especially after Trump had described Mamdani during the New York City mayoral campaign as a “100 percent Communist lunatic,” a “total nut job,” and a “Jew hater.” A reporter asked the mayor-elect, often depicted in the press as a class-baiting socialist, if he thought Trump was really a “fascist.” In the awkward moment that followed, Mamdani had barely time to respond before Trump interrupted in a jovial fashion, assuring him that it was “okay” to call him one. Mamdani acknowledged that he did, while Trump relieved the tension by laughing it off. During the meeting, the two New Yorkers from the polar ends of the political spectrum discussed immigration, real estate and crime, zoning laws, and utility costs, and agreed on one issue that is one of the president’s passions: They both want to build more in New York City. As Trump told reporters while he sat behind his desk, with Mamdani standing behind him, “Some of his ideas really are the same ideas that I have. We agree on a lot more than I would’ve thought.” New York’s next mayor has made housing the centerpiece of his political identity, promising to unleash the public sector to build affordable homes that the private market has failed to build. Affordable housing is a major problem all over the country, but especially in New York. A controversy over one garden spotlights a broader policy question—whether urban planners can deliver both housing and ecological health in an era of climate stress. Or will New York and other American cities continue to trade one public good for another? Like President Trump in his past as a real estate developer building glass skyscrapers, Mamdani is facing serious opposition to his desire to replace green space with residential housing. Consider his quest to construct public housing for elderly on the site of the Elizabeth Street Garden—a whimsical pocket of Manhattan filled with neoclassical statues, pear trees, and rosebushes. In one of his final official acts to block his path, on November 3, after Mayor Eric Adams had already stepped down as a candidate but one day before the election, he quietly designated the garden as parkland “permanently.” Now, Mamdani will need the approval of the State Legislature to construct housing on the site. Building housing for the unhoused was one of Mamdani’s campaign promises. When Adams’ decision came to light, Mamdani expressed his annoyance: “It is no surprise that Mayor Adams is using his final weeks to cement a legacy of dysfunction and inconsistency.”  Adams countered that his decision was about “protecting his legacy.” Yet, in pursuing this cause, he is doing an about-face. Adams, too, once tried to bulldoze the garden to build housing for low-income seniors. He lost to a fierce coalition of neighborhood activists. It’s easy to see both sides. The city’s affordable housing shortage has reached crisis proportions—more than 91,133 people sleep in the main New York City shelter system, and 25 percent of renters spend more than half their income on housing. Yet green space, too, has shifted from luxury to necessity. Trees and gardens cool the air, clean the lungs, and soothe the mind. Environmental justice advocates rightly insist that a healthy city requires both roofs and roots. But as real estate prices soar, New York’s leaders are pressed into what feels like an unforgiving binary—homes or habitats, people or plants. > As real estate prices soar, New York City’s leaders are pressed into what > feels like an unforgiving binary—homes or habitats, people or plants. It doesn’t have to be that way. There was a time when common green spaces were part of everyday urban life. In colonial New England, villagers foraged, grazed animals, and gathered wood on the green and in shared forests. Commons provided the material cornucopia that powered essential common law rights to food, fuel, and shelter. When commoners moved to cities, they brought these practices with them—transforming waste ground and food scraps into fertile soil for small gardens. Shared land served as the foundation for civic infrastructure that we hold dear today. Before it became a jewel of the elite in the 1850s, sections of Central Park were once a patchwork of green shantytowns, built by working people who grew food and raised animals on “wasteland.” The same was true of Hyde Park in London, Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC, and the Fenway in Boston.   As a historian, I look to the distant past, but you don’t have to go too far back in time to see the service of urban greenspace. In Washington in 1950, the US Department of Agriculture counted more than 2,000 hogs and 74,000 chickens, long after laws had banned both types of animals from the city. As late as the 1950s, in cities as different as New York, Washington, Cleveland, Detroit, and Memphis, large numbers of working people relied for subsistence on their backyard gardens and on food grown on roofs and balconies. Home-grown provisions saved people money to pay rents and mortgages. In 1940, some of the poorest neighborhoods of Washington, east of the Anacostia River, where 94 percent of the population was Black, had some of the highest rates of homeowner occupancy, second only to the high-income DuPont Circle neighborhood. The green lungs of our cities were born not of wealth, but of necessity. In the decades that followed, regular people, not business or city leaders, held cities together during economic downturns. They cleaned up unregulated dumping and generally kept their neighborhoods from descending into a scene from Planet of the Apes. In the 1970s, as New York City teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, developers abandoned buildings, and landlords torched their properties for insurance money. New Yorkers stepped in to claim the ruins. By 1990, neighbors in all five boroughs, but especially on the Lower East Side, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, turned vacant lots into an estimated 800 community gardens. (In the 2000s, Mayor Rudy Giuliani sought to auction off many of the garden lots, but protestors saved most of them.) In the same spirit, in 1991, Allan Reiver—a scavenger of forgotten art and architectural fragments—leased several lots on Elizabeth Street to save them from becoming a parking lot. He filled them with plants and sculpture, creating the lush, eccentric sanctuary that stands today. The real question is not whether to preserve one garden, but how to reclaim the idea of the urban commons. For the last 100 years, New York City’s shared spaces have been shaped not by the people who live in them but by the infrastructures built to move them—or exclude them. In the 1940s, Robert Moses, the “master builder” who never held elected office, remade the city for the automobile. His parkways to Long Island’s beaches, deliberately engineered with low overpasses, barred buses and thus working-class visitors. His web of expressways gutted neighborhoods from the Bronx to Red Hook in the name of progress, displacing hundreds of thousands of working poor to house the middle and upper classes. He famously declared that “a city without traffic is a ghost town.” Moses’ ghost lingers in the grid: nearly a quarter of New York’s land area is devoted to streets and parking lots. Each car registered in the city effectively enjoys one and a half parking spaces, while the city’s human residents scramble for housing. Streets and parking lots, devoted to moving and storing cars, are the commons of our age.  > “To change a community, you have to change the soil.” But the era of the city-as-parking-lot is ending. In 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency launched the “Green Streets Program,” encouraging communities to redesign streets with gardens, bioswales, bike paths, and permeable pavement, a green infrastructure that naturally manages stormwater, reduces pollution, and creates more resilient and healthier communities. Mamdani’s proposal for high-speed bus lanes, pedestrian walkways, and the transformation of parking lots into public housing promises to turn New York toward a viridescent horizon. As the city is reconfigured with fewer cars, New Yorkers could, as in the past, take it further, transforming the new wastes (pavement) into a blooming bounty. Curbside gardens could replace idling cars. Parking lots could be transformed into orchards and community plots. Major avenues could be reborn as edible forests of fruits, nuts, herbs, and flowers, as the famed “Gangsta Gardener” Ron Finley has been doing in South Central Los Angeles. “To change a community,” Finley says, “you have to change the soil.” Cities in Europe are already showing what that might look like on a large scale. In the past two decades, the socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has replaced more than 50,000 parking spaces and hundreds of car lanes with parks, bike paths, and tree-lined promenades. The banks of the Seine, once choked with traffic, are now a riverfront park. And Parisians appeared to be fully supportive of the transformation. Earlier this year, they voted to ban cars from an additional 500 streets. Nitrogen dioxide levels that once sat in the red zone have fallen into the green. Amsterdam is doing the same. So is Copenhagen, where a devastating 2011 flood led engineers to rip up asphalt and replace it with wetlands, ponds, and rooftop gardens to absorb the next deluge. London, improbably, is reintroducing beavers to help manage stormwater—and in the process, Londoners are learning how to care for and live with beavers. These European projects configure civic infrastructure differently. Climate infrastructure, equity infrastructure, and survival infrastructure are what students of urban planning study today. The impasse between the former and future mayor over the Elizabeth Street Gardens is a false conflict. Climate adaptation and social justice are not competing priorities. They are two sides of the same project—a new vision of the urban commons visible in Mr. Mamdani’s campaign plan to turn 500 asphalt school yards into 500 neighborhood green spaces. “When we stand up and say that we have an agenda to transform our city schools, to renovate 500 public schools, to build 500 green schoolyards, to create thousands of union jobs, to transform 50 schools into resilience hubs, and to prioritize those that have long been forgotten,” he told a Nation reporter, “that is an agenda we are willing to fight for. That is an agenda we are willing to defend.” Kate Brown is the Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at M.I.T. and author of Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City, which will be published in February by Norton.

When President Donald Trump tries to defend his mass deportation agenda, he claims, without evidence, that immigrants are entering the United States from “mental institutions and insane asylums.”  When he wants to insult people—like Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Mo.), or former Vice President Kamala Harris—he calls them “low IQ,” “deranged,” and “mentally disabled.”  And when he and Vice President JD Vance tried to justify the federal takeover of Washington, DC, they claimed it was necessary in order to get mentally ill people off the streets. “Why have we convinced ourselves that it’s compassionate to allow a person who’s obviously a schizophrenic, or suffering from some other mental illness, why is it compassionate to let that person fester in the streets?” Vance said—offering as evidence, CNN reported, an anecdote “about his family being yelled at during a trip to DC.” > Thousands of federal staffers working on mental health-related issues have > been purged by Trump’s government. This is what mental health and disability advocates people call “sanist” language—words used to stigmatize mental health conditions in a derogatory way. Trump routinely turns to it to degrade his enemies and justify his actions. A review of his speeches and interviews includes more than 200 uses of the word ‘crazy’ thus far in his second term, and ‘lunatic’ and ‘insane’ more than 60 times each, according to a Roll Call database. While these words can be part of casual vernacular, Trump’s constant use of dismissive and stigmatizing rhetoric matches his actions. His officials have dismantled key parts of the federal workforce dedicated to treatment and prevention and cancelled millions of dollars in research grants focused on mental health. In doing so, experts say, Trump and his cronies are not only undermining support systems for people with mental illness but also worsening some of the same issues they claim to prioritize, including minimizing crime and reducing homelessness.  “When you cut those services, you have a lot of downstream impacts, and that’s going to include upticks in emergency department visits, hospitalization needs, incarceration and in homelessness,” said Hannah Wesolowski, the chief advocacy officer of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. One of Trump’s most sweeping attacks on people with mental illness came in late July, when he signed an executive order pushing “long-term” involuntary institutionalization for people with mental illnesses experiencing homelessness, which the order argues the EO argues will “restore public order.” Trump was more blunt about his hopes for what the EO would actually do a few weeks later, when he announced the deployment of National Guard troops to DC: “Crime, Savagery, Filth, and Scum will DISAPPEAR,” he posted on Truth Social. The White House did not respond to a series of questions. Advocacy groups quickly pointed to a plethora of issues in Trump’s order, including that it criminalizes mental illness and tramples the civil rights of unhoused people, particularly those with mental health disabilities. “This executive order diverts resources away from the real solutions we know work and instead embraces coercion over care,” National Disability Rights Network executive director Marlene Sallo said in a press release. As the National Alliance to End Homelessness pointed out, the order does not address who will determine involuntary civil commitment, under what criteria, nor acknowledge the shortage of mental health beds nationwide—an issue the American Psychiatric Association asked Trump to tackle at the start of his second term.  Research indicates that involuntary commitment can be highly traumatic and lead to people cycling in and out of institutions without getting the support they need. More research is needed on how best to support unhoused people with mental health disabilities and substance abuse issues, but Wesolowski, of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said that Trump’s order is not the way forward. “If we want to both reduce the burden of chronic conditions in this country and reduce homelessness,” she said, “the solution to that is to help people sooner.”  Trump’s cabinet seems to share his disdain for people struggling with mental health. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy oversees the National Institutes of Health, the CDC, and the FDA, among other agencies—and since he was confirmed in February, has shuttered key offices and fired critical staffers throughout the department. As our colleague Kiera Butler previously reported, during his doomed presidential campaign, Kennedy floated sending people on antidepressants to “wellness farms…to get reparented, to reconnect with communities.” He also baselessly implied, during a 2023 event with future DOGE head Elon Musk, that antidepressants could be to blame for school shootings. Just last month, the FDA held a misinformation-fest about antidepressants in pregnancy during which panelists argued that perinatal depression does not actually exist and that antidepressants are overprescribed to pregnant women, despite research suggesting that only six to ten percent take them. A leaked strategy document, that Kennedy’s so-called Make America Healthy Again Commission reportedly submitted to the president, obtained by Politico, called for a working group on antidepressant “overprescription trends” among kids.  HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Trump at a White House health technology event, July 30, 2025.Jack Power/White House/Zuma Federal staffers working on mental health-related issues, meanwhile, have been purged by Trump’s government. NIH has lost 7,000 workers, roughly 16 percent of its workforce, through firings and resignations, according to a ProPublica analysis. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) lost an even higher proportion, at 22 percent. HHS also plans to cut more than $1 billion from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), which will be collapsed into a proposed “Administration for a Healthy America,” following cuts of $72 million from March’s continuing appropriations bill; dwarfing an additional $19 million the agency supposedly plans to earmark to support housing for people with severe mental illness. In a May letter to Kennedy, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and three Democratic senators said the plans to dissolve SAMHSA appear to violate the federal law that created it. A slew of advocacy organizations also condemned the proposed cuts, calling to preserve the agency and its funding. NIMH will also be swallowed up into the newly proposed National Institute of Behavioral Health, along with the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. An HHS spokesperson told Mother Jones that “Secretary Kennedy remains deeply committed to the mental health of all Americans, including our nation’s children” and that “under the Secretary’s leadership, SAMHSA is sustaining and strengthening essential mental health and substance use programs so people can access timely, high-quality care.” Many NIMH research projects have also been decimated. In March, Michael Bronstein, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota (UMN), received news that he was dreading: He and his colleagues were losing what was left of their four-year, $187,000 research grant from the NIMH to study vaccine hesitancy in people with severe mental illness. (Bronstein spoke to Mother Jones in his personal capacity.)  The work was important. Research has shown that people with severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, are vaccinated at lower rates. They are also more likely to die of illnesses for which we have vaccines. But under the leadership of RFK Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist, the NIH deprioritized research on vaccine hesitancy, according to the grant termination notice Bronstein received—and a Washington Post report published the same day.  The news was particularly cruel for Bronstein, who with his colleagues had already spent time recruiting about 60 participants who were prepared to open up to researchers about their mental health conditions. “When things get cancelled like this,” Bronstein said, “it’s a betrayal of those individuals’ trust”—and of research that he believed was “going to have a real impact on public health.” Past NIMH research has, indeed, had major implications for treating mental illness. One 2008 study, for example, investigated treatments for psychosis in young people experiencing an initial schizophrenic episode, and led to the launch of hundreds of treatment programs for schizophrenia nationwide. The research found that wraparound treatment of psychosis after an initial episode led to less severe episodes later in life. That study was “a great example of research being put into practice and making a huge impact,” Wesolowski said. “But we need more of that.” But mental health research has been a particular focus on the chopping block of DOGE, which terminated hundreds of NIH grants—with NIMH grants accounting for the largest subset, according to a paper published in JAMA in May. Since then, dozens more NIMH grants have been cancelled, although some terminations have been reversed or are likely to be reversed following a slate of legal challenges, according to the database Grant Witness.   The majority of the cancelled NIMH grants featured in the JAMA study—nearly 75 percent, according to Mother Jones’ analysis—focused on research involving LGBTQ people, who are more than twice as likely as straight, cisgender people to report mental disorders. And with the Trump administration’s additional measures seeking to erase LGBTQ people from public life—by banning trans troops from the military, dismissing discrimination on the basis of gender identity, and purging LGBTQ history from public spaces—these rates could climb even higher.  > “When things get cancelled like this, it’s a betrayal of those individuals’ > trust.” Many of the NIMH-funded projects specifically aimed to better understand these disparities. One cancelled grant, for example, was intended to study how stigma, including state laws restricting trans health care, shapes the mental health of trans people living in rural areas. The project, part of Kirsten F. Siebach’s doctoral research at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, will continue thanks to an alternative funding source. (Siebach also spoke to Mother Jones in their personal capacity, not on behalf of the university.)  But Siebach, who hopes to build their career as a public health researcher focusing on how structural stigma affects LGBTQ people, worries that “there’s just no funding to support such work” going forward. There is already evidence that Trump’s return to the White House has made things worse for LGBTQ kids’ mental health. The day after Trump’s re-election last November, the Trevor Project, an organization focused on preventing suicide among LGBTQ youth, reported a 700 percent increase in contacts to its crisis lines. On Inauguration Day, when Trump signed an executive order that essentially refused to acknowledge the existence of trans people—the organization saw a more than 30 percent increase in contacts compared to weeks prior. Casey Pick, the organization’s director of law and policy, said those spikes reflect the fact that “LGBTQ youth are well aware that the access to care, to support of adults, to welcoming and affirming schools and medical environments is very much at risk.” A protest in defense of LGBTQ suicide hotline services in New York City, July 12, 2025.Gina M Randazzo/Zuma One of the highest-profile blows for LGBTQ young people came last month, when SAMHSA officially shuttered the National Suicide Hotline’s specialized services for LGBTQ youth. Those services, received more than one million contacts since launching in 2022. In a statement, SAMHSA claimed that access to “culturally competent crisis counselors” would continue, adding, “Anyone who calls the Lifeline will continue to receive compassion and help.”  The administration has also undermined support for LGBTQ youth mental health in less public ways: Seven of the cancelled NIMH grants in the JAMA study, Mother Jones found, were explicitly focused on suicide prevention among LGBTQ youth. (Two were since reinstated, but face cancellation again due to a recent Supreme Court ruling.) Two explicitly focused on suicide prevention among Black LGBTQ youth, who report disproportionate suicide risk; another aimed to implement and measure a pilot program for LGBTQ youth at risk of suicide in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. Projects like these, Pick said, helped experts “to see trends, patterns, disparities in the mental health outcomes for our LGBTQ+ young people and to begin to identify solutions.”  Explicit attacks on LGBTQ young people in particular are coupled with indirect impacts on their mental health from other administration actions: Trump’s involuntary commitment order, for example, is likely to have a disproportionate impact on LGBTQ young people, given that they experience homelessness at higher rates than their straight and cis peers. Trump’s executive order seeking to end federal funding for K-12 schools that promote so-called “gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology” could penalize teachers and school counselors who seek to support LGBTQ students, which would ultimately harm the students themselves, given that research has shown accepting adults can reduce their risk of suicide. And LGBTQ youth and their families who flee their home states, or even the country, to escape threats to gender-affirming care or outright bans may further struggle after being uprooted and losing support systems. “What is so important now is that we make sure that young people know that they are not alone, that they still have access to resources,” Pick said, “but the reality is, this is a very challenging time.”

On July 24, President Donald Trump issued an executive order for a nationwide push to involuntarily commit unhoused people to institutions—claiming that roundups would “restore public order,” and demanding the reversal of legal precedents and consent decrees that “impede” the policy, a draconian move that disability rights groups argue violates civil liberties. The resultant crackdown in Washington, DC—where an estimated 5,000 people live without permanent shelter, around 800 on the street—began on August 14. DC’s largest encampment was destroyed on Monday, and although it’s unclear how many people have been civilly committed, the sweep has left unhoused people scrambling to find new places to stay, often losing the few possessions they have. Dr. Sam Tsemberis, who developed the evidence-based Housing First approach Trump has abandoned, spoke to my Reveal colleagues last week about the futility and violence of the White House’s crackdown. “People will get discharged from the hospital. They will get released from the jail. And they’ll be back out on the street and the thing will be going in a circle again,” Tsemberis said. “The only way to end homelessness is to provide housing.” Trump has always backed brutal crackdowns on visible homelessness and disability, part of a lifelong pattern of hostility to poor people, disgust for disabled people, obsession with “good genes” and cleanliness, and a sense of Washington, DC—until fairly recently, a majority Black city—as a somehow fundamentally unsavory, unsightly place. His encampment sweeps and ramp-up of policing mirror familiar scenes in the San Francisco Bay Area, where an influx of wealth has sparked a major housing crisis, intense economic inequality, and public hostility towards the growing ranks of homeless locals. > “Disability has always functioned as a rationale, an alibi, an excuse, and a > bottom line for all kinds of oppression.” In fact, there’s a throughline from San Francisco to Trump’s anti-disability, anti-homeless agenda: as far back as 1867, San Francisco was the epicenter of a spate of “Ugly Laws,” a legislative crackdown on poverty and disability that closely parallels the Trump program on housing and institutionalization. Sparked in part by an influx of disabled Civil War veterans, ugly laws fined and enforced the arrest of poor, often disabled people for begging, or just existing, on city streets—often followed by institutionalization in brutal 19th-century facilities that offered little or nothing in the way of treatment. Ugly laws quickly spread across the country, and never entirely went away. Pushes to police, incarcerate, or drive out unhoused and disabled people have been a constant in American life—and hardly just a Republican thing, with high-profile Democratic politicians like California Gov. Gavin Newsom or New York Mayor Eric Adams prominently endorsing encampment sweeps and forced institutionalization. To understand more about the Ugly Laws and their legacy, I spoke with University of California, Berkeley professor emeritus Susan Schweik, who is also the author of the book The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. What societal issues contributed to the first Ugly Law in San Francisco in 1867? Let me first say that we know about this law because of the disability movement in the 1970s. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Helen Keller were never going to get arrested under this ordinance, which prohibited diseased, maimed, deformed bodies from exposing themselves to public view. It was a status offense. This law was directed against poor people. It’s extremely important to understand it as part of a big cluster of vagrancy laws that were being practiced in the South after the Civil War, and that US northern abolitionists who went down to fight slavery, unfortunately, saw the effectiveness of the vagrancy law in the South was being used to substitute for slavery. Abolitionists brought that back up to the cities in the north, which were under all kinds of pressure. People no longer knew the people they passed on the street. Streets were crowded. Poverty was extreme. There were no safety nets. So it targeted poor people. It targeted poor people who were begging, or who were understood to be begging and disability. Being disabled on the street at all could be construed as begging; whether you were putting a hand out or shaking a cup or saying anything to anyone, it was possible to be understood as asking for people’s pity. What types of punishments did poor, disabled people face under the Ugly Laws?  At some point, I realized that if I could figure out when a city opened its first almshouse or poor house, it was quite likely that the unsightly begging ordinance would happen, because they had a place to sweep people off the street. Once big medicalized institutions for the so-called feeble-minded [were established], then it’s easier for a city to pass a law like this without somehow feeling or seeming heartless. It’s very tied to institutionalization and to shutting people away. People were much more likely to be stuck behind those walls for good when it was understood that they were being kind of medically and charitably helped by being given a place. > “Trump, many decades ago, cut his political teeth by trying to shut down > vending stands by disabled veterans on Fifth Avenue.” Very often, the law was unenforced. The police were uncomfortable with it. They didn’t want to do it. A huge thing was sorting out the deserving and the undeserving, and so police often didn’t do it. Even if police did do it, very often, courts didn’t sentence anybody. There’s very little evidence that anybody actually was legally penalized at the level of the municipal courts. [But] that didn’t mean it didn’t have major catastrophic effects. I had thought for a long time that there was no record of resistance by disabled people to this oppression, and I was wrong. There was an amazing man who lived on the street named Arthur Franklin Fuller, who became the hero of my book, who traveled from town to town until he got kicked out. He self-published books, and one of them was like a legal treatise on the unconstitutionality of the unsightly beggar ordinances. I couldn’t believe it when I found it. It wasn’t like people didn’t try to organize. They did. There was an attempt to unionize disabled beggars in LA to negotiate with the city as a union. How did the “othering” of disabled people lead to the Ugly Laws not getting the backlash that it should have? I think the ugly laws were part of a variety of systems and structures, most notably institutionalization. They were tied to the development of various kinds of institutions that were eugenic because they very deliberately removed people from the social world where they might have relationships that might lead to childbearing. Discrimination in the US has always justified itself on disability grounds. The great historian Douglas Baynton makes this very clear in the realm of immigration: when groups are excluded from being able to enter the US, there’s always a language of disability. They’re contagious, they’re feeble-minded, they’re weak, they’re going to be a burden on the state. Disability has always functioned as a rationale, an alibi, an excuse and a bottom line for all kinds of oppression. Women couldn’t vote because they were hysterical and too emotional. Black people were too volatile or cognitively impaired, or whatever term was going to be marshaled at the moment. Donald Trump, many decades ago, cut his political teeth by trying to shut down vending stands by disabled veterans on Fifth Avenue, and he was absolutely explicit about them being repulsive and unsightly. He has a very long line of operating out of that terrorizing repulsion. Did the fight for disability civil rights help lead to the dismantling of the Ugly Laws?  There was a case in the 1970s in Omaha where a policeman wanted to arrest an unhoused person and didn’t know how—so he goes to the ordinance books, finds this [ugly] law, and he’s like, “Oh, that guy has a scar, so I’ll use this.” He goes to court. The judge was like, What does this mean? If my neighbor’s homely kids ask me for something, they should be arrested? Like, what? What is unsightly? Even though the judge threw it out of court, the DA held a press conference and said [it was] still a good law—and then it [was] reported as “Begging law punishes only the ugly.” Disability activists in Omaha read that headline, and working with disability activists in other Midwestern cities, decided that they were going to make a fuss about that law. An April 21, 1974 article from the Omaha World-Herald.Omaha World-Herald/Newspapers.com Chicago disability activists went to their city council as a form of [political] theater, and said this law is still on the books. Nobody was being arrested under it, [but] nobody had ever cared about removing it, and so poor Chicago got a bad rep for being the site of the ugly law, when it really was the site of the activism. So we know everything we know about these laws because of the disability movement in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. It was invoked explicitly in the campaign for the Americans with Disabilities Act. There are books all over the country, city code books, where they’re still sitting. Do you think that Trump’s executive order targeting homeless people with psychiatric disabilities is reminiscent of the Ugly Laws?  Two things that are conjoined in that executive order [are] endemic vagrancy and mental illness, the combination [that] the way in which these unsightly, bigger ordinances got passed after cities had institutions that could be stocked full of people who other people did not want to see on the street. How is endemic vagrancy and unsightly encampment and the presence of what gets called mental illness? How is it going to be tackled by the executive order? It’s going to be tackled by civil commitment, by institutionalization. I think about the important disability advocate and activist Rebecca Cokley, who put out this call and pointed out that people were tending to reduce the possible impact of that executive order to the realm of homelessness or unhoused people or mental health, but that potentially it had a much broader reach. It could target dissent, and that was true of the history of unsightly beggar ordinances. Someone trans could be identified as a mentally ill person. There are so many ways to contain and hurt and banish immigrants, especially Black and brown people, and to disappear them, as Rebecca says. Ugly laws basically disappeared after World War I, because the existence of large numbers of disabled veterans produced rehabilitation and systems that were, at least at in theory, meant to include people in every aspect of society. [But] here we are again. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

THE CRIMINALISATION OF HOMELESSNESS AND POVERTY IS NOT TRULY ENDING—ONLY BEING RESHAPED ~ Tony ~ On 10 June 2025 the Government confirmed it will repeal the Vagrancy Act 1824 by Spring 2026 (you just can’t rush these things), and whilst the news was widely and justifiably welcomed by homelessness charities, we should sound a note of caution: we have been here before. The previous Government also said it would repeal the Act, only to announce even more reactionary laws to be put in its place. This time the Government says it will be replaced by amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill to include a new offence of facilitating begging for gain and an offence of trespassing with the intention of committing a crime, both of which are included under the 1824 Act.  Of course, the Crime and Policing Bill is already a thoroughly repressive piece of legislation, including so-called respect orders (which can be used to prohibit a wide variety of anti-social behaviour), youth injunctions (to be used against children aged 10 or over but under 18) and further restrictions on protests (prohibiting the wearing or otherwise using of an item that conceals a person’s identity, an offence of possession of pyrotechnics at protests, and an offence of climbing on a war memorial). Whilst most of the Vagrancy Act was repealed over time, the part of the legislation that makes it a criminal offence to sleep rough or beg in England and Wales remains in force (it was repealed in Scotland in 1982), thus continuing to give the police both the power and the discretion to arrest people and Magistrates the power to impose a fine of up to £1,000. According the Single Homeless Project, between April 2022 (when the last Government said it would repeal the Vagrancy Act) and June 2024 (when Parliament was dissolved), 177 people, including 148 men and 27 women, were arrested under the law. To be clear this means that when you are starving and you beg for food or money to buy food you can be arrested. When you lose your home and are forced to sleep on the streets you can be fined. When you cannot pay the fine you can be imprisoned. As always the victims of capitalism are the scapegoats. HOW WE GOT HERE An Act for the Punishment of idle and disorderly Persons, and Rogues and Vagabonds, in England, to give its full title, was part of the response of the ruling class to the rioting that followed the Napoleonic Wars. The price of bread increased but wages did not (I hope this does not sound too contemporary). As a result many agricultural labourers were plunged into poverty. Trade unions were effectively illegal (just 10 years later the Tolpuddle Martyrs were tried, convicted and sentenced to penal transportation to Australia for swearing a secret oath as members of a friendly society). Unemployment increased. The Corn Laws were enacted to impose tariffs on all imported cereal grains, including wheat, oats and barley, thus increasing the profits and power of land owners. Unrest was widespread. The 1824 Act set a new model, which proved extremely influential around the world over the following centuries. Between the early nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, vagrancy laws were adopted or reformulated almost everywhere the British rulers colonised. Laws were adopted to cover a broad range of ‘offences’ and ‘offensive’ ways of being, including impoverishment, idleness, begging, hawking, public gambling, sex work, public indecency, fortune-telling, traditional religious practices, drunkenness, homosexuality, cross-dressing, socialising across racial groups, being suspicious, and many other activities as well. They were adopted for a range of purposes: to control labour and limit workers’ bargaining positions, including after the abolition of slavery; to define the boundaries of civilized, industrious, and moral society; and to “clean up the streets” and reinforce urban boundaries. Most overarchingly, vagrancy laws served as a practical and rhetorical means through which the discretionary power of the state, as enforced through the police and magistracy, was expanded. The Vagrancy Act 1824 comes from a largely forgotten era. Before the supposed Victorian values that so many reactionary politicians still like to espouse. A decade before the ‘new’ poor law which introduced the workhouses. Twenty years before Engels’ study of the Condition of the Working Class in England. Over a century before the welfare state. As for the offences of leaving properties empty, making rents unaffordable and reducing people to poverty, unsurprisingly no legalisation is proposed—but law and morality rarely coincide. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Photo: Matt Collamer on Unsplash The post Scrapping the Vagrancy Act appeared first on Freedom News.

This story was originally published by Grist and Street Roots and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On a Thursday morning in Portland’s Old Town neighborhood, two dozen people mill around a warehouse, waiting for the results of a lottery. At 7:45 sharp, a woman sitting in an interior office calls out three numbers in quick succession. She repeats the last one a few times before someone finally comes forward: “234?” she says into the crowd. “Who’s 234?”  Chris Parker is 234. He is tall and thin and wears Garneau cycling gloves and a baseball cap from the power tools company DeWalt. “Are you kidding me?” he says, happy and shocked. Across the room, one of the other selectees—number 237—does a kind of end-zone victory dance, shimmying with arms above his head. The lottery determines who will participate in that day’s waste collection program from Ground Score Association, a Portland-based collective for people who “create and fill low-barrier waste materials management jobs.” Through this particular program, called GLITTER (short for Ground Score Leading Inclusively Together Through Environmental Recovery), Parker will join a group of Ground Score employees on a four-hour walk around Portland, clearing sidewalks of plastic and other trash. At the end of the shift, he’ll get $80 in cash—$4.55 more per hour than the Portland metro area minimum wage. Participating in the lottery doesn’t require passing a drug or sobriety test or providing a social security number. It’s meant to provide low-barrier employment to people who might otherwise struggle to find or keep a job. Parker, for example, tells me he totaled his car last summer—the latest in a string of misfortunes. He says he used to work at a rail yard on the Columbia River, but he was laid off when he got Covid. It’s been difficult to find a stable job, he says, especially one that pays enough for the “affordable” apartments he sees advertised at $1,300 a month. For now he’s living in a small apartment near Ground Score’s headquarters. One of Ground Score’s GLITTER teams poses for a photo mid-route.Courtesy of Ground Score Most people are homeless when they start working with Ground Score. But after a year on payroll, there’s an 80 percent chance they will have secured housing, according to the organization. Terrance Freeman, one of the employees leading a GLITTER group on Thursday, wears wraparound sports sunglasses and a yellow scarf. He’s been working at Ground Score for six months. Previously, he worked at a nearby Chevron gas station and struggled with alcohol. Another member of his group, Dana Detten—a.k.a. Peanut—was homeless for eight years and worked various jobs at Dollar Tree and FedEx before joining the GLITTER program. Kevin Grigsby, the lankiest of the team, says he came to the organization while trying to overcome mental health issues and a “huge cocaine problem.” Now he’s splitting a $630-a-month garage apartment on Portland’s outskirts with his girlfriend.  “If Ground Score didn’t hire me I would be on a different path,” Grigsby says, using a long grabber tool to pinch up an Oreo wrapper.   Grigsby and the other people employed by Ground Score are “waste pickers,” a catch-all term for the 20 million people worldwide who make a living collecting, sorting, recycling, and selling discarded materials. In recent years, waste pickers have fought for their work to be recognized and formalized in the global plastics treaty being negotiated by the United Nations.  Ground Score, which sees its mission as building community while also “changing society’s perceptions of what and who is considered valuable,” shows what that recognition and formalization look like on a local level. It’s a model with huge potential, given the urgent global need to create stronger social safety nets and combat the growing plastic waste crisis. Could it work in other cities, too? Waste pickers tend to work outside of governments’ formal waste management programs, meaning the services they provide—keeping streets clean, ensuring high recycling rates, sifting hazardous e-waste out of landfills—are underappreciated and poorly remunerated.  The International Alliance of Waste Pickers, or IAWP, which represents unions, collectives, and organizations across 34 countries, says waste pickers manage as much as 80 percent of some cities’ municipal waste, with the highest percentages in developing countries that lack extensive waste management infrastructure. One study from 2020 estimated that waste pickers collect 58 percent of all the plastic that ever gets recycled. They boost recovery rates for cardboard, aluminum, and other metals too.  Members of the Asociación Cooperativa de Recicladores de Bogotá (Waste Pickers Association of Bogotá) work in a warehouse in Colombia’s capital city in 2015. Juan Arredondo / Getty Images via Grist Waste pickers also recover e-waste—often so they can sell the metals inside electronics—as well as textiles that can still be worn, repaired, or refashioned into new goods.  In some jurisdictions, including Oregon, waste pickers collect aluminum cans and plastic bottles in order to claim a rebate determined by a so-called “bottle bill”—a law that tacks an extra 5 to 15 cent deposit onto the containers’ purchase price. But these policies are a relative rarity.  Within the US, only nine other states and Guam have one, and the majority of similar laws internationally are concentrated in Europe, Canada, and Australia. Waste pickers in poorer countries often have to buy or sell their wares directly to recycling companies or brokers, and they can’t rely on a government-mandated return rate per item collected. These activities not only provide waste pickers with a living, they also help to address climate change. According to one study published in March, a subset of waste pickers in just one city—Salvador, Brazil—helped avoid more than 27,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions between 2010 and 2022, mostly by enabling recycling that displaced the need for raw materials like aluminum and PET, the kind of plastic used in water bottles. (For context, that’s about the amount emitted by 6,300 gasoline-powered cars in a year.) Removing paper and cardboard from landfills also reduces emissions, because these materials would otherwise release methane—a potent greenhouse gas—as they decompose. Waste pickers’ services have recently gained attention thanks to negotiations for a binding United Nations treaty to “end plastic pollution,” which began in early 2022 and are ongoing. One paper published last year, quoting an unnamed negotiator, described waste pickers as “the human face” of the treaty, since they’re on the front lines of plastic pollution. In the negotiations, the IAWP has allied with many countries and environmental groups that want to put limits on global plastic production. But it’s also calling for the treaty to include a distinct article ensuring a “just transition” for waste pickers whose livelihoods could be at risk from greater formalization of the waste management sector. Broadly, IAWP wants countries to build better waste management systems around the work waste pickers are already doing, instead of bringing in private companies that would take their place.  Ground Score is showing how to implement that goal on a small scale—in part through partnerships with city, county, and state government, but also through a participatory organizational structure that gives waste pickers a sense of ownership over Ground Score’s activities. Workers in the program “feel like it’s a privilege that they can actually help their own community rather than just perpetuating this culture of, you know, giving and taking ‘handouts,’” says Taylor Cass Talbott, Ground Score’s co-executive director, who is also the advocacy director for the IAWP.  Cass Talbott, Laura Tokarski, and Barbra Weber co-founded Ground Score in 2019 as a “peer-led initiative,” meaning it would be organized by and for the city’s waste pickers. Weber had been collecting cans in Portland since 2015—she had previously worked in marketing, but a brain lesion affected her ability to speak and put her on the street. Tokarski had already founded the Portland-based Trash for Peace, a nonprofit that engagess with communities to reduce and reuse waste. Ground Score is now fiscally sponsored by Trash for Peace. In contrast to most waste pickers’ activities, Ground Score’s GLITTER program doesn’t focus on recovering and selling recyclable material. According to one of the organization’s co-directors, Nic Boehm, 26 percent of what participants collect is nonrecyclable “microtrash,” like cigarette butts. Much of the rest is food wrappers, containers, plastic bags, needles—things that can’t be recycled and are instead destined for landfills or incinerators.  Ground Score employees at The People’s Depot pay cash for the cans and bottles that canners drop off.Brodie Cass Talbott GLITTER’s workers are compensated thanks to funding from the City of Portland’s Homelessness and Urban Camping Impact Reduction Program, as well as contracts with local businesses associations. The Homeless Services Department, a partnership between Portland and overlapping Multnomah County, has also supported the program through funds raised by a 2020 “supportive housing services” tax, though a department spokesperson told Grist that funding for “employment programs” like GLITTER may be reduced in the 2026 budget.  GLITTER highlights the value that waste pickers provide outside the recycling value chain, by keeping city streets clean. “Trash attracts other trash,” Boehm tells me as his group sweeps up fast food containers and wrappers around an overflowing garbage can. The goal is to keep the buildup at bay. Ground Score also has another program that more closely resembles the type of waste picking that is common in other jurisdictions. It’s called The People’s Depot, and it serves as a dropoff point for those who collect and sell used cans and bottles, who are sometimes called “canners.” The people who visit the depot gather empty water bottles and aluminum cans, whether from the side of the road or from unsorted residential recycling bins, and then lug them to a small lot underneath the Morrison Bridge, in Portland’s Central Eastside neighborhood.  At the depot, canners sell their goods for 10 cents a pop—a value assigned to them by the current version of Oregon’s 54-year-old bottle bill. Ground Score’s payroll employees, some of whom are current or former canners, dole out more than $4,000 in cash each day. The money comes from beverage companies that pay into the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative, a nonprofit that manages implementation of the bottle bill. Deposited bottles are hauled off at the end of each day to an Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative warehouse, where they’re weighed so that Ground Score can be reimbursed for their value. Kris Brown is the operational manager at The People’s Depot. He’s worked there since 2021, but before that, starting in 2016, he made a living collecting cans—one night a week in Portland’s Southeast quadrant, a couple nights a week near Willamette Park in Southwest. Apartment complex dumpsters were hotspots, he says, because many apartment buildings lacked a separate recycling bin, meaning there would be lots of cans and bottles to pull out. Brown lived in tent camps around town, and under Portland’s Tilikum Crossing bridge during the earliest days of the Covid pandemic. “There’s this stigma that if you’re homeless, then you’re useless. Like, ‘Why don’t you get a real job?’” he says. “But collecting bottles and cans — it is work. It wasn’t enough money to get a house or an apartment, but it was enough for me that I didn’t have to go begging or steal anything. I could be me and feel good about it.” Where deposit return systems do exist, the data suggests that they play a big part in boosting the number of containers that get reclaimed and recycled. According to an industry estimate, cans covered by deposit systems are recycled in the US at a rate of 74 percent, compared to the national average of 43 percent. Plastic bottles eligible for a deposit are returned at rates of up to 81 percent, compared to a national average of under 30 percent (although not all of what’s collected is ultimately recycled due to technological and economic limitations on plastic recycling).   Canners congregate at The People’s Depot in Portland’s Central Eastside neighborhood. Brodie Cass Talbott In Portland, The People’s Depot offers an alternative to deposit locations attached to supermarkets and convenience stores, where waste pickers say they’re treated with disdain by shoppers and passersby. Last year, hundreds of Portlanders blocked a new bottle dropoff location proposed in the neighborhood of St. Johns. They cited “safety” concerns and a “potential increase in crime or vandalism.” Brown, who regularly invites mutual aid groups and a mobile library to visit The People’s Depot so its patrons can benefit from free books and food, calls the program a “more humanizing experience.” He suggests it could be a model for scaling up waste picker-led recycling programs in other cities. “It becomes more of a community space for [canners] to show up to,” he says. “And the community shows that respect back to us.” Ground Score has had a presence at all five negotiating sessions for the global plastics treaty so far. Weber and Cass Talbott helped draft the IAWP’s 2023 report, “Vision for a Just Transition for Waste Pickers under the UN Plastics Treaty,” which describes the environmental importance of waste pickers’ work. The report calls for, among other things, the direct involvement of waste pickers in plastics-related policymaking, as well as “universal registration” of waste pickers in local and national databases, so they can be enrolled in social benefits programs and more formally included in the plastics recycling value chain.  In order to create more programs like Ground Score, Cass Talbott says waste picker collectives around the world should cultivate relationships with policymakers inside local and regional governments, who can help educate their peers on the benefits waste pickers provide. Ground Score has one particularly strong connection within Portland’s Homelessness and Urban Camping Impact Reduction Program, which has helped Ground Score negotiate nearly all of its contracts with the city, according to Cass Talbott. Waste pickers with the Nakuru County Waste Pickers Association in Kenya call for recognition and respect outside of a dump site in 2024. James Wakibia / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images via Grist Waste pickers and their allies often talk about a “just transition” for the waste sector, a concept that seeks to resolve the apparent tension between reducing plastic production and protecting waste pickers’ livelihoods: If oil and gas companies stop making so much plastic, waste pickers could have less work to do.  For their part, Ground Score’s employees and day workers are aware of that tension. Brown, at The People’s Depot, stresses that plastic production should be reduced and that companies should be “held accountable” for the waste they create. Detten, the GLITTER group member, says she wishes we could send a big laser up into space to “zap” away the world’s plastic pollution. Christine Alix is more reserved than some of her co-workers. She has dark blue hair peeking out from under her baseball cap, and wears bright yellow sunglasses despite the overcast day. She says that, before she started waste picking, she would get angry with people for throwing plastic onto the street. Her feelings are more complicated now: “Thanks for giving me a job,” she jokes. Alix says her bigger priority is trying to keep streets looking clean in order to “reduce the impacts of sweeps,” referring to the police clearing of tents and other shelters from parks, sidewalks, and other places.  Most of the team is effusive about Ground Score’s social mission and the way a simple, low-barrier job can change people’s trajectory. At least three people tell me Ground Score saved their life. Others say their work with the organization has given them a renewed sense of purpose and self-respect. “I love my job,” Detten says. “It’s fulfilling in a way that just expands my humanity.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Trump promised retribution in his second term. For our March+April issue, we spoke with those targeted about lessons from the first term, fears of a second, and plans to fight back. Read the whole package here. “When I am back in the White House, we will use every tool, lever, and authority to get the homeless off our streets,” Donald Trump said in a Spring 2023 campaign video. In June 2024, the US Supreme Court made this promise much easier to keep by overturning a lower court’s decision on criminalizing homelessness. Grants Pass, Oregon, where the case originated, had been punishing the unhoused with fines ranging from $295 to $1,250 and 30 days in jail. Ed Johnson was the initial lawyer who successfully argued this practice was unconstitutional. But after the Supreme Court weighed in, Grants Pass now was able to resume this practice. Other cities are likely to do the same. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Why are some cities criminalize opting to criminalize homelessness? These efforts are not aimed at solving homelessness, but at hiding it—and they’re not even effective in doing that. They increase people’s vulnerability and make it harder to get out of homelessness. People running for office think the rhetoric about getting tough resonates with voters, but it’s unworkable. We need to live in communities where we take care of the people who are the victims of our failed policies. What did the Grants Pass Supreme Court ruling really mean? The legal issue was very narrow. The question was whether cities violate the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment if they punish people for living outside when they have nowhere to live inside. The Supreme Court held that the Cruel and Unusual Punishment clause does not prevent that kind of punishment. There have been cities that have taken the Supreme Court’s invitation to follow the worst possible policies since that decision, but there have also been a lot of cities that have proceeded with existing evidence-based solutions. My hope, of course, is that there are more cities that figure out what works and they stick with that. The Supreme Court—both the majority and the dissent—were clear that there’s nothing requiring cities to punish people who are living outside. What sorts of policies would effectively address the homelessness crisis? You can’t solve homelessness without more housing. Secondly, we need prevention efforts. That means rent assistance, renter protections, and trying to preserve the affordable housing that we have. Because if we’re adding to the population of people who are forced outside, it offsets any efforts to move people inside. Finally, we need shelter so that people can stay safe, stable, and alive while they’re looking for permanent housing. People need to be in a place where they can stay connected to providers and continue to work with people who are trying to find them work and housing. It’s hard enough to do that when you’re not hiding from the police. And of course, if people are getting ticketed, fined, and arrested, and as a result, have recent convictions on their record, it’s going to make it even more difficult for them to move out of homelessness. Year-round, they will have to figure out where to go to the bathroom, where to store any valuables they do acquire, and how to find food. Seasonally, they’ll face frostbite, heat exhaustion, and increasingly, air pollution from wildfires. Are there any good, real-world examples of effective policy? > “It’s taken us decades to get into this hole: we’re 7.2 million housing units > short of what we need in the richest country in the history of the world. “ It’s taken us decades to get into this hole: we’re 7.2 million housing units short of what we need in the richest country in the history of the world. You can’t look at that statistic in any other way than a decades-long bipartisan policy failure. Among incremental improvements, Los Angeles County voters approved a measure that will devote an expected $1.1 billion a year in sales tax revenue to support housing and rent relief programs. New Orleans set up a Housing Trust Fund. Spokane, Washington, vowed to get rid of zoning-mandated parking minimums that make it impossible to build affordable housing. On the campaign trail, Trump mentioned creating “tent cities” on “inexpensive land” for homeless people. What do you make of that? There’s a pretty clear distinction between the things that will work and costly efforts that will make the problem worse. Moving people away from services, punishing them, and making their lives more difficult is going to be expensive and really ineffective.  What can we do to help people living outside? Even though homelessness is taking up more space in the media than ever, it often feels like people with the most information aren’t talking enough. Talk to your friends and colleagues about how we can solve this problem through building more housing and prevention efforts, and don’t make it worse by vilifying the people who’ve been forced to live outside. This is a housing shortage, and these are our neighbors: They are children, and seniors, and veterans, and working people, and people fleeing violent relationships.

On the morning of November 18, New York City police reported that a man fatally stabbed three people in a seemingly random spree in Midtown Manhattan. The victims included a construction worker in Chelsea, a man fishing along the East River, and a woman sitting on a bench near the United Nations headquarters. A cab driver witnessed the third attack and alerted police, who arrested Ramon Rivera and recovered two large kitchen knives. Rivera was charged with three counts of first-degree murder.  In the days following, a picture of Rivera emerged in the press: a 51-year-old homeless man who had cycled in and out of the criminal justice system. He had been arrested at least eight times in the last two years, mostly for minor charges, and had recently spent several months in Rikers Island jail for burglary and attempted assault. Rivera’s record also showed a history of serious mental health issues—he spent some of his previous sentence in a psychiatric ward and in 2023 had told police that he was feeling suicidal and homicidal, according to the New York Times. “That’s a wake-up call for our criminal justice system and our psychiatric system,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said at a press conference shortly after the attacks. “We have three New Yorkers who were murdered in our city by a person who was betrayed by the health care system, and that should trouble us all.”  Faced with an uneasy public, Adams seized the opportunity to defend his controversial 2022 directive that expanded standards for when someone can be involuntarily removed from the street to be evaluated for psychiatric treatment. At that same press conference, Adams described this as a humanitarian measure that had successfully prevented violence and once again called for the passage of the Supportive Interventions Act, which would codify those expanded standards into state law. But legal advocates and disability rights groups say this is a misguided response to rare, though undeniably horrific, acts of violence. They worry that these incidents will be used to justify what they say often is the traumatic and unnecessary removal of New Yorkers who are simply experiencing homelessness.  “These are isolated instances,” said Ruth Lowenkron, director of the disability justice program at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. “It doesn’t mean that we should decide that everybody with mental health diagnoses are scary and that we have to ensure that they are off the streets.”  November’s attacks were consistent with the profile of other widely covered killings in New York: an alleged assailant who spent years cycling between homelessness and jail, punctuated by stints in an underfunded and overburdened mental health system. In retrospect, the moments when tragedy could have been averted—if only the system had worked as it should—may appear to be obvious, but they rarely are. New York is not alone in attempting to address these challenges. For decades, lawmakers throughout the country have grappled with how to balance the civil rights of those with mental illness with protecting the public.  The involuntary commitment process may begin with an encounter like the hypothetical Adams posed in the 2022 press conference announcing the removal directive. He described a person “talking to themselves” on the street, “unkempt” and without shoes, perhaps “shadowboxing” with someone who isn’t there. Under New York law, a police officer or medical professional can determine whether the person poses a “substantial risk” to themselves or others. If they do, a police officer can arrange for that person to be transported by emergency services, even against their will, to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation. Once at the hospital, doctors have 72 hours to assess whether the person meets a similar standard of risk and should be treated involuntarily.  Involuntary commitment has long been a controversial measure. There are broad concerns that it infringes on an individual’s civil liberties and can be a distressing and traumatic experience—potentially discouraging further mental health care. Advocates argue that there are more effective, less traumatic ways of engaging people through community-based services, though they are fragmented and have suffered from a lack of investment. Studies tracking the impact of involuntary treatment have found mixed results for patient well-being, and some report links to a higher risk of suicide.  Proponents like the Treatment Advocacy Center, which has pushed for stronger commitment laws around the country and has been criticized by patient advocacy groups, argue that involuntary treatment can save lives and prevent people with serious mental illness from deteriorating even more. Lisa Dailey, the group’s executive director, claims that this can also avert future run-ins with law enforcement because “failing to get somebody admitted for care really just makes criminalization more likely.” Dominic Sisti, a professor of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said the effectiveness of involuntary treatment depends greatly on the specific circumstances of the patient and the quality of care. Involuntary treatment is intended to be a last resort, after voluntary pathways have been exhausted, but each state has its own criteria. There have been efforts to revisit these standards around the country. Last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law expanding the standards for forced treatment to include severe substance use disorder and an inability to provide for one’s personal safety or medical care. Earlier this year, Florida legislators approved a bill that eased the commitment process and widened the pool of medical professionals authorized to order involuntary treatment. > “The problem with legislating treatment of people with mental illness in order > to prevent crimes is that you have to identify them.” But the question of whether involuntary commitment can prevent violence is a complicated one. Dr. Dinah Miller, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a co-author of Committed: The Battle over Involuntary Psychiatric Care, said, “The problem with legislating treatment of people with mental illness in order to prevent crimes is that you have to identify them.” Almost inevitably, Miller said, this will result in the commitment of some people with no risk of violence.  In New York, the turn to involuntary psychiatric treatment in the wake of a shocking act of violence stretches back to at least a 1999 subway killing. Kendra Webdale, a 32-year-old journalist, was pushed in front of an oncoming subway in Lower Manhattan by a man with a history of serious mental illness. Webdale’s death led Brian Stettin, a young lawyer at the New York state attorney general’s office, to draft Kendra’s Law, which allows court-ordered outpatient psychiatric treatment when there is a risk of violence.  But 20 years later, another subway shoving was evidence to many that the state had not done enough. In January 2022, Michelle Go, a 40-year-old business consultant, died after being pushed in front of an oncoming subway in Times Square by a homeless man who had cycled through hospitals and jails. It was mere weeks into Adams’ first term. Stettin, who had become the Treatment Advocacy Center’s policy director, penned an op-ed describing the incident as “depressingly similar” to Webdale’s death and calling for New York to “broadly interpret” civil commitment laws. That July, Stettin was named the mayor’s senior adviser for severe mental illness. The appointment was an early sign that involuntary commitment would be the center point of Adams’ approach to mental illness. In November 2022, the mayor ordered police, EMS, and mobile crisis teams to follow expanded standards for involuntary removal and commitment. The new criteria were based on a memo released that February by the New York State Office of Mental Health, which sought to address what it described as a “misconception” that involuntary evaluation and treatment is allowed only when there is a threat of violence. It said existing case law supported involuntarily removing people “who display an inability to meet basic living needs, even when there is no recent dangerous act.” In an interview with The City shortly after Adams’ announcement, Stettin said the directive was not “operationally” different from current practices. All it was doing, he said, was informing service providers and police officers that “you have more ability to help people than you may have realized.” Criticism was swift. Beth Haroules, a senior staff attorney at New York Civil Liberties Union, argued that the directive effectively lowers the standard for involuntary removal. Advocates worried that the “basic needs” criteria would apply to people who were simply experiencing homelessness, leading to the removal of those who may be sleeping on a park bench or in a subway car. Yung-Mi Lee, legal director at Brooklyn Defender Services, said the measure could lead to significant numbers of people who don’t need hospitalization becoming mired in the psychiatric system. “It blurs the line between just being unhoused versus somebody who’s truly mentally ill,” Lee told me. Some worried the measure would lead to more encounters between law enforcement and people experiencing homelessness, which could rapidly escalate. “Police are not mental health crisis interventionists,” Haroules said. City hall spokesperson William Fowler underscored that the directive was a matter of providing humanitarian services, saying in a statement: “Denying a person life-saving psychiatric care because their mental illness prevents them from seeing their desperate need for it is an unacceptable abdication of our moral responsibility.” There are significant concerns about what inpatient psychiatric care currently looks like in New York, as hospitals face critical staffing shortages. (Staffing has been a major obstacle to reinstating psychiatric beds that were removed during the pandemic.)  Advocates also have pointed out that involuntary treatment is a temporary measure—an emergency involuntary admission lasts 15 days, though it can be extended—and that after they are discharged, people receive little support. Community-based mental health services have long been underfunded, and a lack of coordination has resulted in some people falling through the cracks. This is not news to the mayor, and Adams has recognized that resources are needed throughout the system. Stettin told The City, “When people tell us that the city has a long way to go to kind of build that continuum of care that meets all levels of need and ensures that people receive care in the least restrictive, appropriate environment, they’re preaching to the choir.” Two years later, advocates have acknowledged that there does not seem to be an influx of people being involuntarily committed. According to the mayor’s office, an average of 126 people per week were involuntarily removed between January and October of this year, but the city was not systemically tracking removals before the 2022 directive. In March 2023, a police official reported to the New York City Council that in the first few months following the removal directive, Black people made up 47 percent of those who had been involuntarily transported while only being 23 percent of the city’s total population. (This roughly resembles the demographics of those experiencing homelessness.) Last year, the NYCLU sued the New York Police Department for the release of its policies and procedures around involuntary removals, which is still pending. The city council also passed a law requiring annual reports outlining who is being involuntarily removed and whether they are ultimately admitted to a hospital. The first set of data is expected in January. Haroules, the NYCLU lawyer, said the lack of transparency makes it difficult to evaluate whether the measure is as effective as the mayor insists—or as harmful as advocates worry. She suggested that the measure may have been a “smoke and mirrors” effort to signal to commuters and tourists alike: “Come to New York. It’s safe. You’re not going to run into people in the subways.”  Following November’s attacks, Adams gave a full-throated defense of the removal directive. “Everybody said I was inhumane, that we just want to institutionalize people. Well, this is the result of that,” Adams said at a press conference. “Too many people were afraid to step up and say people who are dealing with severe mental health illness need to get the care they deserve, even if it means involuntary removals. I was not willing to sit back and allow this to continue to happen, and the thousands we removed off the streets prevented incidents like this.”  Come January, the state legislature will be considering two involuntary commitment measures. One is the Supportive Interventions Act, which Adams has repeatedly championed, even though it has not gained momentum since being introduced in the state Assembly in 2023. In addition to codifying “basic needs” standards into state law, it would widen the pool of medical professionals who can authorize involuntary treatment and would allow some shelter staff to initiate removals. There is also the HELP Act, announced after November’s attacks, which seeks to expand who can evaluate a patient for involuntary treatment without changing the standards. But advocates are still concerned about this proposal, setting up a difficult path forward for both bills.  In the meantime, the humanitarian problem will only worsen as temperatures drop in New York. Advocates agree with Adams on one crucial point: We should not walk past someone who is clearly in need of help. But they fear that extreme weather will justify more involuntary removals, which they say ultimately does little to address why people are on the streets in the first place.  “I don’t want to see people who are homeless either,” Lowenkron, the NYPLI lawyer, told me. “But my answer isn’t to sweep them off the street.”

In August, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, in his working-man’s clothes—aviators, jeans, and a trucker hat—starred in a video where he carted people’s possessions out of a homeless encampment near a Los Angeles highway. On any given night in 2023, more than 650,000 people in the US experienced homelessness, with almost 400,000 unsheltered—though that figure may be an underestimate. Research by the federal Government Accountability Office found that every $100 rise in median monthly rent brings about a 9 percent increase in homelessness—notable as rent costs have climbed by 25 percent nationally since 2020, according to CNBC. Newsom’s photo op followed his July order calling for the clearing of encampments on public property, and came alongside a threat to withhold state funding from cities and counties that failed to meet his requirements, much to the ire of local officials like Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. On July 25, the day of the order, the governor posted on X: “No more excuses. We’ve provided the time. We’ve provided the funds. Now it’s time for locals to do their job.” Earlier this month, Newsom approved more than $130 million in funding for 18 cities, including over $12 million to Riverside, to “sweep” encampments. According to the governor, the goal is to support “efforts to get people out of encampments and connected with care and housing across the state.” A statewide audit released in April tracked investment during Newsom’s first five years as governor, from 2019 to 2023, and found that California spent roughly $24 billion in that span to address housing and homelessness. At his inaugural address in January 2019, Newsom vowed to “launch a Marshall Plan for affordable housing and lift up the fight against homelessness,” promising to push for the development of 3.5 million housing units across the state by 2025.  According to CalMatters, his administration has since backtracked numerous times, calling in 2022 for cities to have planned a combined 2.5 million homes by 2030. The state still has about one-third of the country’s unhoused people, more than half of whom, in many cities—like San Francisco—are without any kind of shelter. In Orange County, many homeless advocates denounced Newsom’s strategy as criminalizing life without shelter rather than driving the construction of affordable homes.  “All things like this do is just shuffle the chairs on the deck of the Titanic,” said David Gillanders, the executive director of Pathways of Hope, an Orange County organization that provides shelters and other support with housing. “If you uproot a person who’s living in an encampment, they’re just going to find another place to go if you’re not offering them an appropriate sort of accommodation.”  Gillanders cites California first responders who moved to—and started commuting from—Idaho, or even further afield. Kyle Conforti, an Orange County firefighter who lives in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee, told the Guardian that the rise in cost of living “outpaces my raises and income. So we finally just ran the numbers and figured out it would be cheaper to live out of state and have me commute back.” According to a 2024 report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, California has the highest housing costs in the nation. At an average of some $2,500 a month, it takes an hourly wage of almost $50 to afford a two-bedroom residence without being “cost-burdened,” or spending more than 30 percent of income. Another study released this year by the California Housing Partnership found even higher average rents in Orange County: just under $2,800, meaning renters would need to earn about $54 per hour.  > “We are going to make them so uncomfortable on the streets of San Francisco > that they have to take our offer.” But not everyone in California is opposed to Newsom’s focus on encampments. San Francisco is among the largest cities to double down on a confrontational policy of eliminating encampments through police enforcement. In August, the city’s mayor, London Breed, strengthened one of its three separate programs to push unhoused people out of the city by offering one-way bus tickets before shelter or other services. Responding to Newsom’s order in July, Breed said, “We have offered people shelter and space, and many people are declining…But we are going to make them so uncomfortable on the streets of San Francisco that they have to take our offer.” Other city councils have similarly prioritized police raids of encampments. From 2006 to 2019, the National Homelessness Law Center found, the number of city-wide bans on camping and loitering doubled—and bans on living in vehicles tripled. Newport Beach, another wealthy Orange County municipality, unanimously voted to intensify anti-camping law enforcement by recruiting more officers for its police “Quality of Life” teams, which issue citations for camping and related violations, withdrew funding for a mobile mental health response team, and, according to the Los Angeles Times, is considering the hire of a full-time city attorney dedicated strictly to prosecuting anti-camping laws. In early October, the city’s ordinance banning camping on public property went into effect, and within hours, all encampments were cleared by public works crews and police. The ordinance does not require Newport Beach to offer services to those who have been forced out. But the most recent arguments over homelessness began in the lead-up to a June Supreme Court ruling, City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, that overturned a 2018 lower court decision banning local laws against camping on public property if cities didn’t also provide adequate temporary shelter. In that case, amicus briefs from various parties—including Newsom—were filed to the Supreme Court. One included petitions from 10 California cities, and Orange County, about the consequences of Martin v. Boise, the lower court’s ruling. Orange County called it “financially unsustainable,” citing a 2019 settlement payment of more than $2 million and a potentially “impractical” requirement to provide one shelter bed per person unhoused. The county’s budget for the 2022-2023 fiscal year was $8.8 billion. Garden Grove, another of Orange County’s largest cities, wrote, “The further impacts of Martin include an increase in homeless individuals by 49% since 2017, an increase in petty crime and theft, and an increase in overdose calls from Fentanyl and other deadly narcotics.”  The Garden Grove comments came from a declaration by Sergeant Jeffrey Brown, the head of its police department’s “Special Resource Team” on homelessness. Brown referred to 2021 numbers demonstrating that less than one percent of homeless people were accepting referrals to shelter or inpatient mental health facilities, and wrote, “As it relates to encampments, the Martin decision has effectively disabled” local police “from mitigating encampment growth and homeless activity on public streets, sidewalks, and rights of way.”  > “Now part of their housing solution would be to house them in jails.” Neither the Garden Grove Police Department nor Brown responded to a request for comment.  Asked why people experiencing homelessness in nearby Newport Beach were turning down shelter bed offers, Natalie Basmaciyan, the city’s homeless services manager, said, “We tend to have a slightly older unhoused population in our region, and they’ve gone through shelters in the ’80s and ’90s and even in the ’00s that were not well-managed. They didn’t have good facilities…You know, here’s a sack lunch. You need to leave for the day. You have to queue up at 5pm and hope you get a bed again.”  “We don’t do that,” said Basmaciyan. “Once you’re assigned a bed and you’re in our program, you are here until you get housed.”  Vox found that other reasons many people avoid shelters range from having to give up pets and personal belongings to having to leave a partner at a gender-segregated facility.  Even adequate shelters present problems absent a system to move people to permanent supportive housing. “We have people that have been in a temporary shelter for three years,” Joe Stapleton, the mayor pro tem of Newport Beach, admitted.  According to CalMatters, homeless shelters themselves often pose health and safety risks; the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California found raw sewage flowing from porta-potties, broken showers, rodent and maggot infestations, a lack of wintertime heating, and flooding during storms. The ACLU also uncovered accounts of unchecked theft, sexual abuse, and violence. Despite California law requiring shelter inspections and repairs, CalMatters found little to no evidence of accountability, with just four of the state’s 478 cities filing mandatory shelter reports—apparently without consequence. For those who turn down shelters, Newport Beach’s municipal code provides a list of penalties enforced via civil or criminal citation, which both escalate with repeat offenses and accrue interest and late fees. According to Stapleton, applying those penalties “is a last resort,” as is calling police.  “This is where the system has failed, where it’s like, how many times is somebody going to remain on the streets, refusing all the services and everything that we’re providing, to a point where they’re going to continue to sleep in front of a business. I don’t think we have the solution. I don’t think anybody has a solution,” said Stapleton.  Sacramento police officers, staff from the Department of Community Response, public works, code enforcement, animal control, and the Fire Department clear out Camp Resolution in August.Paul Kitagaki Jr./Zuma Cesar Covarrubias, executive director of the Kennedy Commission, an Orange County nonprofit that works to increase production of homes for lower-income residents, described the penalty structure as a trap that unhoused people are forced into. “Individuals who are homeless get citations,” said Covarrubias, and if those go unpaid, “then there’s warrants that are issued against them.” Most people cited “are never going to be able to pay for those,” he said, “and it just continues to be a cycle where now part of their housing solution would be to house them in jails.” Covarrubias suggested that “more affordable housing needs to happen through regional and local partnerships with cities,” using publicly owned lands and “local, regional, and state funding…to really create more housing that is affordable.” But the focus on clearing encampments, he said—especially following the Grants Pass decision and Newsom’s order— has hindered progress.  State and local authorities “are really going to stifle this collaboration of addressing housing and homelessness regionally, because there is just no incentive for them to do so,” Covarrubias said. “Now they’re going back to what they traditionally did, which was more enforcement [and] criminalization of homelessness.”  Cities are also divided on housing construction. According to Covarrubias, many municipalities are failing to satisfy guidelines set by the Regional Housing Needs Assessment, a California mandate that decides how much housing each city requires to meet affordability standards. The assessment is a planning tool, he said, that in theory discourages landlords and developers from building only market-rate housing.  Covarrubias explained the failures—and the vital impact of housing policy—by contrasting housing development in Santa Ana and Anaheim, two cities in northern Orange County, which has relatively higher rates of poverty and residential overcrowding than its southern part. Although Anaheim was producing more homes than required, most construction served “above moderate” income levels, a floor of about $124,000 a year for a two-person household. Conversely, Santa Ana, where an affordable housing opportunity ordinance preserves at least 15 percent of new housing for low-income residents, exceeded state guidelines for “low” and “very low” income levels: for two-person households, that represents annual incomes of $101,000 and $63,100, respectively.  > Police ordinances and encampment raids “are not addressing the issue of why > individuals are homeless.” So what to do? Covarrubias cited the Kennedy Commission’s suggestion, a $1 billion county bond to leverage state resources and fund affordable housing. Northern California’s Santa Clara County, home to many of Silicon Valley’s largest firms, suffers one of the worst housing crises in the country. It issued a $950 million affordable housing bond in 2016, partnering with 10 of its cities to fund affordable housing development. By December 2023, the measure had facilitated the construction of 5,127 new affordable apartments and 56 multi-unit housing developments. That’s where the state and groups like the Kennedy Commission come in, said Covarrubias—monitoring housing commitments and progress on construction for low-income residents. The state’s housing department has the ability to initiate lawsuits, request court orders, and administer penalties to cities for noncompliance in housing plan implementation, including fines of up to $50,000 per month and some loss of authority over building permits or zoning changes. Norwalk, a city in Los Angeles County that extended a moratorium on building emergency shelters, recently forfeited state housing and homelessness funding as a consequence, and, according to Newsom, can no longer reject certain affordable housing initiatives. Over the past five years, the city has accepted nearly $29 million to house people experiencing homelessness but has failed to provide a sufficient number of units—just 175 out of 5,034 planned, according to the governor’s office.  Gillanders, of Orange County’s Pathways of Hope, said that more avenues for public housing are needed—beginning with the repeal of the Faircloth Amendment, which caps the number of public housing units that the federal government can fund and authorize at 1999 levels. Jared Brey, the housing correspondent for nonprofit news organization Next City, wrote that the Faircloth Amendment was part of a wave of welfare reform laws passed during the Clinton administration in the ’90s that considered public assistance programs counterproductive to financial self-sufficiency.   Gillanders also suggested that the Department of Housing and Urban Development should be empowered to build affordable housing directly, using federal funds—development Reagan-era budget cuts still severely limit to this day, and which would require fiscal backing from Congress. As housing costs have soared, HUD’s budget and power have not.  In fact, a bill along those lines just hit Congress: the Homes Act, introduced in late September by Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), would repeal the Faircloth Amendment and establish a new federal authority to develop affordable housing with tenant protections. Gillanders calls it a “step in the right direction.” Covarrubias stressed the need for a human perspective on homelessness: “The reality that we need to understand is that many individuals that are on the streets at some point coped with life normally until something happened”—like a layoff.  “In the bigger picture,” Covarrubias said, police ordinances and encampment raids “are not addressing the issue of why individuals are homeless.”