Democrat bill would export Seattle’s failed homelessness policies to rest of US
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Just when you thought the radical left’s social experiments couldn’t get any more out of touch with the reality of everyday Americans, Washington Democrat Rep. Pramila Jayapal and Florida Democrat Rep. Maxwell Frost have a new bill that would export the disastrous homelessness policies of Seattle to the entire nation.
Their “Housing Not Handcuffs Act” would effectively give a green light to the homeless encampments, crime and public health crises that have crippled cities like Seattle, all under the guise of compassion.
This is your warning.
For those of us who have witnessed the decay of our once-beautiful cities, the premise of this bill is not just misguided, but insulting. The legislation, introduced to mark the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision, would prohibit any federal agency from criminalizing a homeless person engaging in “life-sustaining activities” on “public land.”
Near downtown Seattle and along I-5, a homeless community of tents nicknamed The Treeline lives on the edge of the freeway and border of redwood trees in Seattle, Washington, on Friday, July 22, 2022. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Sounds reasonable until you read the definitions. So-called “life-sustaining activities” includes “moving, resting, sitting, standing, lying down, sleeping, protecting oneself and personal property from the elements, eating, and drinking.” In other words, your local park, plazas, and even post office parking lots could become permanent residence zones for homeless drug addicts, with local authorities powerless to intervene.
Jayapal and Frost argue that fining or arresting people who are already struggling is counterproductive. This is a classic strawman argument.
No one is suggesting that a simple fine will solve the complex issue of homelessness. But to strip communities of the ability to maintain order and safety is a surrender, not a solution. It’s an open invitation for the kind of chaos that has become commonplace in Seattle, where a permissive culture has allowed encampments to fester, becoming magnets for drug use and violent crime.
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The “Seattle model” for homelessness has been an abject failure. I covered it, and many other far-left proposals from blue cities, in detail in my book, “What’s Killing America: Inside the Radical Left’s Tragic Destruction of Our Cities.”
For years, the city has thrown money at the problem, funding a constellation of nonprofits and enacting policies that prioritize the “right” to camp in public over the rights of law-abiding citizens to enjoy their communities. The result? A humanitarian crisis on an epic scale.
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Homeless encampments filled with drug-addicted criminals took over elementary school property. Downtown Seattle looked like a zombie-ridden hellscape, fentanyl addicts wasting away, bodies contorted into near-impossible pretzels as they slowly killed themselves. The most recent Point-in-Time count found over 16,000 homeless people in King County, a number that continues to climb despite hundreds of millions in spending. Why bring these policies to Topeka, Kansas, Lansing, Michigang, or Orange County, California?
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The “Housing Not Handcuffs Act” would nationalize this failure. It would prevent federal agencies from addressing the very real public safety and health issues that arise from encampments. The bill’s language is so broad that it protects not just sleeping, but also storing personal property to the “same degree as property in a private dwelling.” It even grants them privacy rights over their public encampments. Imagine the implications: sprawling, unregulated encampments with the same legal protections as you in your own home.
Andrea Suarez dismantles a tent as garbage lies piled at a homeless encampment on March 13, 2022, in Seattle, Washington. The accumulation of garbage at such sites has become a major issue in Seattle as the city tries to move the unhoused out of shared public spaces. ((Photo by John Moore/Getty Images))
This isn’t compassion; it’s a dereliction of duty. It’s a slap in the face to the business owners who have to clean up human waste from their storefronts, the parents who have to explain to their children why they can’t play in the park, and the countless victims of crimes committed in and around these encampments.
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The proponents of this bill will tell you that the solution is more housing. And while no one disagrees that affordable housing is a piece of the puzzle, they conveniently ignore the fact that many of the chronically homeless are struggling with severe mental illness and addiction. Simply providing a roof is not enough. We need a comprehensive approach that includes treatment, personal responsibility, and, yes, the enforcement of basic laws that keep our communities safe and livable for everyone.
The “Housing Not Handcuffs Act” is not a serious proposal to address homelessness. It’s a radical, open-borders approach to our public spaces, a bill that would turn every town in America into a potential Seattle. It’s time for the rest of the country to wake up and see what happens when progressive platitudes collide with reality. The result is not a utopia of “housing justice”; it’s a landscape of human suffering, filth and fear. We can and must do better.
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