A Target for Centuries : O.C. Anti-Camping Laws Not the First Aimed at Homeless
Here’s a solution to homelessness: Round up bag ladies, beggars and anyone with a sign that says “Homeless: please help.” Brand each with an “H” and banish them to work camps.
Sound drastic?
Not in 16th-Century England, where vagabonds caught wandering were branded with a “V,” returned to their hometowns and enslaved for two years.
Vagrants, transients, hobos. The story of the homeless and society’s solutions for dealing with the “wandering poor” bridges centuries. And it’s details like these that Harry Simon, staff attorney for the Legal Aid Society of Orange County, has been gathering.
Wednesday, he and more than 20 lawyers and a half-dozen legal and civil rights organizations throughout Southern California are expected to announce lawsuits against five cities--Orange, Santa Ana, Fullerton, Long Beach and Santa Barbara--that have recently passed ordinances prohibiting camping on public property.
They charge that the ordinances are the latest attempts by local governments to deal with an increasingly unruly problem: the doubling in the last five years of Orange County’s homeless population.
The advocates will argue that the new laws are unconstitutional because they discriminate against the homeless, restrict transients’ right to travel, are too vague to follow or enforce fairly, and would punish the homeless for simply being homeless.
City officials have denied that the camping ordinances are aimed at the homeless or any particular group.
“The ordinance applies to everybody,” said Edward J. Cooper, city attorney of Santa Ana, where the ordinance becomes effective this week.
Cooper disagrees with the charge that the ordinances are unconstitutional.
“There are cases that uphold these kinds of ordinances both at the state level and the United States Supreme Court level,” he said.
The new ordinance was adopted, Cooper said, “because there has been numerous instances of people camping on public property, including sidewalks and streets.”
But the advocates say the laws are a deliberate attempt by cities to insulate themselves from the growing problem of homelessness.
“The camping laws are part of the same legacy,” Simon said. “I think they are designed much as vagrancy laws were designed to deter the displaced poor from wandering into these cities.”
The attempt by officials to use legislation to manage the homeless, represents “a continuation of a historical attitude that people are afraid of the poor,” Simon said.
Drawing on at least 50 years of legal precedent and centuries of social history, the lawsuits will cite cases that have helped dismantle vagrancy laws and other government efforts to control the homeless.
“Clearly (the anti-camping laws) aren’t as severe as branding people, or making them slaves or putting them to death,” said Simon, author of “Towns Without Pity” an academic article that documents historic efforts to drive the homeless from American cities and provides both research and strategy for the coming lawsuits.
“But they are an extension of laws you saw 30, 40 years ago. . . . There was a ‘Not In My Back Yard’ component as far back as the 17th Century, and (these government policies) reflect hostility to the poor and suspicion of individuals living on the streets.”
For example, during the 16th Century, Simon said, a large new population of wandering poor was created when peace in England left soldiers without a cause, sharp population growth left workers unemployed and an entire class of tenant farmers was expelled from their land to make room for grazing sheep.
In a crude effort to protect society from crimes that this new class of wanderers might commit, English King Edward VI passed the 1547 Slavery Act that could punish an entire class of displaced workers. This early vagrancy law allowed vagabonds to be captured, branded and enslaved. Those who attempted escape faced permanent slavery. Another escape attempt meant certain death.
Elizabeth I eventually developed a series of statutes created to deal with the poor, the Elizabethan Poor Laws. One of her laws, the 1597 Act for Punishment of Rogues, Vagabonds and Sturdy Beggars, certainly would have cleared Venice Beach of dozens who ply their trade on the boardwalk each day. The law promised corporal punishment for con men, panhandlers, fortunetellers, jugglers and tinkerers and “all able-bodied loiterers refusing to work.”
In Colonial America, policies toward vagabonds were a bit more lenient because “everybody in the New World was a wanderer,” said Robert Slayton, Chapman University historian and co-author of “New Homeless and Old: Community and the Skid Row Hotel” (Temple University Press).
But taking their cue from England’s book of law, most colonies soon adopted laws of “settlement and removal” which gave authorities the power to deport any newcomer who could not prove he had a job waiting or a trade to practice.
Immigrants arriving in New York Harbor in the early 19th Century also had to have more than loose change in their pockets if they expected to stay in the land of the free.
In 1837, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a New York policy of keeping paupers who arrived by ship from stepping on Manhattan soil, stating that it was as critical for a government to protect its people from “the moral pestilence of paupers, vagabonds and possibly convicts; as it is to guard against physical pestilence.”
A century later, Congress attempted to pass a law that would have made a criminal of “anyone leading an idle life.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt vetoed the statute, which could have prosecuted anyone who was able-bodied but unemployed.
And as late as 1941 in California, it was a felony to “import paupers” across state lines. So, if your jobless brother-in-law from out of town came to stay with you while seeking work, you could go to jail.
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down that law, stating that “A man’s mere property status . . . cannot be used by the state to test, qualify, or limit his rights as a citizen of the United States.” Orange County homeless advocates are certain to cite such legal precedent in the lawsuits.
By the 1960s and 1970s, most vagrancy laws across the country had begun to tumble as courts ruled that they discriminated against the poor.
The New York Court of Appeals struck down that state’s vagrancy ordinance in 1967, ruling that the law was aimed at people “whose main offense usually consists in their leaving the environs of Skid Row and disturbing by their presence the sensibilities of the nicer parts of the community.”
Advocates charge that 25 years later in Orange County, this argument still rings true.
“The increasing numbers of homeless are a reminder that (homelessness) can happen to anyone, and it’s not comfortable to be reminded of that day in and day out,” Simon said. “People moved to Orange County to avoid these problems . . . . But as we move toward (becoming) a more urban community, that’s not possible.”
Adds Ron Thompson, Orange’s city manager: “I think we are always going to have the homeless and those types of people with us. I don’t think I can design an ordinance to create a perfect world. This is a huge social problem.”
