Court Upholds Homeless Law

* Re “State Justices Uphold Tough Homeless Law,” April 25:

Making homelessness illegal is not the answer and is not “a victory.” The California Supreme Court decision upheld a Santa Ana ordinance which allows cities to prosecute people for using a sleeping bag or blanket on public property.

People are not homeless because we allow them to sleep in public. People are homeless because of the lack of low-income housing, high unemployment and a drop in real wages, cuts in social spending, and a serious shortage of programs for the mentally ill. These laws either foolishly ignore or viciously deny this reality.

Orange County Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. E. Thomas Dunn Jr.’s portrayal of the homeless as people who have money to pay prostitutes or buy drugs and just prefer to live outdoors is not only offensive, it is wildly inaccurate. Consider the fact that families with children make up 33% of the U.S. homeless and represent the fastest growing segment of the homeless population and that U.S. veterans make up another 30%.

Two to three million people from all walks of life are without homes in the U.S. A recent congressional study predicts that nearly 19 million Americans will face homelessness in the next 15 years. Millions more of us are one accident, one illness or one paycheck away from being on the street.

JULIE MILES

National Student Campaign Against

Hunger and Homelessness

Los Angeles

* The California Supreme Court’sruling that cities may constitutionally forbid homeless people to sleep in the streets even in cases where there are no shelters available recalls Anatole France’s famed 1894 blast at such smugness. He said, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

Alas for the conscience of California: These words now describe us as well as they once did 19th-Century France.

GEORGE D. CROOK

Los Angeles

* Congratulations to the California Supreme Court. It has solved the homeless problem. Instead of being on the street, they will be in jail--at taxpayers’ expense.

FRED OKRAND

Sherman Oaks

* Now that our state Supreme Court has upheld Santa Ana’s “no camping” ordinance, that city and the others which are sure to follow it may take refuge in the fact that some 2,000 years ago a couple named Mary and Joseph would have felt right at home there. Or would they?

ROCK O. KENDALL

Dana Point