While the mayor granted Cymerys a special exception, the city still bans those who want to offer their services to help others. Anthony Cymerys, an elderly barber, offered free haircuts to the homeless in Hartford, Connecticut in the park - until health officials and the police came to stop him. In addition to bans on public feedings, governments have also begun to crack down on people who want to help the homeless in other ways. Often, to enforce these laws, city police will sweep areas where homeless are known to sleep and seize what little property these people have. ![]() Disturbingly, the National Coalition for the Homeless estimates that 35 percent of cities have laws on the books that prohibit camping in public areas. Ordinances that prohibit people from camping is another way that cities can attempt to push the homeless out. Nevertheless, up to 47 percent of cities nationwide prevent panhandling in public areas. Yet many cities ban this practice, despite the fact that it such attempts are often overruled as unconstitutional because it violates the First Amendment. Sometimes, for homeless people, the only way to get money to get by is to just ask people. The ban was eventually declared unconstitutional, but as many as 50 other cities still ban public feedings. ![]() Most notably, Philadelphia instituted this ban in 2012, with Mayor Michael Nutter ludicrously saying that it was actually a plan to care for the poor more broadly. In the past few years, a new trend has sprung up: cities have begun to ban the feeding of homeless people in parks. (AP Photo/Marietta Daily Journal, Kelly J. Chambers has everything he owns inside the van and is fighting to get his house back in the Victory Park Community of Marietta, which was foreclosed on by Freddie Mac and Wells Fargo Bank. 7, 2014 photo, college-educated architect and Vietnam War veteran John Chambers, who has been living homeless in his minivan since January of 2013, prepares for another cold night inside his mini-van in a local shopping center parking lot with his dog Scout. Because they were “frustrated, irritated and out of options” with homeless people sleeping in the park nearby, they projected construction noises on loudspeakers outside their building to keep homeless people from sleeping there between 11 p.m. Though cartoons and movies like to portray these vague “though shall not idle around” laws as ways to prevent young people from causing trouble, anti-loitering legislation is often unevenly enforced against classes of people that the police do not like - especially the homeless.Įstablishments playing music that caters to their clientele is nothing new, but in San Francisco, managers of Bill Graham Civic Auditorium went the opposite route. This is another incredibly common law, and most cities still have some sort of anti-loitering ordinance, even after the Supreme Court struck down Chicago’s in 1999 for being impermissibly vague. This is present to deter people from lying out on the bench and sleeping on it - a method specifically designed to prevent people who don’t have a bed of their own from doing so. ![]() The sight is common enough in any major city: benches in open places and parks are a wonderful thing, but some have a pesky third armrest in the middle. The metal spikes which have recently been installed are believed to be to deter homeless people from sleeping in the alcove, which is situated outside a block of private flats in Southwark, London. Credit: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images However, activists in London and around the world felt that the spikes were instead an anti-homeless measure, and called it “inhumane” and “cruel.” After a petition gathered over 130,000 signatures and a London activist group poured concrete over the spikes, the supermarket announced it would remove the studs and find another solution.Ī general view of a set of metal spikes outside a private block of residential flats on Jin London, England. ![]() A spokesman for the Tesco supermarket on Regent Street said that customers felt intimidated by the so-called anti-social people, which was the impetus for the spikes. In London, Property Partners decided to install studs on the ground outside its building and a supermarket in an attempt, the store said, to discourage “anti-social” behavior like smoking outside the building.
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