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I am sharing again our recent newsletter - our efforts to better understand suicide in pain continue but recent events mean we need help. Feel free to DM me with any questions

🏠🚨Today the Supreme Court heard arguments on Grant’s Pass, the case, governing whether a prohibition of sleeping outdoors by a community violates the Constitution. I’m in no position to venture on the legal issue. But I can comment on the policy issue. Communities eager to use criminal justice sanctions against people who are unsheltered, are frustrated with the conditions that have emerged on their streets. And in the main: these communities are dealing with consequences of development, zoning & policy choices they have made, or that our federal government made and we acceded to, primarily through interest rates, zoning & tax policies. And most of those policies are ones that made us wealthier if we own homes, or want to borrow 💰 for a mortgage, even in places with tight competitive geographic space. The downside is that most of these policies erected taller barriers to low-cost housing, and barriers to development of affordable rental units. The number of affordable rental units - determines the overall number of people homeless, in shelters or on streets, in any community. The number of persons homeless is not driven - in the main- by the existence of various demographic or health risk factors found disproportionately among persons who are homeless. Anyone might become homeless. More often the persons who do so are older, disabled, Black, poor, medically ill, mentally ill, recently in jail or prison, or have serious addiction. Most persons with these risk factors don’t become homeless, or they can escape it given a viable path to a unit they can afford. And while sometimes there is a surge in the number of people who are poor or who have addiction in one area, there is no evidence that there has been a national surge of any risk factor. But for any person who has the risks, who actually does wind up homeless, a faster return to housing is always better for them. This is because problems can compound and homelessness becomes harder to exit, and the person can become much harder to house if no pathway out exists early in the course of homelessness Absent a path out, then for many the following harms of homelessness compound: ✅loss of credit, ✅loss of ID, ✅loss of stabilizing relationships ✅loss of paid work and a viable work history ✅development of a criminal justice record Landlords don’t want tenants who have accrued these harms. These make a return to housing ever more difficult, worse & worse over time. Communities petitioning the Supreme Court have a reasonable expectation to influence and govern whether their public spaces are or are not accessible for all who live there. I agree 💯 However, those communities have been full and active participants in creating the conditions that did allow their homeless level to rise. The remedy they seek may turn out to be legal: to impose a criminal justice sanction & record on individuals who lack access to housing or shelter, and who are on their streets. But that remedy may not turn out to be ethical, or effective. It may not be ethical because the communities chose or acceded to the policies that favored the development of homelessness by preferring the accumulation of housing wealth for homeowners, at the cost of assuring a reasonable supply of low cost rentable units. The policies have aggravated or caused the level of homelessness we see in some places. That is an ethics problem It is also not likely to be effective. Imposing criminal justice penalties on people who are homeless makes them less likely to gain employment and less desirable tenants. Fines & fees, often unpayable, will aggravate inability to pay for security deposits, transportation, or suitable clothing for work SCOTUS will decide on law. But SCOUTS won’t fix the downsides of policy choices many of us agreed to. There are wiser paths ahead that should respect communties and the people who live in them. The Courts wont save us from our own bad policy choices. – at Mountain Brook, AL