Storage programs are meant to protect people’s property rights and allow them to reclaim their possessions. But they rarely accomplish either objective, according to a ProPublica investigation of cities with the largest homeless populations.

As homelessness has reached crisis levels, more cities are clearing tents and encampments in operations commonly called sweeps. Since a U.S. Supreme Court decision in June allowed cities to punish people for sleeping outside, even if there’s no shelter available, some have made their encampment policies more punitive and increased the frequency of sweeps.

Some cities have programs to store what they take, sometimes created in response to lawsuits. In theory, these storage programs are supposed to protect people’s property rights and make it easy to get their possessions back.

In reality, they rarely accomplish either objective, according to a ProPublica investigation of the policies in regions with the largest homeless populations.

  • Nougat@fedia.io
    141·
    22 hours ago

    That claim is clearly bullshit on its face, if you take just one moment to think about it.

    A city would need to:

    • Accurately determine what counts as a “possession”
    • Collect the possessions
    • Keep every individual’s possessions separate from all others
    • Safely store those possessions while keeping them separate from one another
    • Index those possessions in a way that enables them to be retrieved
    • Positively identify the owner of a specific group of possessions
    • Positively identify a claimaint as being the person who owns a specific group of possessions

    Every one of those points would need to be in place, and I have serious doubts that any of those are in place.