Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>Together with Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles must be one of the most naturally beautiful cities in the world. And despite Rio being bigger than LA, it's actually LA that has a higher number of homeless people - even though the US is way more richer than Brazil... </p><p>"Adequate housing is an internationally protected human right. But the United States, which has been treating housing primarily as a commodity, is failing to protect this right for large numbers of people, with houselessness a pervasive problem. In the US city of Los Angeles, California, where the monetary value of property has risen to extreme heights while wages at the lower end of the economic spectrum have stagnated for decades, houselessness has exploded into public view. Policymakers addressing the issue publicly acknowledge the necessity of increased housing to solve houselessness, but their primary response on the ground has been criminalization of those without it.</p><p>The criminalization of houselessness means treating people who live on the streets as criminals and directing resources towards arresting and citing them, institutionalizing them, removing them from visible public spaces, denying them basic services and sanitation, confiscating and destroying their property, and pressuring them into substandard shelter situations that share some characteristics with jails. Criminalization is expensive, but temporarily removes signs of houselessness and extreme poverty from the view of the housed public. Criminalization is ineffective because it punishes people for living in poverty while ignoring and even reaffirming the causes of that poverty embedded in the economic system and the incentives that drive housing development and underdevelopment. Criminalization is cruel."</p><p><a href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/08/14/you-have-move/cruel-and-ineffective-criminalization-unhoused-people-los-angeles" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">hrw.org/report/2024/08/14/you-</span><span class="invisible">have-move/cruel-and-ineffective-criminalization-unhoused-people-los-angeles</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/USA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>USA</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/LosAngeles" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>LosAngeles</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/LA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>LA</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Housing" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Housing</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Homeless" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Homeless</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Homelessness" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Homelessness</span></a></p>