The homeless need help, not hounding
When neighbourhoods smarten up, longstanding residents can sometimes find it difficult to keep up. For most it’s a gradual realisation, but in the London borough of Hackney, where I was born and lived until getting priced out around five years ago, the council came up with a more efficient way of letting undesirables know they’re not wanted — and no fixed address was required to deliver the message.
It’s called a Public Space Protection Order or PSPO and — until Hackney bowed to pressure from a residents’ petition on Friday — it included a provision to fine rough sleepers as much as £1,000 for the crime of not having a home to go to.
Hipster Hackney is ever ahead of the trend, so it should come as no surprise that criminalising homelessness has gone global. Last week, councillors for the Hawaiian capital of Honolulu voted to widen a ban on sitting or lying down in public, designed to deter the homeless from areas frequented by tourists.
Why so hard-hearted? In a statement on their website before the U-turn, Hackney defended its actions by insisting fines are a last resort for the most “entrenched” and “anti-social” rough sleepers. “In some of these very difficult cases, the threat of legal action has been the push that has persuaded them to seek the help that they so desperately need.” So it’s all for their own good, see?
Yet even in the realms of quick-fix, cosmetic solutions to complex problems, there are better ways. Much has been written, for instance, about the US’s Housing First programme which has cut homelessness (by 72 per cent in Utah) and costs via simple means. They give the homeless permanent housing, no strings attached.
But that’s another story. In the UK, the sorry truth is that councils aren’t acting without impetus. Measures such as the PSPO reflect a hardened public mood that expects cities to prioritise the leisure of the wealthy over the basic needs of the poor. And, as in Hackney, it take public pressure to force a reconsideration. It was British holidaymak- ers, remember, who last month complained about the migrants ruining their Mediterranean sea view, and it was Sheffield shoppers who insisted a Big Issue vendor be moved from his patch outside a branch of Waitrose, because his presence made them uncomfortable.
We should feel uncomfortable when we see people sleeping rough, but we should also be able to direct our discomfort not at the individuals, but at the obscene inequality which their presence represents. If “urban regeneration” only means investing in property, not people, then the number of homeless will continue to rise, even as our cities grow wealthier. Recorded instances of rough sleeping rose by 37 per cent in London in 2014.
Until we find the courage to confront this contradiction, it’s only right that Hackney’s “difficult cases” remain in view, swigging from White Lightning bottles like the world is their al fresco cafe and bringing down the property prices — the smellier and more anti-social, the better.