Homeowner suing to stop homeless shelter

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Homeless shelters feel like a band-aid for cancer. They look good on paper but a lot of the time they enable poverty rather than help with the problem of homelessness and the suffering of the homeless. Is enabling people to stay in poverty actually being charitable or helping the poor? I feel like the homeowner isn’t wrong in this situation.
 
pnewton said:
The griping homeowner does not own the property he is attempting to exert control over.
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The landlord doesn’t own the property they are saying will go down in value?
I must have missed that. Where did you find this?
 
1Lord1Faith said:
The reason people don’t want these things in their nice neighborhood is because of the failure of state and federal government to properly address the population of mentally ill homeless people who don’t have anywhere to go except for a homeless shelter.
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I beg to differ, lower property values is their clearly stated motivation.
 
pnewton said:
If something should not be in your back yard, something that could be in someone else’s, then that is an immoral position.
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Then all the zoning laws of cities and towns are per se immoral.

There are good reasons for choosing locations carefully. And it’s generally permitted that neighbors and persons in the immediate community get some say about what gets built near them. I regularly get invited to zoning hearings involving stuff being built near me, and so do all the other neighbors. In the end, it might be built over the neighbor’s objections (if there are any), but at minimum the objections become part of public record so that if there is some later problem, lawsuit, or lesson to learn, the record is there.

Also, just because it’s a new police station, doesn’t mean everybody’s going to love that either. People regularly object to building projects on grounds of traffic, maintaining greenspace, noise, and a host of other things.
 
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Theo520 said:
I beg to differ, lower property values is their clearly stated motivation.
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First of all, the article does not quote from the actual court filing but instead quotes from some letter that this property owner sent to the council. I would presume that the legal grounds for the actual court filing is that the project planners invoked some sort of emergency powers to circumvent a normal, lengthy zoning-type review. I would further note that such circumvention is often alarming because it can signify they know that there’s good reasons to oppose and they’re trying to just shove the project through to get past that.

Second of all, the article quotes selectively from the letter by the property owner. The article says the guy gave nine reasons. I don’t see nine reasons quoted.

The article appears biased to show the property owner in a bad light. Not surprising, because he is a landlord, and landlords are hated even worse than lawyers in this society.

We would need a lot more facts, including all court filings by both sides, all documentation of the case for this planned project, all correspondence sent by this property owner, and perhaps some firsthand knowledge of the area, to figure out what’s really going on here.
 
our town has an ordinance against pan handling. I used to give money to this presumably homeless man – over the span of a couple years. But, I could no longer do that. Well, the man has been on the lookout for me, and my car is very distinctive, yet ordinary and over five years old. Well, when he sees me, he now runs after me for a handout of money. Well, in addition to being short of money myself, I have other charities. I get up to ten pieces of mail per day requesting funds for this or that charity. (I don’t know why the Catholic charities think December is a great time to flood the mail with solicitations.)

My experience with this one homeless man is that he wants to be homeless – he doesn’t like any rules or strictures in the nearby rescue shelter. He caught me again one very frosty morning and he looked really chilled.

Some radio host on EWTN remarked that 1/3 of homeless are drug addicts and another third are people with mental problems. I suppose the other third are people who have made bad choices somewhere.

The problem of homeless is complex and complicated. I have heard of some states taking their homeless and buying them bus tickets to LA. That’s a real NIMBY attitude.

My parish developed a real NIMBY attitude. There was a family that died off in a home next to the parish church and the parish council purchased the dwelling and had it moved to a nearby vacant lot – they didn’t want any undesirables overrunning the private property onto the parish property. It’s now a vacant lot for future expansion of the adjacent parking lot, but nothing has been done like that in over ten years since the property was acquired. They don’t even want a parking lot there, it’s just grass.

PF put in showers for the homeless in the Vatican, didn’t he?

If the shelter in the top comment is built, it is really just the tip of the iceberg of the needs of these people. I think it is doomed to failure.
 
The problem with throwing money at the problem and building shelters is that they typically don’t allow alcohol or drugs. If you are willing to build a shelter that allows alcohol at least, then I could contribute to it. But building a shelter and then denying them things that they might want to do is counterproductive. A shelter is worthless if people don’t want to stay there because of the rules.
 
vz71 said:
I also lived in an apartment complex that was fairly nice. Very little crime, great neighborhood, and clean facilities…until the city did similar.
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I can’t say that Im not sympathetic.

My own neighborhood was seriously damaged by the building of a thrift shop over my back fence. The traffic it Brough in just to steal or beg from it was significant.

I used to be calling the police about the folks going in to root through their trash for metal, which tended to lead to shouting and fights (not to mention so much clanking that we couldn’t sleep . . .).

What was once a typical run of the mill middle class neighborhood is now lower middle class and run down. The bright side, I suppose, is that I don’t have to worry about burglary, as no-one (left) in the neighborhood has anything worth stealing . . . (and having paid the place off, I’m too stubborn to move . . .)

As a lawyer, I’ll not that the concept of introducing a nuisance that interferes with the usability of other properties is ancient Common Law, and quite actionable. The question is whether either it or a Fifth Amendment “taking” claim would be successful (there obvious defense is to argue that it’s an appropriate use of the state’s “police power” )
 
Before we go judging the homeless in this situation, let’s remember that some areas of California also have huge numbers of working poor homeless and elderly retired homeless who simply cannot find affordable housing in areas like Palo Alto. They lose their apartment somehow, end up living out of their car and having to find a place to park the car at night to sleep, preferably someplace that has restrooms and maybe showers. It’s possible that this shelter is meant to serve them, especially given the mention of a location near freeways. If those are the homeless at issue here, then the shelter might not be so bad, although efforts would also need to be made to get these people into actual housing at some point.
 
vz71 said:
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pnewton:
The griping homeowner does not own the property he is attempting to exert control over.
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The landlord doesn’t own the property they are saying will go down in value?
I must have missed that. Where did you find this?
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That is not close to what I said. A person who owns a home owns his backyard, as in, not in my backyard. He does not own what is beyond the fence, or the lot down the street. How did you get a landlord?
 
Tis_Bearself said:
Then all the zoning laws of cities and towns are per se immoral.
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I should have added, all things being equal.

I am not unsympathetic to this position, but this is the nature of real estate. There is always an option of gated, controlled communities, but that comes with its own downside. I would agree that if the building violated local zoning regulations then it would be proper to oppose it the specific location.
 
I’m sure others have already stated this but I will add my 2 cents anyway. I will start by saying that I do understand the need to care for the less fortunate, and with that in mind I fully admit that I do not have the solution. That said, in my professional experience homeless shelters and low income housing drastically increase crime and contribute to the deterioration of neighborhoods. There is certainly a difference between “poor neighborhoods” and those with deliberately built and designated “low-income” developments. Poor neighborhoods have the same problems and crime concerns as the wealthy areas. Low income developments and homeless shelters, on the other hand, experience violent and drug-related crime at a highly disproportionate rate. There are certainly good people who find themselves having to live in such conditions, but the visions of the warm and fuzzy “bed and breakfast” type shelter serving all those innocent and disenfranchised people who are just down on their luck is largely an illusion.

Again, I don’t have the solution, but building a shelter that most people fight not to have to stay in is not the answer. I think more effort and funds should be put towards job training and life skills development, as well as counseling for those who need it. It would certainly make my job easier.
 
Fuerza said:
That said, in my professional experience homeless shelters and low income housing drastically increase crime and contribute to the deterioration of neighborhoods
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I worked as a social worker and was involved with Sydney’s homeless community for about a decade, and I generally agree with this.

The Australian Gov’t has moved away from funding large, “megaplex”-like social housing solutions for the homeless as it generally results in the accretion of a variety of social problems in one small geographic area (google the “suicide towers” in Sydney for an idea).

The approach now is to ensure a spread of accommodation across the city: individual homes and apartments that are innocuous and embedded amongst private residences, blending into the cityscape and minimising excess impacts to one neighbourhood.

Is it a perfect approach? No. Ideally we’d implement something similar to Austria which has an extensive social housing system (which is very much supported by their local Catholic Church). But it seems that some combination of stigma, government reticence and tenant behaviour in English-speaking countries makes it a politically undesirable approach.
 
They do something similar in USA called Section 8 Housing where they give poor people rent vouchers that allow them to go choose their own place to rent. In the best case, it allows them to rent in an area that has good public schools for their kids and where most of the neighbors aren’t also Section 8 so it’s not like you’re getting a big concentration of poor people, and the problems that such a concentration brings, in one area.

There’s section 8 housing now in my hometown neighborhood for some years, and while some of the longtime residents don’t like it because they worry about property value, I haven’t seen huge amounts of problems coming to my neighborhood because of it. Once in a while you get somebody shady on your block, but I’ve been seeing renters come and go for 50 years and there’s always been a certain percentage that were shady.
 
Bithynian said:
The approach now is to ensure a spread of accommodation across the city: individual homes and apartments that are innocuous and embedded amongst private residences, blending into the cityscape and minimising excess impacts to one neighbourhood.
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This is, IMO, the best way to deal with homelessness among those who are not mentally-ill or criminals.

And this is a solution that would allow many Christians who own rental property to get involved in a very tangible and up-close-and-personal way.

I’ve described my brother here on CAF many times, but because I believe so strongly in what he does to help the poor, I’ll describe it again in hopes that others here who own rental properties will consider doing what he does (if they aren’t already doing it);

My brother owns around 40 rental properties across Northern Illinois. He seeks out renters who are decent (not addicted to anything or involved with crime), hard-working people who are willing to do some work around the property in exchange for a substantial reduction in the rent.

He finds these renters through his own ability to strike up conversations and “read” people, and also through the recommendations of trusted friends. He doesn’t advertise–he doesn’t have to! Often his renters will tell their friends about my brother, and that’s how he finds renters.

The renters do things like mow the lawn (saving my brother time and money), paint, heavy clean, simple remodeling, simple repairs, planting/maintaining shrubs and flower gardens, etc. He also encourages them to call repair people and arrange complex repairs rather than calling him and making him do this kind of work–they just have to send him the estimate and then the bill.

In exchange, they are charged dream rents; e.g., $500/month for three bedroom, full basement, two-car garage HOUSES in safe, good school neighborhoods.

These low rents enable the renter to actually SAVE money towards a house of their own (or use the extra money for private school, music lessons for kids, sports for kids, family vacations or activities, etc., as well for the obvious–food, clothing, auto, etc.

My brother isn’t losing any money. He always charges enough rent to pay for the unconscionable property taxes that are burdening all of Illinois. He has other jobs, mainly welding/mechanic, and he also buys and sell various profitable items and materials (e.g., copper wire). Plus, all the properties are fully paid-off, so he doesn’t worry about mortgage payments. He lives a very simple life; in fact, he lives with an elderly lady who is happy to provide him with room and board in exchange for having a strong man living in her house, doing hard work and repairs, and occasionally taking her to a flea market or shopping trip.

He also lives a very generous life, gladly giving gifts to people he loves, helping out relatives and friends who run into financial woes, donating to charities that he supports (e.g., a local wild animal shelter that rehabs injured wildlife), etc.

To me, this is true Christianity straight out of I Thessalonians 4: 10-12!
 
Peeps, that’s a wonder story. Truly, and I applaud your brother.

The difficulty I see, however, is this: he’s essentially skirted the law of averages, suggesting that just one or 2 tenants who don’t do as advertised - thru addiction, laziness, doing a lousy job on a remodel they’ve undertaken, whatever - can shoot the whole thing to heck.
Wayward residential tenants (as opposed to commercial) are notoriously hard to evict. Further, it seems his sweet spot of paid off houses and the other factors you mention are hard to replicate.
That said, it seems to be working -
So good for him, and the tenants.strong text
 
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