Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) are harassing homeless people and violating California’s state laws through their political spending and likely through cruel actions such as confiscation of homeless people’s possessions, University of California Berkeley researchers found in a study released Tuesday.
BIDs, as their name would suggest, have geographic boundaries, and are allowed to fund projects within those boundaries to supplement public services. They generate revenue through assessing businesses and properties in the district. California was one of the first states to enact statutes that authorized BIDs, the study noted.
The UC Berkeley Law School’s Public Policy Clinic said that, although the data doesn’t establish a causal relationship between the increase of BIDs and criminalization of the homeless, the data researchers have suggests a “positive relationship between BID policy advocacy and the rising enactment of anti-homeless laws.”
BIDs use property assessment revenue, which includes public property to fight for laws that criminalize the homeless for doing things human beings have no choice but to do, such as sleeping, eating, and sitting. The study mentions the example of the Downtown Sacramento Partnership’s fight to keep an anti-camping ordinance in 2016 and California BIDs’ fights against legislation that advocates for homeless people’s rights.
By using property assessment revenue to advocate for measures that are intended to push out homeless people, BIDs may be violating the state law, since it raises statutory and constitutional concerns. Researchers explained that “Assessment-funded policy advocacy expenses in the Union Square BID, the Downtown Sacramento Partnership, and Oakland’s Jack London Improvement District represent the full or partial salary costs of various personnel who engage in policy advocacy.”
BIDs are also risking criminal liability when they use security and police to violate homeless people’s legal rights. BIDs work with local police and, in some cases, have their own security try to remove homeless people from the area. The increasing enforcement of laws targeting the homeless correlates with a rise in BIDs throughout the state, researchers said.
Some examples of this include a Sacramento BID executive contacting the Sacramento Police Department to let them know about camping and loitering. The executive wrote, “[There’s] been quite a few homeless hanging out behind the donut shop at 26th and Franklin again … Hoping you can help out.”
But BIDs aren’t always relying on laws to move homeless people out of their districts. Even when homeless people are not violating the laws that target them for being homeless, BIDs reach out to the police. In one case, a Sacramento BID representative asked a police lieutenant to remove a sleeping homeless person who also appeared to be ill and had a “hacking cough.” In another email from a Sacramento police officer, they said, “We are still struggling with having the legal authority and penal code to deal with [homeless people] at our RT bus stops.”
Some BIDs create security programs to “identify, target, and monitor specific homeless individuals,” such as Downtown Oakland and Lake Merritt/ Uptown District Association’s Known Persons Database for panhandlers. A homeless woman said that a San Diego BID private security guard ran his bike into her multiple times as she slept in a public space. There have also been cases in California of BIDs taking homeless people’s possessions, which may violate state and federal law, the researchers said.
Earlier this month, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — the federal appeals court governing the western U.S — said cities can’t arrest or cite someone for sleeping outdoors unless officials can prove the homeless person had availability at a shelter or other indoor housing option. In the past decade, there has been an increase in cities that outlaw sleeping in public. This ruling affected cities in California, Montana, Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska.
California accounted for nearly half of the homeless population in the U.S. in 2017, according to the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department. The state’s homeless population rose almost 14 percent from 2016. Housing costs are going through the roof in California. According to Apartment List data analyzed by Christian Science Monitor, a list of 15 U.S. cities with the most expensive one-bedroom apartments showed that almost half were in California.
Adam Murray, executive director of Inner City Law Center, which creates strategies to end homelessness, told the Monitor, “Way too often we try to solve homelessness by just solving homelessness, as opposed to solving the underlying drivers pushing people into homelessness. There’s not nearly enough attention put in place on homelessness prevention and, more generally, on affordability of housing for extremely low-income folks.”
UC Berkeley researchers recommended that the state legislature take up measures such as prohibiting BIDs from spending property assessment revenue on policy advocacy and policing and repealing their authority to spend that revenue on security. They also suggest putting restrictions on BIDs’ authority to assess revenue from publicly owned properties. Cities should also refuse collaborations with BIDs that violate homeless people’s rights, they wrote.
Of course, BIDs are just one party involved in the continued violation of homeless people’s rights. City and state authorities frequently sweep homeless encampments and destroy property and disrupt homeless communities, while providing little, if any, support to homeless people. In Washington state, Clark County workers regularly confiscated and destroyed homeless people’s property, according to a 2016 lawsuit. The county’s law enforcement policy said property could be taken if a camp were abandoned. But in a lawsuit brought by homeless people, plaintiffs’ lawyers said they came back from trips to local charities for meals to find that their things had been taken.
In D.C., there are also sweeps of homeless encampments, and government officials have argued that the sites pose a “security, health, or safety risk, and/or interferes with community use of public space.” But Ann Marie Staudenmaier, an attorney who works closely with homeless people in D.C. told ThinkProgress in 2016 that the government doesn’t have a right to seize or destroy homeless people’s property simply because they did something illegal. Staudenmaier said she believes the sweeps are done “to appease outraged neighbors” more than acknowledge the needs of the homeless.