Opinion

Tom Ammiano's homeless bill is bad idea Bad Idea of the Week

Richard, a homeless man, sat U.N. Plaza with his dog Kane. Richard, a homeless man, sat U.N. Plaza with his dog Kane. Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Tom Ammiano's homeless bill is bad idea 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

California is getting its first nonstarter idea for a new legislative session: a "Homeless Persons' Bill of Rights" that targets curbs on behavior and conditions on cash welfare payments to people living on the streets.

The bill, introduced by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, a San Francisco Democrat, is an absurd reaction to restrictions on homeless conduct and tough-love ideas such as San Francisco's "Care Not Cash" program that substitutes housing and counseling services for welfare checks.

Other steps such as bans on panhandling and ordinances that bar sprawling on sidewalks have also infuriated homeless activists despite their general popularity with voters and public officials trying to devise limits on public conduct.

The measure, AB5, would enshrine much homeless conduct into a list of rights. Its hyperbolic text compares quality-of-life laws aimed at people living on the streets to Jim Crow laws that punished African Americans in the South, the segregation of Chinese immigrants or "ugly laws" that made it a crime for people with severe disfigurement to appear in public.

Ammiano knows his bill will need to be amended significantly if it has any chance of surviving.

San Francisco spends more than $200 million per year to house, treat and feed homeless people, who number between 5,000 and 10,000. In return, people living on the street get services, not welfare cash. Panhandling is restricted and homeless people are not permitted to sleep on sidewalks, although those laws remain a low priority for police.

San Francisco has employed a balanced approach - blending relatively plentiful services with reasonable restraints on behavior that intrudes on others. True, those quality-of-life laws do not address the underlying causes of homelessness - poverty, mental illness, drug abuse - but they signal a commitment to maintain a livable city for all while offering food and shelter to those without homes.

Ammiano's AB5 goes in the wrong direction. A bill that asserts an individual's right to urinate, sleep and panhandle wherever he wants is neither compassionate nor wise. To pass it would be to surrender our streets and parks to misery, chaos and squalor.