Charlotte City Council has restored criminal penalties for some of the activities of homeless people in Charlotte. WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On My Mind" commentary, wonders whose quality of life these new rules preserve.
So here’s a situation we’ve all been in. You’re out somewhere, maybe coming back from running errands or something, and you have to go to the bathroom. You calculate how long you can hold on. Maybe things start to feel a little urgent as you sit through a red light. But eventually, you get the sweet relief of making it back home.
It’s a different story if you don’t have a home.
And this puts the city of Charlotte in a difficult situation: whether to make it criminal for a homeless person to do what all of us have to do every day.
Last week, the Charlotte City Council voted to recriminalize several activities involving the city’s homeless population, from panhandling at a median to sleeping on benches to using the bathroom in public.
The state decriminalized those offenses in 2021, leaving cities to decide what to do on their own. Recently, residents in uptown and Fourth Ward have complained about the increased presence of homeless people in their neighborhoods.
And let’s be clear: It’s an uncomfortable experience to walk through the city and see people sacked out on park benches or — I’m going to try to say this delicately — leaving their waste in the street. It is, as many have said, a quality of life issue.
The question is whose quality of life we are most worried about?
Making it more difficult to be homeless — and sometimes, criminal to be homeless — might ease the stress on those of us who have a warm safe home to go to at the end of the day. But we seem less concerned about the people who are on the streets in the first place.
We don’t provide easy access to public bathrooms, although the city has now set up two portable toilets uptown. We don’t have enough shelter space to keep all of Charlotte’s homeless off the streets. We would rather write them off as a nuisance than deal with the problems of drug addiction, mental illness, or just bad luck that lead people to wind up without a home.
Many studies have shown that the most efficient way to deal with homelessness is to simply give people a place to live. Not only does it solve their most pressing needs, it’s less of a burden on the taxpayer in the long run. Roof Above in Charlotte runs several apartment buildings such as Moore Place, which has saved hundreds of homeless people since it opened in 2012. But they don’t have the resources to help everyone.
Homelessness is a complicated thing. We’re never going to get everybody off the streets. But there are proven ways to help — ways that will improve the quality of life not just for the homeless, but for the rest of us. It is up to those of us with means to decide whether we want to provide that help, or just complain about it.
In the meantime, it’s now possible that someone living on Charlotte’s streets might go to jail for doing their daily business. Which, in some twisted way, could be seen as a blessing. At least a jail cell has a toilet.
Tommy Tomlinson’s On My Mind column runs Mondays on WFAE and WFAE.org. It represents his opinion, not the opinion of WFAE. You can respond to this column in the comments section below. You can also email Tommy at ttomlinson@wfae.org.
