A Montana Town Faces a Homelessness Problem Similar to San Francisco and L.A.

[question everything]

MISSOULA, Mont.—This city boasts more than 400 acres of parks, many of which line the roaring Clark Fork River. Recently, they have become full of homeless people. Some 600 people without homes live in the Northern Rockies college town, triple the number of a decade ago, many of them in tents in city parks. Their presence has sown growing anger among residents who say the parks have become dirty and unsafe.

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Missoula has a decades-old law that makes it illegal to camp in a park, but can’t enforce it because of a 2018 ruling by the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals that found removing anyone camping in a public space in its Western U.S. jurisdiction when there isn’t a shelter bed for them constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Missoula has less than half the beds that would be necessary to comply with the order, most of which are already being used.

The ruling has frustrated leaders of major cities across the West, including Portland, Ore., San Francisco and Los Angeles, where homeless encampments have proliferated in parks. Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom criticized the order in an interview Tuesday with the San Francisco Chronicle, calling it “preposterous” and “inhumane.”

The struggles of Missoula, population 78,000, show that the ruling also is affecting smaller cities, which also are coping with increased street homelessness driven by rising housing costs. The average monthly cost of a one-bedroom apartment in Missoula is $1,195, up 50% from 2019, according to rental listings platform Zumper. Nationwide, the increase was 21%. “All of a sudden people can’t afford it and they’re out,” said Chris Sage, who coordinates homelessness data in Montana for a nonprofit group. Homelessness has grown 62% in the state since 2019.

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[Chainfire]

1. Can't we just send them somewhere else, out of sight?

What is dirty is the dirty rotten shame that there are so many American homeless. But hey, if we have billionaires, we have to have to desperately poor to balance things out...

[mountain grammy]

2. Beautiful city..

We camped there a week in an RV park.. Not a lot of full time residents at that park.. really didn't notice many homeless. This was 4 years ago. What a sad situation here in America. It's taken years to get to this point.

[SWBTATTReg]

3. And it's so ironic, that those that have properties that have increased in value, and everything

else that comes w/ increased property values, means that fewer and fewer lower priced homes are available, prices of everything increases too, such as labor costs to mow yards, clean homes, workers to work in retail establishments, etc. have to commute farther and farther away (if they can be found, affluent towns usually run these people off).

So, one might be careful in wishing for what they really want, eh? In getting everything they want, they change their environment to suit their new found wealth and in effect, change their environment, usually for the worse.

[roscoeroscoe]

4. Working locals have been priced out

If I recall correctly. I read a feature a little while back about a teacher who had been priced out of renting in one of those northern tier cities.

Absolutely the same forces causing homelessness everywhere.

[justaprogressive]

5. Kept from getting a living wage

until they lost their homes

[Aristus]

6. Oh, so small-town America is having problems with homelessness, too?

Not just the "dystopian, socialist shithole cities"?

Color me shocked...

[lambchopp59]

7. Well now, isn't that special.

Swallowing hard the "I told ya so's" with the red bunch blasting Cali for this ad nauseum. But winter will come again in such regions. Congress raised it's salary 6 times in the GWB years and flipped a quarter at the unskilled labor. Gee... go figure. 9.95 an hour now in Montana, is Fox Noise still lamenting the proposed $15? Little doubt they're still opposing welfare and of course, grumbling about innovative, potentially lucrative "green jobs", some solutions there if they'd shut the F up and pitch in. We pump our own gas except in Oregon, no help there.
There simply aren't enough McDonalds-ilk service jobs nor enough pay to support a living at those anyway.
Seems to me the roaring 20's are going to turn into massive repeat of the jungle camps along the railroad tracks by the 2030's... 100 year cycle. Interesting, but stupid.