Limiting Homeless People Research Paper

Our inspiration for this experiment came from a lecture in class about the Los Angeles council agreeing that there should be a law limiting homeless people’s belongings to what can fit in a trash bin. This would force the homeless people to throw away large portions of their belongings to benefit the city from not having “trash” on the streets. According to the L.A. times, the legislation California believes that this law will “limit storage on sidewalks, parkways, and alleys citywide to what homeless people can fit in a 60-gallon container, about the size of a city recycling or trash bin”. The idea of controlling what people can and cannot have is outrageous. The executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty in Washington
D.C. would agree that this is “outrageous”. Another point that Maria Foscarinis made was that it would be cheaper for the state to provide these homeless people with housing. The other piece of inspiration we had, came from the King 5 website where the newscasters were going around Seattle interviewing the homeless people on the streets. One woman had been homeless for four years. Of those four years, she carried around with her everything that she owned. If this woman was forced to throw away her most valuable belongings because the law says you are limited to a certain amount of belongings than she would lose almost everything. Our overall idea for our experiment was to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. To see how it feels to be avoided, stared at, or gossiped about because of the amount of items that we were carrying.