Homeless protection bill launched
January 3, 2013
A bill designed to protect “some of society’s most vulnerable members” has been introduced by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco). Ammiano calls his prospective legislation AB5 “The Homeless Person’s Bill of Rights and Fairness Act” and sets out to build protections of “basic human rights.
“We need to stop criminalizing the behavior of people who have no where else to turn,” he said in a statement accompanying his bill’s debut.
In a commentary published originally in the San Francisco Bay View, an aide to Ammiano, Carlos Alcala, wrote, “Current local laws on urban camping, sleeping, loitering and even sitting and lying down, in reality, are often attacks on the homeless, who have few safe options on where to go.”
Alcala noted, “Laws that target homeless are not much different from other laws of the past that stigmatized disabilities or poverty.”
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