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

[question everything]

Cross posting from Editorial Forum

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016362723

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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