Waaaayyy back in November 2007, the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) and the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty (the Law Center) worked collaboratively to publish Feeding Intolerance: Prohibitions on Sharing Food with People Experiencing Homelessness. Back then, they provided a spreadsheet that listed the US cities that had some sort of ordinance or ban on street feeding:
Almost 6 years later, not much has changed and in fact, this spreadsheet is woefully outdated today because a number of new cities need to be added, including Nashville and now, Philly (and Nashville initiated theirs so long ago that it's barely worth mentioning and is only listed here because I happen to live here). Why, you might ask, are Mayors like Nutter still justifying their actions years later based on debunked excuses for implementing punitive measures on peeps who are hungry?
Well, Mayors across the country participate each year via via The U.S. Conference of Mayors’ Task Force on Hunger and Homelessness, and they strategize on how best to eradicate homelessness. The U.S. Conference of Mayors is the official nonpartisan (supposedly, anyway) organization of cities with populations of 30,000 or more. There are 1,139 such cities in the country today, each represented in the Conference by its chief elected official, the Mayor.
Now I would really like to think that all these participating Mayors were honestly interested in ending homelessness by providing real options for their city and the people who're experiencing perhaps one of the most traumatic and challenging times of their lives. This real policy change is accomplished by promoting housing-first strategies and approaches for the city's most vulnerable, ensuring a well-trained staff of direct service providers, and facilitating a collaborative and coordinated cross-agency effort that utilizes evidence-based and promising practices empirically proven to end - not manage - homelessness.
But I also know that these approaches are not always fully embraced by communities - at first, anyway. And money is tight in every city, as we're all painfully aware. I also know that trying to navigate through the political land mines saturating the field of social policy choices bring with it high risk for those who're considering pushing upstream against the currents of the mighty river of Status Quo.
I've got more than a sneaking suspicion that because these risks, should they go bad, have very high consequences to the good Mayors; and because those experiencing homelessness don't contribute to campaigns; nor are they typically a block of courted voters, since they don't usually vote (with any regularity, anyway); our Mayors tend to take a path of least resistance in terms of potential political ramifications and execute the "end" of homelessness through illusion, rather than through good, solid systemic policy change.
And that path of least resistance seems to usually culminate in the Mayor of a given city, in this most recent case, Philadelphia, the "City of Brotherly Love," trotting out these lame justifications for the enactment of quality of life criminalization measures rather than to tackle the real issues related to the systemic problems that often lie at the root of an individual's homelessness, hunger, and poverty....
In Philadelphia parks, churches fight to feed the homeless
By Church ministries have been feeding homeless people in Philadelphia’s public parks for decades – not as a charitable gesture, but as an act of faith.But earlier this year, city officials passed an ordinance banning public feeding of groups of more than three people in any city park – taking care, of course, to exempt city-sanctioned special events, family picnics and other gatherings the city finds more palatable.
The law targets church groups and charities that give meals to the homeless on land along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, home to major museums such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the newly opened Barnes Foundation art collection.
Why make it so hard to feed the homeless in the City of Brotherly Love?
Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter’s official explanation for the ban is that he wants to move feeding the homeless inside (though the city is vague about how or when this will happen). Moreover, the city argues, church feeding programs are health hazards that create a mess in the park. The mayor offered part of the plaza surrounding City Hall as a temporary alternative location.
Religious leaders dismiss the city’s objections to meal distribution in public parks as bogus, pointing out that no one has gotten sick from the food distributed and volunteers clean up the space used. Moreover, many of the homeless who live in the park are reluctant to travel elsewhere (leaving their few possessions) – and some are too disabled to do so.
According to critics of the law, the real reason for the ban is the proximity of the feeding programs to tourist attractions, especially the new $150 million building housing the Barnes Foundation collection that opened in May.
To stop the law from taking effect, religious groups (with support from the American Civil Liberties Union) filed suit in federal court charging that prohibiting churches from feeding the homeless in city parks violates religious freedom ( Chosen 300 Ministries, Inc. v. City of Philadelphia).
The city responded by claiming that because the law “imposes no restrictions upon praying or preaching or reading the Gospel or engaging with the homeless,” the ban on feeding doesn’t interfere with the churches’ right to practice their faith.
In July, U.S. District Judge William H. Yohn, Jr., rejected the city’s argument and granted a temporary injunction barring implementation of the law. In a written opinion issued two weeks ago explaining his order, the judge wrote that government has no business ascribing some of the churches’ religious activities more religious significance than others.
To support his conclusion that the park feeding ban violated the religious freedom of the ministries, Yohn relied not on the First Amendment, as might be expected, but on the Pennsylvania Religious Freedom Protection Act.
That’s because the U.S. Supreme Court weakened the protections of the First Amendment’s free exercise clause in 1990, declaring that government no longer had to show a compelling state interest before denying religious exemptions to generally applicable government laws that substantially burden the free exercise of religion ( Employment Division v. Smith ).
In response to the court’s 1990 ruling, some states – including Pennsylvania – have passed legislation restoring the “compelling interest” test.
According to Yohn, Philadelphia’s public feeding ban would likely fail that test because the city has not shown that governmental interests are strong enough to override religious freedom in this case. Moreover, the city has not provided a truly viable alternative for relocating the feeding programs.
Philadelphia is not the only city trying to move homeless people and those who serve them out of public parks. According to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, more than 50 other cities have passed anti-camping and anti-feeding ordinances.
Nutter is appealing the court injunction. But whatever happens in the courts, church leaders in Philadelphia promise to keep the meals coming – even if it means defying the law.
After all, when it comes to helping “the least of these,” they believe in obeying a higher law.
By | 02:37 PM ET, 08/23/2012
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