*****
Recorded Reading (29:54): https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/u8nmvg9vxoguo1rhzbu3v/Constitutional-Safe-Lots.m4a?rlkey=f0tcbeazkktd1ttx726m6cj39&st=gpggz37z&dl=0
*****
In the United States of America, if one member of a demographic group ~ Black people, let’s say, or skateboarders, or senior quilters ~ commits a crime, we do not penalize all Black people, skateboarders or quilters, as a class, for that crime.
It’s written into our most basic laws.
What we do is to collect hard evidence on ~ and take to fair trial ~ the individual actually suspected of the misdemeanor.
Except, of course ~ of late ~ for our homeless.
Any litter placed around them (and this poet has had quite a lot of it so placed, in her years spent doing tailspins on our society’s fringes) ~ is, collectively and reflexively, blamed on them.
Any and all crimes committed by carefully masked and equally carefully raggedly-costumed perpetrators, who then take care to run away in the direction of the nearest homeless ~ are, collectively and reflexively, blamed on them.
Shopping cart thefts (a very longstanding favorite activity of this poet’s targeting network) ~ are…
… Yeah, you guessed it…
This very unamerican reality has recently been brought before a duly accredited justice of our judicial system.
That judge ruled that each one of our (now hundreds of thousands of) persons experiencing homelessness ~ being still, whether we ourselves personally find it in our pinched souls to approve of it or not ~ an American citizen, is indeed, in the eyes of the law, an individual enjoying the same Constitutional rights as do any of his or her more fortunate cousins.
This means that:
• Having locked them out of the 20 existing residential properties for every 1 homeless person among us (!) sitting vacant while we complain about a “housing shortage,” and base all our national statistics on the building of yet more of them ~ and lock tens of thousands of our poor behind the master switches at front counters of “federally assisted housing” units (where we also subject them to unreasonable, demeaning and demoralizing routines before even allowing them IN to their “own front doors”) …
• … We are not indeed conscionable in requiring them, indiscriminately and as a class, to abandon all possessions and sign their remaining civil liberties away pursuant to entering a “shelter.”
Also…
• That each individual homeless dwelling must be cited, if at all, for actual infractions of social decency, by the actual individual person living inside it.
Imagine that.
Justice applying to even our poorest!
Sounds like the stuff I used to hear as a child, when we were taught to be proud of our communal willingness to go to bat, even for the ‘little guy,’ in the spirit of American fair play!
One heard quite a lot about that kind of thing when I was young.
Nobody disapproves more than this poet does of those homeless who insist upon placing themselves in spaces, and in presentations, which impinge on public walkways or create any nuisance, from sanitation to reasonable fear to disturbance of the peace ~ and she entirely approves of citations ~ to individuals ~ for any and all of the above.
She frequently wonders whether, if they themselves had to spend just one evening on show to all passersby while picking their noses, fighting with their mates, binge watching sitcoms and pigging on ice cream, people might find a little less disapproval in their hearts for others.
Be all that as it may, however…
… Under our present social priorities and property regulations, evictions are skyrocketing.
Those who possess vehicles which are or can be DIY’d into mobile living spaces are, without other options, moving into them.
If you’ve never attempted getting to work on time after sleeping on a portable bed, rescuing your clothing from crumpled boxes and making do with a cold breakfast, you should try it once. It’s a very educational experience.
… A dedicated space in a lot, safe from harassment by both legal and extralegal forces, would be a wonderful beginning.
The public cost of safe parking lots, even incorporating the few financially-affective recommendations among those listed below, so far undertotals accumulated outlay on our streets for law enforcement calls, notifications, ticketing, towing, city cleanup (even a few scraps have to be officially treated as potentially toxic at astronomical cost), followed by housing in “shelters,” plus secondary costs in health and welfare when their stay at those shelters ends (Prague calculates that it actually funds the entirety of its very extensive social housing program on this savings alone) ~ that the two numbers are not even comparable.
This poet feels that ~ she being in the somewhat unique position of possessing a healthy and consistent sense of social responsibility, along also with a high degree of mental organization ~ and, as well, being informed by extensive personal experience in homelessness ~ her insights might be of some value.
That’s especially true right now, at this moment ~ at the start of planning for these inexpensive, reasonable and practical little institutions.
… It pays to remember that there do exist among us forces who would love to see them fail ~ and that setting them up wrong, and then having to unscramble their problems, would play these little lots right into the plans and preferences of those forces.
The poet herself would much rather not have to continue to say, as at present she must, that facilities offered to the homeless are both generally unconstitutional and personally inappropriate to her medical, spiritual and creative needs.
She’d like to see them work ~ right from the beginning.
Okay, then.
Here we go:
*****
For those who are parked in them, safe lots are their homes ~ and they have certain Constitutional rights with regard to them.
The suggestions below are offered in a timely fashion, while the first of these lots are in planning, so that, after we construct them, we do not find ourselves with persons experiencing homelessness who ~ quite legitimately ~ refuse them.
Failure in any may well mean failure in all ~ so no category is primary to any other, and they are offered, for simplicity of future review, in alphabetical order.
They are:
Access/Egress
Children
Community
Fire / Safety
Guests / Gatherings
Noise
Pets
Rights
Sanitation
Security
Size
Smoke
Space
Sun
Time elapsed / Absence
Weapons /Tools
Suggestions for Entrance Questionnaire
Example of Suggested Lot Map
We begin:
*****
ACCESS / EGRESS
• Just as with mandated fire exits in any public space, lots should have two unfettered openings. There should be no physical barrier preventing egress from either opening in the event of personal emergency, emergency on the lot, or generalized societal upheaval.
• These areas of ingress/egress should be monitored by security personnel of a very specific type (see below). Ideally a resident should usually be personally recognized by the security guard on duty, and waved through with a smile.
• Recommended for lack of confusion and enhanced surveillance is the usual use of one of these unbarred openings for ingress, and the other for egress.
• Unauthorized ingress of banned parties or unaccompanied guests should be immediately reported to law enforcement.
• Hours of ingress and egress may be limited by rule to accommodate community quiet hours. Reentrance may be denied until quiet hours are over for that night.
• While entrance may be denied, egress cannot, though doing so during designated quiet hours is frowned upon.
• While interior regulations may or may not prohibit its casual crossing ~ just as with fencing of any residential property, the hight of fencing around this lot should not exceed six feet.
• While illegal drug usage on the lot may be prohibited by regulation and removal from the lot made its consequence, no resident should be made to pass any kind of a sobriety test simply as condition for entrance or exit.
Also please note suggestions under both “Community” and “Security” sections of these recommendations, and in the suggested lot map.
*****
CHILDREN
• These, requiring both quiet for ordered thought, good behavior and the extra rest they need and, at the same time, permission to squeal and laugh as they play, present a special community challenge. It is recomended that, as with many existing apartment complexes, separate safe lots be constructed with the needs of young families in mind.
*****
COMMUNITY
• Residence on a safe lot might come with the requirement of a morning or afternoon of volunteer work every week or two, on behalf of the whole. This practice fosters a sense of personal investment, pride and responsibility in the lot, as well as cutting its operating costs, enhancing its beauty and order, and encouraging mutual respect and communication between residents ~ by all these means, maintaining a level of goodwill generally both productive of harmony and discouraging to malfeasance.
• Volunteer activities (calibrated, insofar as possible, to the strengths, weaknesses and preferences of each individual) might include, but not at all be limited to:
~ Roving trash collection (“Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!”)
~ Security assistance, perhaps in checking vehicles and guests into and out of the lot, leaving guards free of distractions to surveillance
~ Lot improvement
~ Ongoing casual interviews of residents for evaluation and enhancement of what’s going right, and preventive damage control regarding what shows signs of heading wrong
~ Helping the ombudsman with paperwork
~ Admin, ditto
~ Speaking in the outer community to raise awareness about safe lots and their residents
~ Keeping a lot bulletin board up to date (see below in “Community” suggestions section).
• It is highly recommended that a full or part time ombudsman/advocate be provided, available online, by telephone, and in person, for explaining to residents necessities for existing regulations, providing advice on constructive conflict resolution, and smoothing pathways for administrative appeals. This individual should be chosen for conversance both with beaureaucratic necessity and with the overwhelmingly discouraging realities of impoverished existence.
• Community volunteers, abroad among residents to keep fingers on their pulse of well-being, should also stay in regular touch with the lot ombudsman to keep them abreast of changing realities on the lot.
• Some internal shuffling of occupied spaces may be anticipated as everyone does their best to accommodate themselves and everyone else under seriously crowded conditions. This process should, within reason, be accommodated with helpfulness.
• Community bulletin boards are low profile, low maintenance, inexpensive, space-efficient and hassle-free ways to encourage interaction and mutual problem solving. A copy of regulations can remain posted upon them, along with the ombudsman’s link, and a colorful notice in one corner might encourage residents to make use of them for announcing skills and resources they might trade, offering or seeking out rides, and the display of quoted snippets of wisdom or eloquence, among other ideas.
• Content of postings is required to be affirmative in nature. This particular bulletin board is not a sounding board for protest, but a community-building resource.
• Though not requiring review before posting, items deemed divisive or demeaning to any party or demographic will be removed by next volunteer at review. Appeals of removal may be directed to the ombudsman.
• All postings must be dated, and are removed either upon discovering that no date appears upon them, or after two weeks has passed. As long as content has continued acceptable, a resident may repost the same information each two weeks.
• Purely commercial posts are discouraged, and are removed first in the case of crowded bulletin board conditions.
*****
FIRE / SAFETY
• Residents have the right to a safe flame with which to warm both themselves and healthy food.
• “Safe flames” should be strictly defined for regulation, with the assistance of fire authorities and subject to ongoing input from residents.
As suggested in our “Smoke” category below, as well as in the suggested lot map, generators of smoke would be best located on the downwind end of a lot.
*****
GUESTS / GATHERINGS
• The reader would not like to be told, his or herself, that he or she may never so much as entertain a friend for coffee on a sunny afternoon, nor be pleased if that friend, after having been personally vouched for to admissions security by themselves, were subject to indignities such as ID and/or breathalyzer review. Guests of adult lot residents should, likewise, be subject to none of the above inconveniences and strictures.
• Residents should be available to vouch personally for incoming guests.
• Limits on casual gatherings of more than three or four guests at a vehicle except dueing community celebrations, are reasonable.
• Complaints to the lot’s ombudsman from neighboring vehicles regarding too-frequent, too-loud or too-raucous gatherings should be taken seriously. Residents ~ after all ~ are free to leave the lot to do their more rambunctious socializing in less densely populated environments, returning when things have calmed back down. They have the advantage of always having their homes with them.
*****
NOISE
• Quiet hours on and directly adjacent to the safe lot by indwellers should be instituted and enforced.
• Disturbances of the peace originating just outside safe lots ~ including engines idled at length which resonate inside nearby vehicles ~ should be promptly reported to law enforcement as such.
• It is recommended that people who express a preference for more quietness be located at one end, or corner, of a safe lot, and those for more acoustuc robustness at its opposite.
• The playing of vehicle radios, boomboxes and amplified live music should not be permitted on the lot ~ or if so, should be strictly limited to specified low decibel levels, located at the lot’s non-quiet end, and during its general non-quiet hours only. Quarters are very close on a lot, and intervening walls are both thin and resonant. In this regard, one man’s pleasure is indeed another’s poison.
• Completely unamplified live acoustic music cannot go far beyond the vehicle in or beside which it is played, and might be permitted lot-wide or in a larger internal radius during non-quiet hours, unless there is complaint.
• Charging and use of generators by residents should be required to occur both off-lot and out of earshot.
*****
PETS
• Fur buddies with a barking habit should be located at the less quiet end of the lot.
• In our society at large, ten minutes is considered maximum acceptable (or even legal) length of time for which to have to endure someone else’s barking dog ~ after which the animal can be removed and the owner fined. There is much more reason to enforce this reasonable restriction in a shared parking lot than on any residential street whatsoever.
Please see also notes under “Community.”
*****
RIGHTS OF NOTIFICATION
• Rules and regs should be available for review by prospective lot applicants before initiation of the application process.
• Presentation of those rules and regulations, whether printed or online, should be visually and verbally friendly ~ less, “Achtung!” and more, “This is how we keep things good for each other around here.”
• After acceptance for residency, each vehicle should immediately be issued a current and clear copy of all regulations, including a link to an online backup copy, and one to the lot ombudsman.
• Changes or additions to any rules and regs should be required to be distributed with at least 48 hours notice (in nonemergency situations, a week is better), requiring timely return of at least one representative acknowledging signature from each vehicle. Collection of these signatures might be an ideal job for lot volunteers described under “Community.”
• Enforcement of new rules under appeal with the ombudsman should be suspended until receipt, by the resident, of a written response from administration. In emergency situations the speed of the reply should be consonant ~ preceding all other actions.
*****
SANITATION
• Every effort will be made by volunteers to assist.
• For resudents: “Keep it clean or find somewhere else” ~ Zero tolerance recommended.
*****
SECURITY
• While the hiring of an outside contractor to provide security personnel may appear to be convenient in the short term, it’s more consistent with the community energy desirable on a safe lot to hire internal staff who become knowledgeable about, and understanding of, residents as individuals ~ and who will not find themselves frequently and arbitrarily replaced in their posts with little or no notice to themselves, lot administration, or the residents themselves. It’s recommended that responsibility for hiring these ~ and ongoing evaluation of those hired ~ be placed under auspices of the lot ombudsman, who has a finger on the needs of that community and to whom its member feedback regarding performance would also be directed.
• Lines of sight on the lot should be arranged so that larger vehicles, occupying spaces adjacent to one another in their own sections, do not obscure security’s full visibility of smaller ones. The rim of a lot, for instance, might be recommended for these larger vehicles.
For further suggestions, see “Size” category just below.
*****
SIZE
• As mentioned in the “Security” section, larger vehicles might be located at a lot’s rim to facilitate internal security surveillance.
• A practice of parking larger vehicles in the East, as well, leaves solar panels in and around smaller vehicles unshaded for those important afternoon hours.
• It might also be possible ~ as with our young families ~ to dedicate a separate lot to larger vehicles, leaving other lots more uniform in profile.
See also notes in “Community,” and “Sunshine.”
*****
SMOKE
• Residents should be permitted to smoke any legal substance inside their vehicles, medicinally, religiously, creatively or for pleasure alone ~ just as can any other free adult in our society.
• Creators of smoke are best parked in the prevailing downwind area of a lot ~ those severely allergic to it, as far upwind as possible.
• Idling of vehicles and running of generators should not be permitted on the lot.
*****
SPACE
• Safe lots should be designed, for all types of vehicles, with spaces significantly larger than those of other lots ~ double the regular commercial width is recommended ~ for the following reasons:
• Many homeless vehicles are larger than the average family vehicle.
• More of their inhabitants than of the public at large have special needs, including the use of walkers and wheelchairs.
• Frequently, a vehicle must be partially unloaded of possessions before there is room to function inside it, and those possessions must then be stacked around it, still leaving room to move.
• If you stop to think for a moment about life inside a vehicle, on an exposed lot, on a 100° day, with people you don’t know right at each elbow ~ human decency alone would require a little intervening space.
• Residents should have space to place folding chairs so they can sit outside their vehicles, and to rig awnings to shade them.
*****
SUNSHINE AND SHADE
• Consideration should be given to those who indicate in their admissions questionnaires that they make use of portable solar panels.
• The “quiet side” of the lot might be placed under any shade which might be available, as this population tends ti be older and possess more sensitivities and special needs.
See also notes under “Size,” as well as example lot map.
*****
TIME
• A safe lot is not part of our gruesomely failed system of temporary ghettoe– ah, sorry, “shelters.”
• Once a vehicle owner has qualified for residence on a safe lot, that qualification is not revoked according to time elapsed.
• As mentioned elsewhere in these suggestions, enforcement for citizens on a safe lot, just as for citizens outside it, should be behavior-based. The only criterion for cessation of continuous placement, outside of the too-extended absence of the resident, would be his or her actual violation of lot regulations.
• If a vacation is planned involving a vehicle’s absence for more than forty eight hours, notice should be forwarded to the lot ombudsman. Limits on total periods of absence over time might be clearly set but compassionately interpreted and enforced.
*****
TOOLS AND WEAPONS
• Residents may own a knife with which to cut whole foods. A four inch blade is minimal for this purpose.
• They may keep that knife upon their persons for convenience as indespensible replacement, in tiny-space outdoor living, for the dozen household tools and implements a housed individual reaches for every day without thinking about it.
• American citizens, within reasonable legal strictures, have the right to own firearms. It’s what they individually choose to do with them that counts. We’ve got no right to be searching people’s persons, possessions or homes (vehicular or nonvehicular) for any weapon or substance whatsoever without individualized warrants which indicate that due legal process is being followed among us ~ not just for a favored few of our citizens, but for all of our citizens.
*****
ADMISSIONS QUESTIONNAIRE
… Might include, among others, such inquiries as:
• What is the length, width and height of your vehicle?
• How do you heat it?
• How do you warm up food?
• Are you up at night a lot?
• Do you have any special needs that we should keep in mind (no promises, but we try our best!)
• In general, do you tend to like things quiet, or lively?
• Do you have hearing problems? Do you play your television and music loudly? What kind of music do you like to listen to?
• Do you have small children?
• Pets? … Aging and docile, or young and rambunctious?
• Do you use solar panels on or in your vehicle?
• What kind of volunteer community work do you think you’d be best at?
• What are the qualities you like best in a neighbor?
• What are qualities you can’t handle in a neighbor?
• What happened to get you homeless?
• Got plans for the future?
• Do you have power tools with you? What kind?
• Generator?
• How long do you think you’ll be here?
• How clean do you keep your surroundings?
• Who represents your vehicle, as far as making sure you all know about things?
• Do you party a lot? Late at night?
• How loud is your motor? How smelly is it?
• What do you feel you have to offer this community?
• What do you feel that you need from this community?
• Is there anything else you’d like to share right now ~ about anything at all?
*****
POTENTIAL LOT MAP:
Please refer to theme image at page top.
*****
Thank you for considering these rights and suggestions in the construction, rule making, and administration of future safe lots which may come under discussion.
*****
This poet/editor is physically disabled, and lives at a fraction of her nation’s poverty level.
Arts patrons may visit http://www.UgiftABLE.com , using code 72D-31S. It will take about two weeks for the poet to be notified of your patronage.
International donors please contact the poet for special instructions.
Thank you for supporting quality in the fine arts.
Rising Light of Reason