But on Monday night, it was hard to hold back tears as more than 100 people, including three bored-looking cops hired for the occasion, packed into the Rainier Room at Seattle Center to implore a panel of city representatives to reconsider a new policy that would allow city workers to clear out encampments where homeless people sleep, confiscate and destroy their possessions—including potentially "hazardous" items such as tents and sleeping bags—and permanently bar them from city property. The rule requires only 48 hours' notice before the city can act. As one speaker asked the panel, "Would 48 hours be enough time to respond if somebody were to come to your home and take everything you had?"
To a person, Monday's speakers—homeless, formerly homeless, and one self-described "law-and-order type"—opposed the new policy. "I can't understand how the city can look at a picture of my family and say, 'This picture is worth less than $25' [the threshold for throwing homeless people's possessions away] and throw it in the garbage," John Bailey, a Real Change vendor, told the panel. "The city... wants to take away the last thing in the world that may be holding me together." Other speakers pointed to the lack of shelter beds in the city, noting that, under the city's new "housing first" policy, shelter space simply has not kept pace with the number of homeless. Last week's One Night Count of King County homeless found more than 2,600 homeless people in the county—a 15 percent increase from last year on the sixth sub-freezing night in a row. There are only about 1,100 shelter beds in the city, according to a count maintained by the Human Services Department. HSD head Patricia McInturff did not return a call for comment.
Instead of kicking people off city property and prosecuting them for trespassing, speakers argued, the city should provide Port-A-Potties and Dumpsters to give them a sanitary place to go to the bathroom and toss their trash. And they should invest in shelter beds—not just permanent housing. According to the Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness, "Interim survival mechanisms... are necessary until such time that affordable permanent housing is available to all."
In Miami, homeless plaintiffs sued the city for arresting homeless people for sleeping, eating, and congregating in public, and for confiscating and destroying their belongings. At the trial, the Fourth District Federal Court of Appeals found that Miami had fewer than 700 shelter beds for more than 6,000 people, and ruled that criminalizing essential acts performed in public violated the plaintiffs' 14th, 8th, and 4th Amendment rights. A similar lawsuit in the famously liberal Ninth Circuit would almost certainly yield similar results. 
