Critically Speaking: Are we still a compassionate city?
Long Beach to begin citing some unhoused people following June Supreme Court ruling.
I remember sitting through a contentious City Council meeting last summer where the council was considering whether it should discuss policy options for addressing encampments in the city.
Councilmember Kristina Duggan was pushing for a public discussion for how Long Beach might be able to borrow ideas from other cities to better ensure that parks, schools and other public spaces were clear of persistent encampments that may have refused help in the past.
The request got shot down and assigned to a council committee instead. The council didn’t want to head down a "slippery slope" of criminalizing the unhoused. The city would lead with "compassion," a majority of the council said.
