In an editorial that’s bound to make the Arcata Chamber of Commerce wince, the Los Angeles Times today came out against the city’s 2010 panhandling ordinance, saying:
The city’s frustration is understandable, but its remedy is too broad and too punitive, emblematic of the excesses that many municipalities succumb to in confronting the unsightly but all too human problems associated with panhandling.
Political activist Richard Salzman filed suit against the city last year, claiming that the ordinance’s geographic restrictions against begging violate the First Amendment. The Times’ editorial board agrees:
Yes, it can be irritating to be confronted by poverty while exiting a store, but the tender sensibilities of shoppers cannot be allowed to outweigh the rights of Americans.
A decision on the case is expected soon.
Previously: Cold Shoulders, Spare Rights, Media Maven: Free Speech Now!
This article appears in Occupy Broadband.
Wah wah wah, figures that L.A. would want them, take them all, and let them rob, get wasted every night, eat free food 3X daily, fuck up houses, and it’s WARM there too! Pot is going bye bye from Hum, hello cheap mexi buds! What are you waiting for?
Well tonight Arcata is hosting Arts Alive. I’m not there, due to being harrased by the so called “Homeless” bums. The entire county needs to take a stand on this BS. Eureka is no better but rather than panhandle they just rip you off. These are not the faces of poverty, rather they are the faces of entitlement. They expect the state, county or us working folks to give them a hand out. Believe me, I have no problem helping someone with a hand up, but I’m over all these handouts that just enables these folks. Think it’s time we drug test these folks living off our tax dollars once and for all!
It’s about time, or now that I think of it, Arcata had become a shthole with mass dope growing, thievery, robbery, raping, hard drugs, etc. The majority of vagrants don’t need to get it together when they can ‘whip’ up some meth, and get high all day, every day. The stupid, yeah I said it, STUPID Arcata City Council that seems that they are running on a single braincell, and the DRUGGIE VAGRANTS NEED TO GET DOWN AND LEAVE ARCATA. We homeowners and artists bring people to the area for many festivals and spend some INCOME locally. We are getting sick of the crap. Get with it ACC, and crack down now.
Check out http://www.topix.com/forum/city/eureka-ca/TTPJIMSNRTJ626A7B
It’s all about Arcata and people who live here are getting sick of the crap.
The one sign that I truly can’t stand are the “broke and traveling”. If you’re hungry and out of money, quit traveling
and get a friggin’ job like the rest of us.I’m not going to pay for your
traveling with my change when I haven’t gone on a vacation in years. And no there is no such thing as “spare” change when you have a family to support.
“I have no problem helping someone with a hand up”….
Most people share this sentiment…but not as a launching pad for ignorant bigotry.
It’s not all your fault, your “free press” NEVER bothers to inform you of the HAND UP America’s poor required and received a generation ago that has disappeared.
Impoverished American’s fundamental needs for employment training, job placement, housing, health care, and education are unchanged.
Have you actually called the EDD lately? You’d better be over 50 and able to prove you are unemployed due to outsourcing if you want job training assistance.
There are 50,000 homeless in LA!
Without fundamental assistance…all are treated as scum regardless of their desire and ability to work.
As long as this area has free buds we’ll have the vagrants, felons and bums mooching from the street. Crack down on indoor/outdoor growing and use the Federal system with massive fines. Arcata is a 18″ zit on a 10″ head, pretty sad.
As a college student, Arcata was cool. As a pending father, I left Arcata to start my family… and that was BEFORE the stats came out on how many houses are grow houses.
LA can have all of our wonderful, “out-standing” and begging poor homeless folk. I for one have had enough. The problem is that we enable them to continue their hustle in our town. Drugs, alcohol, and many levels of mental illness are the real problems here. If our city doesn’t start creating barriers to identify problem individuals then how can we truly help these people.
It’s an editorial…an opinion piece…probably ghost written by Salzman…it was not written by a news reporter so please don’t present it as such. Geesh.
I can no longer stand to be near the vagrents in arcata. I used to give them a dollar or so because I felt sorry for them in the past years but now they are rude and obnoxious and wasted on meth and cheap beer. As I was leaving the Arcata Safeway a female approached me and asked me for some money, when I said “Im sorry but no” she spit on my car and yelled “F##k You Bitch Snob”. That hurt a lot, please do something Arcata City Council, or I will move out of town.
Westwood used to be a dirty shithole…the creek is a shooting gallery and booze alley. When the garbage spilled out over a bike path in a waist high mound I couldn’t take it anymore, and hauled out over 1000 lbs (no joke) of trash over 3 years. Civic pride is at an all time low, weeds and trash are everywhere. No one really gives a shit and the “dirtbag royalty” likes it that way. Just sayin it can be done.
@LouLou
“Think it’s time we drug test these folks living off our tax dollars once and for all”
That’s brilliant. In fact, let’s drug test EVERYONE “living off our tax dollars!” And I mean everyone – farmers who, without govt subsidies and tax breaks wouldn’t be able to sustain their farms, business owners who, without tax breaks, federal and state grants, wouldn’t be able to operate their business, teachers whose entire livelihoods come from taxes… And u know what? I am willing to pay for all those expensive drug tests, as I’m sure you ar, too, LouLou!!
Great post!
U fucking Unhelpful, judgmental, follower piece of shit.
1)Make the camping fines VERY high, and NO PARKING & STAYING IN THE VEHICLES OVERNIGHT.
2)We should give them one month to find a job and place to live, if they don’t have either one give them the boot. Take their photo and ban them from Arcata for two months.
Let them eat SPAM……
I agree, Arcata could become a wonderful Art Town with so many great artisans. I love the occasional weekend drve up there from SF but I’ve stopped due to the vagrants and hard drugs. Last year I had a room at the Hotel Arcata and my car was broken into and seven original prints were stolen along with a p.a. system worth $400. Clean up and I’ll do business with Arcata galleries and vacation again.
I bet the same individual posted most of these angry sociopathic rants here in the comment section. NCJ should check their logs, for the lulz.
Also, I had no idea things had gotten so bad (crime rate) in Arcata. Oh wait, that’s because they haven’t. Keep your dome glued to fox news, its good for you! Enjoy the fear! Marinate your tiny brain in the hate.
And what about corporate bankers pillaging our communities by stealing from us, rigging contracts and other forms of crime they engage in everyday? Should we run this scum out of town too, or do we tolerate them because we stick our hands out waiting for crumbs that never fall? Does that make us unwashed parasitic bums?
Panhandler? Thats a street musician in that picture. Someday, he’ll have enough money to buy all four strings, and with practice will be able to play something people might actually want to listen to.
And when did Salzman get a banjo, anyway?
Solution: The city should pay the panhandlers to pull the weeds that are growing in the newly “landscaped” entrance to Arcata. The classier aesthetic would certainly deter more vagrants from coming here. The city could pay the itinerant workers in community currency, a currency that is for another community (genuis, I know). They would then have to leave our fair city to be able use their hard earned “Plaza-Bucks”. We could use our sister city in Oaxaca as the other community. The perma-stoned plazoids wouldn’t know the difference once they take a maria-de-juana siesta in their newfound home’s plaza, or “plaza” in espanol. If we end up getting a bunch of Oaxacan panhandlers up here trying to spend their “Plaza-Pesos”, we could just have them deported! I see this as a win-win-lose-win situation for everyone. Vote Peter Panhandler for Arcata City Council in 2013!!!
With all the mass killings around the country, it makes me nervous that the stoned, drunk, methdout, whacked vagrants are getting at times, violant, who’s next for a mass shooting, Humboldt State? It wouldn’t surprise me.
I work on the plaza everyday and am very familiar with the the situation described in the article above. Arcata is a considerate town, however our liberal openness has left us in a situation were we passed the ordinance to control,begging. The summer before the ordinance was passed it was not uncommon to see “homeless” on nearly every corner in the downtown area. Many locals (of all ages) have grown tired of the negative scene on the plaza. An overwhelming majority of the people considered homeless are transient kids, who don’t actually live here, but are traveling. There is an easy way to clean up the plaza and tha’ts to have more of a police presence. Most of the time,the transients leave when to cops hang out on the plaza.
CRACK DOWN WITH A.P.D. ALL OVER, HAVE NARC VOLUNTEERS OUT MAKING DEALS EVERY DAY.
Agreed…most of these posts are made by truly ignorant and hateful bigots.
Meanwhile, the biggest welfare cheats this world has ever known are still looting the U.S. Treasury in “bailouts”, stealing the labor of foreign children, decimating environments around the world, hiding their loot in offshore accounts while their malfeasance is protected by 800 foreign U.S. military bases, their corporate contracts enforced by U.S. courts…all without paying a dime in taxes!
As in the past….the poverty, drug abuse and crime on our streets will worsen until livable wages and free “public” university educations are returned to American citizens.
Plaza Pat,
Thanks for your comments. I agree 100%. To be considered a tolerant, compassionate person, one does not need to put up with whatever BS others decide to throw your way. I’m sick and tired of perfectly abled bodied 20 somethings begging for change and puking on the plaza.
Arcata PD are infective pussys, they just keep the using same tampon of an excuse not to bust the friggan vagrents. IT’S THE PUSSY POLICE OF ARCATA. YOU GUYS ARE GETTING PAID FOR WHAT? YOU DON’T DO ANYTHING EXCEPT SIT ON YOUR FAT ASSES MUNCHING DONUTS AND SHOOTIN THE SHT………
Arcata: How Bad Is It?
I love watching the vagrants get busted 328 30%
I’m Leaving this craphole ASAP 299 27%
I love watching the bums get beat up 227 21%
I hate living here but I go to HSU 177 16%
Im in love with Arcata not the bums/vagr 29 2%
I’m just a lunatic too. 19 1%
Current Total 1,079
Every time I’ve left Arcata and lived elsewhere I’ve returned. The intolerance towards groups of people (take your pick) and the attitude of if you don’t fit into our idea of civilization then we will treat you as an animal or drive you out, usually it is both, always made me come back home where people were more tolerant and counted each human being as a human being..
Here in this beautiful place beyond most in comparisons we tolerate grow houses going up in smoke, gun’s blazing on freeway shoot-outs, scores of young people careening drunkenly out of plaza bars on Friday nights, and host multiple food stores with such exorbitant prices on healthier food many employees can’t afford it. And yet there isn’t any tolerance for beggars deriving their own sustenance off the excess. How petty can people get. Arguing about our own need for comfort in the face of what we all, together, have created.
Karma exists for a reason. Delaying the lessons slapping us in the face by making them illegal is a poor way for a society to move forward.
Ever seen the film “Soylent Green” 1973?
Who said we won’t be able to eat the bums, when the food shortage shortly comes.
This board would be much more interesting and would encourage more use, if trolls like Watch Out, Yoodedo and Jen (the same person?) were moderated or deleted. Leaving this garbage on your blog is like leaving a tag on your house. It only encourages more.
you want less hipiee fredom well FUKU youll have to push me out of town hipiees can fight breck windos stop cars youl be sorry
There are no more stoner “Hippies” in Humboldt, only meth heads and vagrants who would rather steal from you than get a job. The working class bust their asses to buy something that someone would steal if they get the chance.
Sounds like a bunch of whiney hipsters and yuppies to me.grow some balls and say NO.if they start talking shit. Just walk away and laugh.i lived here my whole life and yeah theres a problem with tweekers and transsients.but why bitch and moan about it.long as theres NO jobs and cheap run down hotels in eureka that cater to tweekers and junkies. Its not gonna end.be glad we dont have big city problems.EPD and APDneeds to bust these druggies and do theyre fucking job other than driving around acting like theyre “patrolling” and buying new vehicles with our tax money
No shit, time to get rid of the tweekers and all the thieves.
Unfortunately for all you nasty, ignorant, uninformed, selfish comment posters, and FORTUNATELY for HUMANITY, your hateful, violent comments and your opinions of people DO NOT CHANGE what constitutes HUMAN RIGHTS or FREEDOM OF SPEECH.
You deprive yourself of your own humanity when you deny others theirs.
More people are going to be poor, and more people are going to be “out there”- refugees of this twisted, shameful society, so I suggest you begin now to adjust your attitude.
Well Verbena, you can blab and blab. Nobody’s listening.