Regurgitating Anti-Poverty Laws From The Ugly Laws to Today’s Grants Pass vs Johnson Ruling

By Leroy F. Moore

As an activist in my middle fifties, one very important thing that have been so obvious to me over and over again and that is many people in power are intimidated to the people they suppose to work for and they have a lack of original thought thus continue to bring back pieces of policies that has a long history rejection from the people they supposed to work for.

The recent Supreme Court ruling, Grant Pass vs. Johnson Ruling makes it illegal for houseless people sleeping outside. This ruling is nothing new for activists like me. There’s a long policies from our own governments, locally and federally from the 1867 when San Francisco’s wrote and enforce what has become known as the Ugly Law was the first American ordinance pertaining to preventing people with disabilities from appearing in public was passed in 1867 in San Francisco, California. This ordinance had to do with the broader topic of begging.

According to SUSAN M. SCHWEIK’s 2009 book, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public the San Francisco’s Ugly Laws came out through the notion and practice of charity from the church to large organizations and it also seeped into social work and other bureaucracies would give out permits to “qualified people” who will have a doctor’s say that disabled person only income is playing music on the streets so at that time between 1867 to 1974 a lot of disabled musicians had to go through these bureaucracies just to approve their way of making money.

Under Mayor Willie Brown ( 1996-2004) in San Francisco in the height of gentrification and the dot com boom, I witnessed up close how city government made their own anti poverty policies an decisions on their commissions like the one that I was sworn in to be on aka the Mayor’s Commission on Disability. One vote caught me off guard because it was a proposal to remove all the benches from downtown San Francisco and I thought surely this proposal can’t pass because of the city strong access laws on top of the federal disability civil rights law, the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act but it did and a week later the benches were gone!

Under Mayor Gavin Newsom we saw constant anti poverty policies to programs like Care Not Cash to shelter redesign to force treatment to anti poverty art where you would see big rocks on sidewalks to spikes on bus shelter seats and so much more. It not only male mayors, today Mayor London Breed continues these policies from sweeps to attacking the work of the Coalition on Homelessness to what Newsom did when he was mayor and I quote from a SEPTEMBER 27, 2023 article in 48hills.org:

“The latest Breed move: Announcing that she’s going to take the minimal cash people get from General Assistance if they don’t take drug tests or if they test positive (for what isn’t clear) and don’t go into a treatment program that won’t be available anyway.”.

Now the US Supreme Court is regurgitating what city mayors Black, White women and men have been doing since the Ugly Laws of 1867! From mayors, legislators, governors and now Supreme Court judges are regurgitating the same old vomit!

Leroy F. Moore