A national law advo­cacy group has put a mid-sized Michi­gan city into the list of the mean­est cities for home­less peo­ple. The study ranks the top ten cities that are unfriendly to the home­less, Kala­ma­zoo, Michi­gan joins Los Ange­les, Orlando, Atlanta and others.

The law cen­ter that com­plied the reports says some loi­ter­ing laws Kala­ma­zoo have are anti-homeless. From this story in the Kala­ma­zoo Gazette, reporter Kathy Jes­sup explains.

The report, issued by the National Coali­tion for the Home­less and the National Law Cen­ter on Home­less­ness & Poverty, put Kala­ma­zoo in the top 10 along­side larger cities such as San Fran­cisco, Atlanta and Orlando, Fla. Los Ange­les was No. 1 in the rank­ing.

The groups said the rank­ings are based on fac­tors that include “the num­ber of anti-homeless laws in the city, the enforce­ment of those laws, the gen­eral polit­i­cal cli­mate toward home­less peo­ple in the city and the city’s his­tory of crim­i­nal­iza­tion measures.”

Accord­ing to the report, Kalamazoo’s des­ig­na­tion is based largely on a 2007 con­tro­versy over a city ordi­nance pro­hibit­ing overnight sleep­ing in pub­lic parks and on rules passed in 2008 for downtown’s Kala­ma­zoo Trans­porta­tion Cen­ter that addressed loi­ter­ing, pan­han­dling and ille­gal substances.

The report says infor­ma­tion on Kalamazoo’s ordi­nances and arrests was pro­vided by Michi­gan People’s Action, for­merly known as the Kala­ma­zoo Home­less Action Network.

KHAN has been a long­time advo­cate for local home­less peo­ple and an out­spo­ken critic of Kala­ma­zoo Depart­ment of Pub­lic Safety enforce­ment prac­tices. The net­work par­tic­i­pated in 2007 talks that shaped the city’s park-use, pan­han­dling and loi­ter­ing ordi­nances.
The report says dozens of home­less peo­ple were arrested in Kala­ma­zoo in 2007 and 2008 for alleged vio­la­tions in parks and at the trans­porta­tion center.

Michael Evans, who was the lead orga­nizer of KHAN and one of the peo­ple arrested, said most of the charges were even­tu­ally dropped after the National Law Cen­ter on Home­less­ness and Poverty pro­vided legal assistance.

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