This essay first appeared in The Austin American-Statesman, January 20, 1996. Trespassing on private property is already a crime. Every place is either public property or private property, and a law above city ordinances requires human beings to sleep. So in effect, the new law is a law against being homeless. As virtually everyone who is homeless would have a home if it were within his or her power to get one, the law is against people's existences.
Nothing is new in the attempt to outlaw poverty.
Many societies have tired it. Central Texas owes most of its German population to attempts of German princes to eradicate poverty by exiling the poor. This, and other experiments in transporting the poor, showed that the poor's only fault was lack of opportunity, but the world has run out of places to send the poor. Hardly any measure in Western law has ever been so harsh. Yes, England had its debtors' prisons, but one had to do something, namely fail to pay a contracted debt, to be committed to debtors' prison.