HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — It is now illegal to sit down, lie down, or put personal possessions on sidewalks at any time in the Greater East End area.
Wednesday’s city council vote is just another expansion of the city’s efforts to remove homeless people from public places.
But the city’s new policies aren’t without controversy, especially when it comes to enforcing them.
Houston’s city council has expanded what’s called its civility ordinance multiple times in the past year, effectively making it illegal for people to live or set up belongings on sidewalks in multiple areas of our city.
Our media partner, Houston Public Media, crunched numbers and reports that before mid-July, law enforcement officers issued an average of three tickets per month for general sidewalk obstructions.
After mid-July, when the civility ordinance was expanded to include a 24/7 ban downtown and in east downtown, Houston Public Media reports the average jumped to more than 100 tickets a month.
According to Houston Public Media, tickets for the city’s general civility law surged from a monthly average of 159 to 244 after mid-July.
Council members and the mayor have discussed enforcement, which in this case means ticketing.
“Of those citations, how many have appeared in court or since been diverted?” councilmember Abbie Kamin asked in last week’s council meeting.
“Those homeless are not being cited. We don’t remove anybody unless we have a location and ticketing really serves very little purpose,” Houston Mayor John Whitmire said.
The city has just approved the construction of a large homeless services center in East Downtown.
But for those living on our streets, some of the city’s latest measures show a lack of understanding.
Houston Public Media reports that one woman received more than 780 tickets for violating the civility ordinance, totaling nearly $200,000 in fines from 2016 through 2025.
“I’m homeless. I don’t have a job,” Gregory Woods, who said he has been homeless, said. “I mean, how are you going to pay a ticket and you don’t have a job?”
“For them to be giving tickets to the people that are really trying to do something better with their life, it makes no sense,” Malcolm Thomas, who said he is homeless, said. “For the people that don’t be trying, it still don’t make no sense because they have no way of enforcing that I have no funds at the moment.”
According to the nonprofit Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County, homelessness is up in Harris, Fort Bend, and Montgomery counties.
A recent survey showed a 15.8% increase from last year of people living without shelter.
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