The Floor of Dignity: Homelessness, Policy, and the Unjust Scales of Proportionality

Dick Gariepy | Big Thinky Ouchey

There is no decision one can make, no irresponsible choice, no exercise of autonomy so reckless that it makes a person deserving of living this kind of bare life.

Homelessness is often treated as if it were an inevitable personal failure, a natural disaster of individual poor choices. In reality, it is a policy outcome, a man-made disaster delivered by design or neglect. If that sounds dramatic, consider this: imagine people forced to sleep on cold concrete, repeatedly jolted awake at night by police flashlights, denied basic sanitation so that life itself becomes a health hazard. If I described such conditions in a prison camp, you’d recoil at the cruelty and illegality. Human rights advocates have pointed out that the conditions many unhoused people endure on American streets meet definitions of torture or cruel and degrading treatment. And yet we walk past this reality daily with a shrug, as if losing one’s home were a morally deserved sentence rather than the product of deliberate decisions by institutions and lawmakers. 

My own home was taken from me not by laziness or vice, but by a cascade of misfortunes and bureaucratic indifference. A break-in and vandalism rendered my house uninhabitable; my insurer denied the claim on a technicality, and by the time I waded through appeals, the bank had initiated foreclosure. I was forced to drop out of school, and became unhoused. The destruction of my life and the promising future I once had has left me with no illusions about the role of institutional negligence in manufacturing homelessness. I learned the hard way that you can do “everything right” and still end up on the curb if policy machinery decides to grind you down. 

This essay exists to dismantle the myth that homelessness is simply the fair outcome of individual failure. Using the principle of proportionality, a cornerstone of legal and moral reasoning, l examine how our society’s response to personal setbacks or social problems has grown grotesquely out of scale. Homelessness is not a natural science; it is the product of choices. And those choices (laws, administrative rulings, budget priorities) often flout proportionality by compounding petty misfortunes into life-altering catastrophes. In moral terms, we’re subjecting people to the social equivalent of a life sentence for the “crime” of being poor, sick, or unlucky. In legal terms, we are imposing consequences so severe and wide-ranging that they violate basic standards of fairness and justice.

It’s time to call this what it is: an injustice. And proportionality, the idea that consequences should not far exceed the precipitating cause or wrongdoing, offers a powerful lens to understand why allowing anyone to fall into abject homelessness is a profound moral failing of our policies.

Proportionality 101: An Ancient Principle of Fairness (with Modern Relevance)

What do we mean by “proportionality”? In simple terms, proportionality is the principle that punishments or burdens should not exceed what is appropriate for the circumstances. It’s the age-old idea that the response to a wrong or a problem should be in balance with the gravity of that wrong. In the Western moral tradition, this is often traced back to lex talionis, the “eye for an eye” principle from ancient law. Far from endorsing unbridled vengeance, lex talionis was originally a restraint: it set an upper limit on punishment, insisting that penalties be commensurate with the offense. As legal scholar M.J. Fish (2008) explains, the famous “eye for an eye” rule is better understood as “a seminal expression of restraint and proportionality as moral principles of punishment,” ensuring that justice does not turn into excessive retribution (Fish, 2008). In other words, even in antiquity, people recognized that making the punishment fit the crime was a mark of a just society.

Legally, proportionality has become a cornerstone in multiple domains. Criminal sentencing, for instance, is guided by the idea that a penalty should reflect the severity of the offense, no chopping off hands for shoplifting, no life sentences for stealing a loaf of bread (lest we channel Victor Hugo). Constitutional law also employs proportionality tests, especially in countries that explicitly balance public ends against individual rights. Courts ask whether a law’s infringement on a right is suitable to achieve a legitimate aim, necessary (no less-restrictive alternative available), and appropriately tailored so the cure isn’t worse than the disease. In international human rights law, the proportionality principle demands that even lawful measures (like enforcing public order) must not impose excessive or unnecessary harm on individuals. As one United Nations committee put it, even if the state has a legitimate goal, interference with rights must be reasonable and proportional to that goal. 

Morally, proportionality resonates with our basic sense of justice. We bristle at stories of gross unfairness, the petty thief executed, the whistleblower ruined, or the minor mistake that triggers a life-altering penalty, because they offend this fundamental principle. 

Proportionality is why we instinctively feel it’s wrong to, say, banish someone from society just because they failed to pay a parking ticket or because they relapsed into addiction. There’s a deep human intuition that responses to wrongdoing or hardship should not destroy a person’s basic dignity and prospects. The law isn’t always so compassionate, but the ideal persists as a guiding light. As H.L.A. Hart and other jurists have observed, proportionality in punishment is crucial for maintaining the moral credibility of a justice system (Fish, 2008, p. 57). When consequences overshoot causes by a mile, legitimacy is lost. So what happens when we apply this principle to homelessness? If becoming homeless is the “punishment,” then what exactly is the crime? Being poor? Making a bad investment? Fleeing abuse? Getting sick? None of these “offenses” would warrant the loss of everything under any sane moral calculus. Yet our society often treats homelessness as an appropriate, even natural result of such misfortunes, or worse, as something deserved. It’s as if we’ve thrown proportionality out the window and accepted a system where a single stroke of bad luck or a few missteps can trigger a spiral straight to the gutter. In a just framework, that’s as absurd as sentencing someone to amputation for jaywalking.

Homelessness Is a Policy Choice, Not a Personal Doom

Let’s debunk the myth right here: Homelessness is not an inevitability that befalls only those who “failed” personally. It is overwhelmingly the outcome of structural forces and policy decisions. To say homelessness is a “policy-produced outcome” is to highlight that we as a society have the means to prevent it, and have proven as much. Indeed, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness flatly states that homelessness is a policy choice (USICH, 2023).Homelessness isn’t “what happens naturally” when someone slips; it’s what happens when specific policy switches are set to harmful positions—zoning that throttles supply, wage floors below rent floors, benefits that time out before stability returns, and enforcement that reaches for eviction first. We know this because when the switches moved, the outcomes moved: during COVID, places with strong eviction moratoria and rental aid saw eviction filings collapse (e.g., –82% in the Twin Cities), and the feared homelessness surge didn’t materialize (governments themselves call it proof that homelessness is a policy choice). Meanwhile, the wage actually required to rent a modest one-bedroom hovers around $28/hour nationally—evidence that this isn’t about “bad choices” so much as bad math built into the housing market. If proportionality means using the least harmful tool that works, then Housing First clears the bar while criminalization and sweeps fail it. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the government launched an unintentional experiment in prevention: eviction moratoriums, emergency rental assistance, expanded unemployment benefits, and child tax credits. The results were astonishing. Despite the economic upheaval of the pandemic, homelessness did not explode as one might have feared. In fact, millions of expected evictions never happened. Poverty dropped sharply during this period, by as much as 45%, precisely because policy stepped in to provide a buffer\.

When those measures expired, the tide predictably turned again. The lesson? We know how to stop the bleeding. Homelessness increased (or held steady) in line with the presence (or absence) of robust safety nets, proving that the level of homelessness in a wealthy country is a reflection of policy priorities, not a mere aggregate of personal decisions. Consider the economics: there is no county in the U.S. where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a modest one-bedroom apartment at market rent. This is not a failing of individuals, it’s the consequence of wage policies and housing market failures. Today, the country has a shortage of millions of affordable homes; in 1970, we actually had a surplus. That shortage didn’t happen by accident; it was the result of disinvestment in public housing, zoning laws that restrict development, tax incentives that favor luxury units over low-cost ones, and many other choices. When rents skyrocket and wages stagnate, even full-time workers can end up on the street. Indeed, as many as 40–60% of people experiencing homelessness are employed, yet simply can’t afford housing in our broken market (USICH, 2023).

Telling these folks to “just get a job” is dark comedy when many have jobs and still can’t make rent. Another major driver is the healthcare and social support system, or lack thereof. Mental illness or addiction is often painted as the cause of homelessness, but the causality usually runs the other way: untreated illness and lack of affordable care lead to homelessness when we have no safety nets. And importantly, the majority of people experiencing homelessness do not have severe mental health or substance issues (that’s another myth). 

But for those who do, we’ve effectively made homelessness their “punishment” for being sick. We dismantled state psychiatric hospitals in the latter 20th century (arguably a humane move) without building adequate community-based housing and care. The result is that many people with serious illnesses have nowhere to go but the street or jail. Again, this is policy at work: either fund supportive housing and treatment or pay the price in human lives on the street. Even straightforward misfortunes like a house fire, a family breakup, or a medical bankruptcy can precipitate homelessness when there is no cushion. It’s been often noted that most Americans are one crisis away from financial ruin. One missed paycheck, one catastrophe, and the bottom falls out. Social scientists sometimes call these folks “situationally homeless”, people who led typical lives until a job layoff or illness knocked them down. If the system doesn’t catch them, say, unemployment benefits run out, or they don’t qualify for emergency housing, down to the pavement they go. My own story illustrates this well: I wasn’t running a scam or living large; I was studying and trying to better myself. Then criminals literally broke my house, the insurer (who I paid to protect me) walked away from the mess, and the bank opted for foreclosure over forbearance. Every step in that chain was a decision. Homelessness is manufactured by decisions: the decision to have an insurance loophole, the decision to make foreclosure easier than loan modification, the decision to offer no public aid to a student in crisis, etc. In short, homelessness signals a failure of policy, not personal morals. As one advocacy report put it, many policies on homelessness aim not to solve it but to make it invisible, by shuffling the unhoused out of sight or into jails.

That ugly truth emerged when critics noted that some U.S. housing agencies’ methods of counting homeless people conveniently undercounted the real population, almost as if the goal was to declare “mission accomplished” while thousands couch-surfed or hid in cars.

It’s hard to imagine a clearer admission that homelessness is allowed to persist. If we truly believed homelessness was an unacceptable outcome, we’d design it out of existence, just as we design other hazards out of our society. The fact that we haven’t means, consciously or not, we’ve decided some people can fall through the floor of our concern.

Disproportionate Consequences: Life Sentences for Economic Misdemeanors

If homelessness is a “punishment,” it’s wildly disproportionate to any of the so-called infractions that precede it. In a society that prides itself on the rule of law, we don’t (openly) endorse chopping off a thief’s hand or jailing someone for life over a minor offense. Yet we often treat losing one’s home, the complete removal of shelter, safety, and privacy, as a reasonable consequence for things as banal as poverty, debt, or illness. This is morally obscene. It is the equivalent of imposing the death penalty for a parking violation, because make no mistake, homelessness can be a death sentence. People without housing have mortality rates many times higher than the general population; in fact, they die nearly 30 years earlier on average (National Health Care for the Homeless Council, 2019).

Living on the streets means exposure to violence, extreme weather, untreated medical conditions, constant stress, and the ever-present risk of becoming a victim of crime. It is, in every sense, a life-threatening condition. So when someone becomes homeless because they couldn’t pay rent, society has effectively decided that failing to cover a bill warrants a condition that can kill you. Proportional? Not by any stretch of logic or decency. Consider how our legal and bureaucratic systems compound the harm:

• Evictions and Foreclosures: Missing a rent or mortgage payment is not a moral failing on par with, say, arson. Yet the legal remedy, eviction, can render a person or family completely destitute. Often this happens with minimal due process and under conditions where the tenant’s hardship (job loss, medical bills, etc.) is irrelevant in court. The punishment (losing your home and perhaps ending up on the street) far exceeds the offense of nonpayment, especially when nonpayment itself often stems from systemic issues like unaffordable housing or inadequate healthcare. Alternatives exist, rental assistance, mediation, temporary stays, but too often the system reaches straight for the harshest tool. It’s akin to a debtor’s prison in spirit: if you’re poor, you suffer an extreme penalty. As housing scholar Matthew Desmond observed, eviction isn’t just a condition; it’s a cause of long-term poverty and instability, a civil judgment that haunts people for years (Desmond, 2016). An eviction record can bar you from getting future housing assistance or rentals. effectively a branding of scarlet “H” for homeless that makes recovery harder. This cascade is anything but proportionate, it’s a downward spiral triggered by one stumble.

• Criminalization of Homelessness: In many cities, being homeless is effectively criminal. There are laws against sleeping in public, sitting on sidewalks, or even giving food to people in parks. The logic here is perverse: first, offer people no place to go, then punish them for existing in public spaces. It’s hard to imagine a more direct violation of proportionality. What exactly is the crime of sleeping in a park when one has no home? The U.S. Department of Justice itself acknowledged (in a now-famous brief in Martin v. Boise) that punishing people for sleeping outside when they have nowhere else to go is cruel and unusual, a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on excessive punishment. One federal court noted that even one day in jail would be a cruel punishment for the “crime” of having nowhere to sleep. Yet after a recent Supreme Court move, cities are feeling emboldened again to make homelessness effectively illegal. The result? Homeless individuals get tickets they can’t pay, warrants are issued for their arrest, they serve time or pay fines, and emerge even worse off, now with a criminal record on top of everything. We are taking people who need housing and giving them handcuffs. This is policy piled on cruelty. The “crime” of being unhoused is met with a punishment of further marginalization. Nothing about that is proportional or just; it’s society shooting survivors in the lifeboat.

• Administrative Indifference: Sometimes the disproportionate effect comes not from overt punishment but from callous inaction or Kafkaesque processes. Think of a disabled person who can’t get their benefits reinstated for months due to red tape, or a disaster victim denied relief funds over a clerical detail. These procedural failures can tip someone into homelessness just as surely as an eviction notice. In my case, an insurance company’s denial (likely to protect their bottom line) set off a chain reaction. A break-in at my home, a crime by someone else, ultimately resulted in me losing housing because every institutional actor I turned to (insurer, bank, even the university financial aid office) treated me as a problem to brush off. Proportionality isn’t only a principle for courts; it’s for any decision-maker whose choices affect lives. The administrative decisions that compound harm when gentler alternatives are available represent a violation of proportionality too. If a welfare office has the choice to expedite emergency housing for a battered woman but instead puts her on a six-month waitlist (during which she’s on the street), that’s a needless excess of harm. If a city can provide safe parking areas for people living in cars but opts to tow those cars and leave people with nothing, that’s a cruel imbalance. At each juncture, narrower, less destructive alternatives exist, yet time and again, the toughest or most neglectful path is taken. The result is effectively a punitive system, even if it’s not always labeled as one.

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In all these examples, ask: Where is the floor of dignity? At what point do we say, “No matter what someone has done or failed to do, this level of suffering is too great, we don’t allow humans to fall this far”? Right now, it seems that floor doesn’t exist. The “punishment” of homelessness drags people well below any acceptable baseline of dignity and safety. That is profoundly disproportionate. Justice would demand that even if someone defaults on a loan or struggles with addiction, they should not lose the basic shelter and security that every human needs to survive. We have intermediate steps, we could design policies of forgiveness, second chances, and support, but instead we often drop the guillotine.

Narrower Alternatives: Compounding Harm vs. Humane Responses

A key test of proportionality, especially in legal contexts, is necessity: was there a less harmful way to achieve the same goal? If there was, and we didn’t take it, then any harm inflicted was by choice and is likely disproportionate. By that measure, our approach to homelessness fails spectacularly. For virtually every scenario that leads to someone living on the streets, there were kinder, smaller interventions that could have been made to avoid that outcome. The existence of less-destructive alternatives reveals just how needless and policy-driven homelessness really is.

• Preventive Policies: We know prevention works. As discussed, the pandemic response showed that eviction moratoria and rental assistance prevented a feared surge in homelessness (USICH, 2023). The alternative to mass eviction was not mass chaos, it was targeted support that kept people housed. If we can do it in an emergency, why not as standard policy? Cities like New York have “right to counsel” programs for tenants facing eviction, and they have dramatically reduced evictions because tenants finally have legal help to find alternatives or fight unjust filings. Other cities have experimented with emergency rent loans or mediation programs. These are modest, less harmful tools that treat housing loss as something to avert, not simply punish. Yet many jurisdictions forgo these and lean on the blunt instrument of eviction courts. The harm of homelessness was not necessary in so many cases; it was just the easiest thing for those in power to allow.

• Housing First and Supportive Housing: A highly successful alternative to criminalizing or ignoring homelessness is the Housing First approach, basically, give people housing without preconditions, then address any other issues (jobs, health, etc.) once they’re stable. This approach has been proven to not only reliably get people off the streets but also save money (because it’s cheaper than the revolving door of ER visits and jail stays) (USICH, 2023). Housing First recognizes that the most effective and proportionate response to homelessness is housing, simple as that. It doesn’t demand that people earn their right to a roof via immaculate behavior or sobriety (after all, who can overcome addiction while sleeping under a bridge?). It just ends the homelessness, then deals with the rest in a humane way. Many cities, however, still cling to punitive or moralizing approaches, like shelters with so many rules and barriers that people would rather risk the sidewalk. The availability of a more humane alternative (providing housing) casts a harsh light on the choice to keep doing things like police “sweeps” of encampments. Those sweeps, where authorities trash people’s tents and few belongings in the name of “cleaning up”, are devastating. They destroy what little stability and community people have managed to create. And what do they achieve? A temporary aesthetic improvement for housed residents or reclaimed public space, at the cost of further traumatizing the unhoused. Legal analyses have found that these sweeps impose harsh repercussions disproportionate to their purported ends (like public cleanliness) and thus violate basic right. It’s the equivalent of burning down a village to get rid of a rat infestation, utterly out of proportion. If instead outreach teams offered storage for belongings, sanitation services, and pathways to housing, we would achieve the goal of healthier public spaces without gratuitous cruelty. The fact that many cities opt for punishment over aid is a policy choice divorced from necessity or proportionality.

• Economic and Legal Justice: On a broader scale, a society committed to proportionality would ask if our economic system itself is forcing people into impossible choices. Do we allow a job loss to cascade into homelessness, or do we provide buffers like universal healthcare, robust unemployment insurance, or even a universal basic income to prevent anyone from hitting rock bottom? These ideas are alternatives to the status quo that would dramatically lessen the worst outcomes. Similarly, consider our legal system’s treatment of fines and fees. A $100 fine is annoying to a middle-class person but catastrophic to someone living paycheck to paycheck. When that unpaid fine leads to a suspended driver’s license, which leads to job loss, which leads to eviction, we’ve just created homelessness over a traffic ticket. Many jurisdictions are rethinking this and choosing alternatives like income-based fines or community service to avoid such overkill. Proportionality demands that even in punishment for minor offenses, we don’t set off a chain reaction that ruins a life. Yet, until recently, we did so routinely (and still do, in many places).

  
  

All of these alternatives share one philosophy: they prioritize human dignity and stability over the urge to enforce harsh consequences. They recognize a narrow truth: if someone can be kept housed, or quickly rehoused, that outcome is always preferable (for them and society) to letting them fall into homelessness. There is no serious argument that letting people live and die on the streets achieves anything positive that could not be achieved in a far less harmful way. Every goal one might cite, saving public money, encouraging personal responsibility, maintaining clean cities, protecting property values, can be pursued without relegating people to destitution. It’s not that our leaders and communities lack options; it’s that they sometimes lack will or imagination, or perhaps compassion, to implement those options. Why, then, do the more destructive paths persist? Sometimes it’s politics, it’s easier to win elections promising to crack down on visible homelessness than to invest in housing for the poor. Sometimes it’s ideology, a punitive moralism that views suffering as deserved or even beneficial (“teach them a lesson”). And often, it’s simple apathy: the people falling below the floor of dignity are those with the least political power, and so their well-being is not a priority. This is why a proportionality perspective is unsettling: it forces us to see that we are choosing excess harm when we don’t have to. It asks us the uncomfortable question: What kind of society consciously inflicts far more harm than necessary on its most vulnerable members? The answer, if we’re honest, is: a society that has lost its moral bearings, one that calls itself civilized while ignoring one of civilization’s most basic tenets of justice.

The Floor of Dignity: A Non-Negotiable Baseline

At the heart of proportionality is a moral assertion: there is a floor of dignity below which no one should be allowed to fall, regardless of their actions or circumstances. In law, we say even prisoners must have basic sustenance and medical care; we don’t torture inmates or starve them, because their punishment does not include the loss of their humanity. In moral philosophy, we often talk about the inherent dignity of persons, that no matter what, a person should be treated as an end in themselves, not merely a means. To allow homelessness on the scale we do is to shred those commitments. It’s essentially saying, “Some lives are expendable; some people’s dignity is optional.” That is a ghastly statement for any society to make. As one observer poignantly wrote, “Shelter is not charity; it is the floor of dignity.” It’s the minimum, the baseline recognition of someone as a member of the community (Oracle, 2025). 

When we abandon people to the streets, we effectively banish them from the circle of society, declaring them outcasts for whom we feel no obligation. This is, as the quote suggests, banishment in plain sight, and it should horrify us. Proportionality as a guiding principle would demand that we raise that floor of dignity. It would have us ensure that no matter what mistakes a person made, or what bad luck befell them, they are guaranteed the basics of life, food, shelter, sanitation, safety. That’s not a utopian ideal; it’s the bare minimum of justice. Anything less, and our talk of human rights and democracy rings hollow. The U.S. Declaration of Independence spoke of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as inalienable rights; it’s hard to pursue much of anything when you’re shivering under a freeway overpass, life and liberty whittled down to day-to-day survival. International human rights law recognizes housing as a fundamental right tied to the dignity of the person. If we took that seriously, our policies would prioritize ensuring housing first, and sorting out secondary issues second. 

Think of it this way: a proportional society would see homelessness the way we see, say, polio, as something aberrant and unacceptable that must be eliminated, not tolerated. We didn’t blame individuals for getting polio; we undertook concerted public action to eradicate it. We understood that suffering on that scale was a threat to our collective humanity. Similarly, homelessness should be treated as a humanitarian crisis and a moral emergency, not an acceptable background condition in wealthy nations. Every tent encampment under a city bridge, every person huddled in a doorway, is a sign that the social contract has failed at a fundamental level. Yet, a curious hardness infects the public discourse: a notion that providing a floor of dignity will sap initiative or reward bad behavior. This is the old punitive puritanism dressed up in economic talk. It forgets that most people who are homeless have been “punished” far beyond anything they might have done wrong. It also forgets that treating people with dignity tends to restore them rather than corrode them. Give a person a stable home, and you create the conditions for them to address addictions, find jobs, reconnect with family. Continue depriving them of stability, and you ensure they stay in crisis. It’s not leniency to make sure everyone has housing; it’s sanity. As one public welfare official in New Hampshire put it when justifying public funds to bury unclaimed bodies: “We have a legal role, and I would suggest a humanitarian role as a society, to at least provide a floor of dignity for people” (Marsh, 2024). 

If we recognize a duty to respect dignity in death, how much more in life? The unsettling truth is that homelessness represents a collapse of proportionality on all fronts. It’s a social verdict that a person’s missteps or misfortunes warrant total exclusion from the basics of existence. That is a far harsher sentence than we give most criminals. Even the concept of “desert” (what one deserves) cannot justify it, because no one deserves to be homeless. People certainly can make choices that contribute to their situation, but those choices happen within a context that we collectively shape. Proportionality would ask us to always leave room for redemption, for mitigation, for a path back. It would ask us to design our systems such that there is always a safety net, a last resort that catches a falling person before they hit bottom. In a proportional society, hitting bottom literally wouldn’t be possible because the floor of dignity, perhaps manifest as a guaranteed housing provision, would be there to break the fall.

Conclusion: Recalibrating the Scales

The sight of homelessness in wealthy nations should instill not complacency, but collective shame and urgency. It violates the principle of proportionality at such a fundamental level that it calls into question our justice system, our economic order, and our moral identity. We have normalized what should be unthinkable: thousands of our neighbors living and dying on the streets, effectively condemned without trial by an invisible tribunal of “market forces” and policy choices. But market forces are not acts of God; they are shaped by laws and priorities. When those produce barbaric outcomes, we are obliged to change them, just as a law that authorized torture or excessive punishment would be a law crying out for reform. To bring proportionality back in line, we must start by rejecting the narrative of personal blame and recognizing homelessness as the policy problem it is. That recognition then can fuel changes: housing must be seen as a right or entitlement, not a reward for winning an economic game. Social systems should be designed around the assumption that everyone is entitled to that floor of dignity, no matter what. This isn’t about coddling; it’s about basic justice. The savings in human potential (not to mention public expense) would be immense, because a person restored to stability can contribute, whereas a person in constant crisis only struggles to survive. 

My own journey taught me how thin the line is between the housed and the unhoused when systems fail. I am writing this from my encampment, a tent hidden away in a Calgary park. Ill likely stay living in a tent for sometime due to the absence of some arbitrary detail, like a helpful friend, a bit of savings, a bureaucrat who bent a rule, rather than in any moral deserving. We should respond not with scorn or indifference but with a righteous anger at the systems that allowed this to happen. Reasserting proportionality means refusing to accept extreme suffering as an acceptable outcome for ordinary human fallibility. It means insisting that our responses to social problems actually solve the problems, rather than punish the people who have them. It also means having the humility to know that everyone needs help at times, and providing that help before things fall apart, not after the damage is done. When a society ensures that no one can sink below a humane standard of living, it isn’t indulging in fantasy; it’s affirming its deepest values. It is saying that justice is not just about crime and punishment, but about how we care for one another at the most basic level. In the end, the measure of a society’s commitment to proportionality is not found in its law books alone, but on its streets. Right now, our streets testify to a gross imbalance, an injustice screaming for correction. It’s time we listen. If we truly believe in proportionality, in fairness, in human dignity, then we must build that floor of dignity high enough that no one lives below it. We must recalibrate our policies so that a lost job, a bout of illness, or a run of bad luck doesn’t spiral into a life of homelessness. No more “punishing” poverty with destitution. No more accepting the unacceptable. A fair society may never be perfect, but it knows one thing: the punishment of being homeless far exceeds any “crime” of being poor. It’s time to bring our neighbors back inside, time to balance the scales, and time to ensure that justice and mercy, those old friends, are finally extended to those we have for too long left out in the cold.

References

Cunningham-Bowers, K., & Tars, E. (2025). Challenging Domestic Injustice Through International Human Rights Advocacy: Addressing Homelessness in the United States. Cardozo Law Review, 46(1), 1–63. (Comparing homelessness conditions to torture and discussing human rights approaches)

 Desmond, M. (2016). Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. New York: Broadway Books. (Study on how evictions fuel poverty and homelessness)

 Fish, M. J. (2008). An Eye for an Eye: Proportionality as a Moral Principle of Punishment. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 28(1), 57–71. (Discussing lex talionis as an early proportionality rule in law) National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty. (2018). Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading: Homelessness in the United States under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Washington, DC: NLCHP. (Arguing that encampment sweeps and criminalization are disproportionate and violate human rights)

 Oracle, AI. (2025, August 25). The Least Among Us: What a society declares when it abandons its own. Medium. (Emphasizing that “Shelter is not charity; it is the floor of dignity” and framing homelessness as societal banishment)

 United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH). (2023). Homelessness Data & Trends: Myth vs. Fact. Washington, DC: USICH. (Dispelling myths, stating “Homelessness is a policy choice” and highlighting COVID-era prevention success)

 Underwood, K. (2024, May 16). Remains go unclaimed across New Hampshire each year. WMUR News 9. (Reporting on unclaimed cremains; includes quote on providing a “floor of dignity” for all even in death)

 Waldron, J. (1991). Homelessness and the Issue of Freedom. UCLA Law Review, 39(2), 295–324. (Philosophical examination of how laws restrict the freedoms of homeless people, arguing that homelessness implicates basic liberties)

 Tars, E. (2014, January 16). I Believe in Human Rights: Homelessness—Torture on the Streets of America. USICH Blog. (Comparing the experience of homelessness with torture, helping spur recognition of homelessness as a human rights issue)