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+Despite a dire lack of adequate shelter and affordable housing, homeless persons are increasingly criminalized for engaging in necessary, life-sustaining activities—like sleeping and sitting— that they often have no choice but to perform in public spaces. Between 2011 and 2014, city-wide bans on camping in public increased by 60; begging by 25; loitering, loafing, and vagrancy by 35 sitting or lying by 43; and sleeping in vehicles by 119. Moreover, communities routinely engage in forced evictions or "sweeps" of homeless encampments with little notice and no provision of alternative housing, often destroying important documents, medicines, and what little shelter the victims have. In 2015, the U.S. supported a recommendation from the Human Rights Council’s second Universal Periodic Review to "Amend laws that criminalize homelessness and which are not in conformity with international human rights instruments." This built on 2014 recommendations from the U.N. Human Rights Committee and Committee on Racial Discrimination that federal agencies "offer incentives to decriminalize homelessness. Such incentives included providing financial support to local authorities that implement alternatives to 2015 Human Right to Housing Report Card criminalization and withdrawing funding from local authorities that criminalize homelessness." |