Yeah, it's messed up that nearly everyone from the US would read that headline and make the same assumption without batting an eye because we've been conditioned to expect nothing else from police. It sure would be nice if we lived in a country where policing was actually a civil service and not a damn street gang.

I mean, I would add on not sticking her with a criminal charge as an important thing they didn't do here, because the whole story of "oh you missed a court date because we sent the notice to an address you haven't lived at in years, so now we're fining you on top of the original criminal charge that brought you in here, [soon] wow, you've got a lot of missed court dates and unpaid fines, you look like a career criminal who needs the book thrown at them" happens a lot,

And there's a very real chance that the contractors looked the other way and then this woman's residence got discovered they could have lost their licenses or otherwise gotten in trouble

Like, I think what you're pointing out is a really important perspective and we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that a woman with a home was made homeless here, but I think a lot of relatively powerless people here tried to be as humane as an inhumane system would let them be, and I think that's important too. I think the way this world gets less shitty is when more people start making these little steps towards revolutionary kindness and then those little steps start getting bigger and bigger.

This is where it’s at in the US: people feel a warm sense of happiness when a marginalized person isnt beaten to death or shot by authorities.

I agree it sucks, but they can't reasonably let her continue living there after they found out. There's so many legal and ethical issues with that. They are not qualified to provide housing. We need to provide better alternatives.

Boo. If you see that extension cord, no you didn't.

Setting aside whether they want her living in their sign, if they know that she's there and let her stay, I'm pretty sure that they have liability if there are problems. She was living on the roof of a building, no obvious way up or down, and if they say "sure, go ahead and stay" and she is climbing off the roof one night and falls, that's on them. Not to mention that I am pretty confident that a store-roof-sign is gonna violate a long list of code requirements for legal housing, from insulation to having a bathroom.

And even if you're gung-ho on the concept of relaxing liability and code for property owners who don't charge or something like that because you want a lower bar for homeless shelters or something, I am almost certain that the kind of place that they're gonna aim to permit isn't gonna be people living on a roof in a sign.

EDIT: Also, while I don't know the specifics of this store, it's apparently in a shopping center (and the article referenced that she may have climbed up from other commercial buildings, so they're probably adjoining). I think that the way those work is that the stores don't normally own their individual properties, but that they lease from a property owner who owns the strip mall or shopping center, and it's not like the store can just go start treating the property as residential even if it wants to, even aside from zoning restrictions from the municipality.

Lemme check Google Maps.

Yeah, it's the "Northwest Plaza" shopping center. Looks like they share a building with a pet food store and a UPS store and such, and there are other buildings in the shopping center.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Family+Fare+Supermarket/@43.6425233,-84.2512005,215m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x8823d55dddb15c93:0xaf14d039d2268031!8m2!3d43.6427161!4d-84.2508454!16s%2Fg%2F11cky3vyyq?entry=ttu

Yeah, and at Street View level, you can see that there are more businesses in the same building. Like, a buffet restaurant, a pharmacy, etc.

Like, setting aside the whole question of whether society should subsidize more housing, this just isn't somewhere that it makes a lot of sense to put someone, even if that's the aim.

Pure commercial zoning, legally can not be a home.