Dear Mayor Wahler, Council President Espinosa, Council Members Cahill, Carmichael, Leibowitz, Lombardi, Rashid, and Uhrin:
We write to urge you to withdraw changes to the municipal code to be considered on December 2, 2025 that criminalize people experiencing homelessness. These proposed changes, identified in 3.23-1 and 11.2-1 especially, will move Piscataway off the path of success, common sense law, and basic human compassion.
We need to pursue a path toward successfully housing our community members.
These changes criminalize the basic human need to sleep and could result in arrests, up to $2,000 in fines, and/or 90 days imprisonment for people who have no alternative but to exist and store belongings in a public area. Piscataway should be a leader in engaging homeless service providers to develop care plans with unsheltered residents and secure housing. This work is more important than ever before, as costs are rapidly rising and more residents are struggling to meet basic needs. This is not justice, it is cruelty.
Piscataway needs to support homeless service providers and their efforts to engage unhoused individuals to connect them to rapid rehousing and housing first programs. The Township’s focus should be on providing a fair share of affordable housing. Instead of penalizing people, Piscataway should pursue collaborating with service providers to create care plans and connect unhoused residents to housing. We respectfully ask you to work toward compassionate, community-led strategies that provide rapid rehousing through Housing First programs that treat people with dignity and offer real solutions.
The Council should withdraw all of the related ordinances, including proposals to limit the length of stays in hotels and motels and increase police surveillance of people’s stays in these private businesses. These proposals drain resources from law enforcement, violate visitors’ expectations of privacy in our community and create an extra burden on vulnerable people, including veterans and domestic violence survivors.
The root cause of homelessness is the lack of affordable housing. Removing people to neighboring towns and forcing them to shuffle from place to place is not a solution. There are already laws in place to address dangerous or unlawful behavior. Enforcing those laws is very different from punishing people simply for being poor. To fine unhoused individuals for sleeping outside is not only ineffective, but also senseless. If someone cannot afford housing, it makes no sense to expect them to pay fines.
Our neighbors experiencing homelessness are not strangers. They are often long-time Piscataway residents who have fallen on hard times. Every major faith tradition calls us to care for the most vulnerable among us with compassion, not criminalization. This ordinance betrays that core value and threatens Piscataway’s reputation as a caring, forward-thinking community.
Do the right thing. Withdraw this proposal and commit to working with our community and the available County and State programs to ensure that everyone has a safe, affordable place to call home. There are numerous ways to support people experiencing homelessness that help them. We urge you to create a Task Force on Homelessness and bring together experts and volunteers to work towards solution that protect our most vulnerable neighbors.
We hope you will oppose these changes, remove them from the agenda, and move forward with compassion and care to solutions that solve homelessness. We urge you to address homelessness in our community with housing, not handcuffs!
