If #Brexit has taught the world anything, it’s that ballot measures may carry unintended consequences. For both the United Kingdom and the European Union, the fallout from the “Leave” vote appears to be profound. The Economist’s Intelligence Unit predicts that the June 23 referendum will reverse the U.K.’s economic recovery. With leadership uncertain and hard-right politics rising across the continent, the fate of the European Union is in question.

Voters in San Francisco face nothing so cataclysmic on the ballot this fall (save for the vote for the U.S. presidency). But one referendum that voters will decide will have enormous consequences for the city’s most vulnerable population: people experiencing homelessness. In its own way, the San Francisco referendum suffers from the same hastiness as the vote that led to the crisis that is now tearing apart the U.K.

The ballot measure, which is supported by San Francisco Supervisor Mark Farrell, would effectively ban homeless camps and tents from San Francisco streets. A “yes” vote on the referendum would enable the city to forcibly remove encampments 24 hours after providing notice and an offer of shelter. The measure is an answer to residents’ mounting frustration with encampments in the city and the hygiene problems that attend them.

Residents are right to be distressed. Many must be angry that the city isn’t doing more to help its most vulnerable residents, and refuse to accept homeless camps as an answer. Other voters may not care, of course; they may simply want to see the city remove public eyesores from the sidewalks, and in November, they’ll pull the lever for this measure to make it happen. Either way, voters will “get the chance to prove just how willing they are to see [encampments] forcibly cleared,” as The San Francisco Chronicle’s Emily Green puts it.

San Francisco deserves a better answer to homelessness than an up-or-down vote.

The ballot is a heinous way to decide the fate of San Francisco’s nearly 7,000 homeless residents. A referendum enables the city’s most callous voters to indulge in indifference, but that’s not even the worst of it. A referendum asks many more voters to accept a short-term solution to homelessness by pushing them out of sight and out of mind, which helps to foreclose on the possibility of a viable long-term structural solution. This ballot measure, like almost any ballot measure, shifts the risk of unintended consequences off of San Francisco’s elected representatives and onto its residents—specifically, those experiencing homelessness.

Consider this ballot measure specifically. The measure would require the city to identify short-term shelter for a person before she can be evicted from an encampment. But there currently aren’t enough shelter beds for the homeless population of the city. (This is one reason why so many resort to sidewalk campsites, though not the only reason.) So the measure may be doomed to fail—or rather, it may be doomed to fail homeless residents.