Supreme Court Rules Cities Can Ban Homeless From Sleeping Outdoors

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that cities can ban homeless people from sleeping on the streets.

It is the Court’s most significant ruling on homelessness since at least the 1980s, when many experts say America’s modern homeless crisis began.

The ruling allows local governments to enforce rules prohibiting people from sleeping in public places without regard to the U.S. Constitution’s limits on cruel and unusual punishment.

The case began in the small town of Grants Pass, Oregon, where three homeless people sued the town after receiving citations for sleeping and camping outside.

At a Supreme Court hearing in April, the city argued that criminal penalties were necessary to enforce local laws that ban homeless people from public spaces for “cleanliness and safety reasons.”

Homeless residents said the penalties violated the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution because the city had no public shelters.

The conservative-led Court appeared skeptical of its right to make decisions on local laws, with some justices more inclined to leave those decisions to elected officials.

The number of homeless people in the United States is on the rise, fueled in part by a chronic shortage of affordable housing. About 653,000 people were without housing in 2023, the highest number since tracking began in 2007, according to U.S. government figures.

Grants Pass’s population has doubled to 40,000 in the past 20 years, but its supply of affordable or public housing has not increased.

Soaring housing costs have led to a significant number of people losing their homes.

City officials responded by passing laws imposing fines on people who slept or camped in public. Over time, these fines added up, reaching thousands of dollars for some.

Unable to pay multiple citations, three homeless people took the city to court.

Their lawsuit reached the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled in 2022 that the Grants Pass restrictions were so strict that they amounted to an effective ban on homelessness within city limits.

The court had ruled four years earlier in a similar case in Idaho that the constitution “prohibits a city from criminally prosecuting persons who sleep outdoors on public property when those persons have no home or other refuge to go to.”

Meanwhile, the homelessness crisis continues to worsen.

Jennifer Friedenbach of the San Francisco Homeless Coalition said money and resources should “go toward getting people off the streets.”

“What we know is that arresting and fining people who are homeless doesn’t work,” she said. “It doesn’t get anyone off the street. This wastes municipal resources and exacerbates homelessness. »

The Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision will now allow cities to take tougher measures without fear of legal challenge.

The first problem with incarcerating the homeless is that it is extremely expensive, and when they get out, the person is still homeless and now even less likely to find a job with a criminal record, says Elizabeth Funk, founder of DignityMoves, a non-profit organization. dedicated to ending homeless homelessness.

“We need to think about how to solve this problem,” she said. “It’s not about fining people for doing something they can’t avoid. It’s about helping them.”

Some of the highest concentrations of homeless people are on the West Coast.

California, with its moderate temperatures, has nearly half of all homeless people living outdoors and has a total of 123,423 homeless people, according to data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Across the country, cities are grappling with how to combat this growing crisis.

This issue has been at the heart of recent election cycles in West Coast cities, including Los Angeles, where officials have invested record amounts of money in shelter and affordable housing as the homeless population has continued to rise.