The US Supreme Court had on Friday, June 29, ruled in a 6-3 vote along ideological lines that cities can ban homeless people from sleeping on the streets.
This decision is the court’s most significant decision on homelessness since the 1980s, when several experts reckon the modern US homeless crisis began.
The ruling states that local governments can impose laws against people sleeping in public places without violating the US constitution’s limits on cruel and unusual punishment.
The case originated in the small city of Grants Pass, Oregon, after three homeless people got sued after receiving citations for sleeping and camping outside.
At a Supreme Court hearing in April, the city argued that criminal penalties were important to help enforce local laws prohibiting homeless people from public spaces for “reasons of cleanliness and safety”.
Meanwhile the homeless residents have hit back on those penalties, saying that it violated the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution because the city did not own any public shelters.
Homelessness is steadily increasing in the US, fuelled partly by the persistent shortages of affordable housing.
In 2023, around 653,000 people were reportedly homeless — the largest number since it began being monitored in 2007, according to US government figures.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development also reported that they are an approximate 256,000 people living without shelter on any given night across the country in 2023.
The Reactions to the Ruling
Several cities had issued statements embracing the ruling. San Francisco have declared that it would help cities “manage their public spaces more effectively and efficiently,”
The National Alliance End Homelessness had reacted to the ruling, staring that it now “sets a dangerous precedent that will cause undue harm to people experiencing homelessness and give free reign to local officials who prefer pointless and expensive arrests and imprisonment, rather than real solutions”.
In the city of Grants Pass, the centre of the legal brouhaha, city leaders have said that they would meet with their lawyers to discuss next steps.
Grants Pass’s population doubled to 40,000 in the past 20 years, but its supply of public or affordable or housing has not.
The expensive housing costs have led to a size-able number of people losing their homes.
In response to the homelessness situation, town officials responded by passing laws that penalised people for sleeping or camping in public.
Unable to pay for multiple citations, three homeless people dragged the city to court. Their lawsuit reached the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which decided in 2022 that the restrictions in Grants Pass were so tight that they amounted to an effectual ban on being homeless within the city limits.
Note that the court had determined four years earlier, in a similar case in Idaho that the constitution “prohibits a city from prosecuting people criminally for sleeping outside on public property when those people have no home or other shelter to go to”.
Despite this, the homeless crisis has continued to worsen.
Why It Matters
The Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision does not permit cities to take more extreme measures without the fear of legal recourse.
A lot of the highest concentrations of the homeless are on the West Coast.
California, with its moderate temperatures, accounts for nearly half of all the homeless who live outside and has a total of 123,423 homeless people, according to data from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Nationwide, cities have been wrestling with how to combat the rising crisis.
The issue has been at the crux of the recent election cycles in West Coast cities, including in Los Angeles, where government officials have poured great amounts of money into creating shelters and affordable housing while homelessness multiplied.
