🏡💚 Criminalizing homelessness in California cities
Last month, the conservative-majority Supreme Court ruled in Grants Pass v. Johnson that cities have broad discretion to forcibly remove and criminalize people who are homeless. Despite the apparent and glaring cruelty of these policies, the Court claimed that fining and arresting homeless people—even when there aren’t enough shelter beds available—does not constitute “cruel and unusual punishment.”
The ruling overturned a lower court’s decision that invalidated an anti-camping ordinance made in a southern Oregon city (Grants Pass). Part of the issue in the case was that the city had no homeless shelter (outside of a Christian shelter that required church attendance), and thus nowhere for people sleeping outside to go. This has been a legal issue in other cities including San Francisco, where an injunction in 2022 barred the city from removing tents using anti-camping statutes unless it had enough shelter beds for every homeless person citywide.
Already we are seeing the consequences of the Grants Pass ruling, as last week an appeals court overturned the San Francisco injunction as a direct result of the Supreme Court decision.
The politics of this decision are not what you might initially expect. The Grants Pass case has made strange bedfellows between the conservative Supreme Court justices and Democratic California politicians (or perhaps not so strange, if you closely follow homelessness policy in the state). Governor Newsom praised the ruling, saying it “provides state and local officials the definitive authority to implement and enforce policies to clear unsafe encampments from our streets.” In fact, Newsom did a lot more than just applaud the outcome — he helped to bring it about, filing an amicus brief that said the lower courts’ rulings would leave communities “paralyzed” to address encampments.
Mayor London Breed also commended the decision, after her and City Attorney David Chiu also filed an amicus brief supporting the effort to overturn the lower courts’ rulings. In a statement, Breed said the decision “will help cities like San Francisco manage our public spaces more effectively and efficiently.”
She went a lot further than that. Just yesterday, Mayor Breed said the city would launch a “very aggressive” crackdown on homeless encampments starting in August “which may even include criminal penalties.” Breed added, “the problem is not going to be solved by building more housing. Thank goodness for the Supreme Court decision.”
Last week, the city of Palm Springs passed a sweeping new anti-camping ordinance that allows police to arrest people who build encampments or sleep in public areas.
Councilmember Lisa Middleton, the city’s former mayor and a Democratic candidate for the state Senate, responded to Grants Pass saying, “The United States Supreme Court got it right on this one. Every court is entitled to get it right once.”
Not every Democrat has embraced the decision. To her credit, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has been a staunch critic of the decision, and had previously warned that this decision would encourage those who want to further criminalize people for being homeless. She emphatically stated that she would be “resisting Grants Pass” and focus on housing solutions.
While reading about these different ordinances and reactions, I can’t help being stuck by the euphemisms used to describe “homeless solutions.” City officials bemoan the challenges of “removing” homeless people and “clearing” encampments. The logic of erasure is both dehumanizing and absurd. They seem to be frustrated that “cleared” encampments just pop up again, that the people have not been successfully “removed.”
The new ordinances reveal the conclusion of that logic: the destination of forced removal is now a jail cell.
The false compassion of the rationalizations that accompany these draconian laws is disturbing. It most often takes the form of paternalistic reluctance, a “doing it for their own good.” As if a criminal arrest record or a fine could do anything but further deepen the spiral of poverty. These punishments directly undermine a person’s ability to get the things they need: employment, housing, and government services. Instead, they spend time in jail and navigating the criminal justice system. Scarce public resources are used for policing and prisons, instead of housing and improved services (it costs about $106,000 a year to incarcerate an inmate in prison in California).
The new ordinances come as record-breaking heat waves hit the West Coast. I wrote last week about the rising death toll, and have written previously about the ways homelessness and the climate crisis converge in California. The Fresno Bee released a story last week where the reporter spoke with a homeless man on how he tries to beat the heat. The piece illustrates both the challenges of surviving extreme weather, and the small and hopelessly inadequate acts of kindness that anonymous people offer — a bottle of water, some words of encouragement.
Homelessness is a moral outrage that we are confronted with and forced to accept on a daily basis in many communities in California. It’s a highly visible manifestation of deeper social issues, one that strips the dignity from those who are experiencing homelessness, and the people who walk past and can choose to offer a desperately insufficient act of kindness/sympathy/pity, or to try to ignore it because there’s way more people and need than you as an individual can possibly help.
Politicians understandably feel the pressure to take action. And perhaps also feeling like they cannot impact the thorny social problems that form the root causes of homelessness, they will often focus their attention on the most visible symptoms. Grants Pass will allow the most cruel forms of those political reactions to stand, but it doesn’t require them either. The political fight will be localized to every town, city, and state, where proven solutions can still prevail.
Protests in anticipation of the Grants Pass decision. Source: POLITICO
WHAT WE’RE READING
‘There are no guardrails’: Supreme Court empowers cities to take tougher steps to police homelessness (Politico) — a lot of the information on California city responses to Grants Pass came from this article
Biden to unveil plan to cap rents as GOP convention begins (Washington Post)
LA County leaders vote to give renters free eviction attorneys, a first in SoCal (LAist)
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