No excuses #4: Grant's Pass liberates cities to do the right thing for unhoused and their neighbors
Grant’s pass homeless tents
For years, CA big city mayors have complained that Martin v Boise severely constrained their ability to manage homelessness crisis. Those constraints are gone: what will they do? Alison Durkee reports for Forbes.
The public camping ban in Grants Pass isn’t “cruel and unusual” because it just imposes “limited fines” or prison time and is in line with other punishments for criminal offenses, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the court’s majority, also ruling it doesn’t criminalize people for being homeless—which could violate past Supreme Court precedent—because the ban doesn’t differentiate between “a person experiencing homelessness, a backpacker on vacation, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building.”
The court’s ruling is expected to affect cities across the country. San Francisco’s mayor told the court that rulings striking down public camping bans had “severely constrained San Francisco’s ability to address the homelessness crisis,” and Gorsuch noted that cities told the court allowing public camping bans and not having any federal injunctions in place “‘is crucial’ for local governments to ‘have the latitude’ to experiment and find effective responses.”
250,000. That’s approximately how many Americans who experienced homelessness in 2023 were unsheltered, according to the federal government, making up 40% of the 653,104 people who experienced homelessness last year overall. That’s up from approximately 550,000 in 2016, and marks a dramatic increase over 582,000 in 2022. Cities across the country have grappled with rising homeless populations in recent years, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City, where the Coalition for the Homeless reports homelessness levels have reached their highest point since the Great Depression.
Grants Pass’ public camping ban levied fines of at least $295 on people who were punished for sleeping outdoors, which increased with multiple violations and could ultimately result in people being barred from the city’s park for 30 days under threat of criminal trespassing.
The city started taking action against its homeless population in 2013—with its city council president saying, “The point is to make it uncomfortable enough for them in our city so they will want to move on down the road,” according to Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Residents filed a class action lawsuit against the city in 2018, which made its way to the Supreme Court after both federal district and appeals courts ruled against the public camping ban. The courts’ decisions were based on Martin v. Boise, a 2018 ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that barred governments in nine states, including Oregon, from punishing people for sleeping outside.
Read the whole thing here.
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