NYT: Some Western mayors get more aggressive about addressing homeless encampments, post-Grant's Pass
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The Supreme Court decided last month that cities could cite homeless campers. Some cities say ‘clear them all.’ Some vow 'no change.' Others are ramping up outreach. Shawn Hubler and Mike Baker explore for NYT.
Until recently, federal appellate courts limited how far cities could go to clear encampments. But late last month, the Supreme Court ruled that they could remove homeless residents sleeping outdoors, a decision that has already begun to reshape how they deal with homelessness.
Three days after the decision, the Folsom police announced they would start citing recalcitrant illegal campers, though they also would team up with nonprofits to provide more homeless outreach.
In the two weeks since the Supreme Court decided that the city of Grants Pass, Ore., could penalize sleeping and camping in public places, city leaders across the country have responded by revising local ordinances and preparing to take a harder line on homeless encampments. Nowhere has the homelessness crisis been more severe than in Western states, where tent communities have proliferated since the pandemic.
Some cities are particularly eager to get moving.
“I’m warming up the bulldozer,” said Mayor R. Rex Parris, a Republican, of Lancaster, Calif., an exurb 62 miles north of Los Angeles. “I want the tents away from the residential areas and the shopping centers and the freeways.”
“I get that some of these people have fallen on hard times,” the mayor said, “and we have a state-of-the-art shelter with beds available. But the population we’re talking about doesn’t want a bed.”
That sentiment is not limited to Republican leaders. In San Francisco, where Mayor London Breed has faced a tough fight for re-election, businesses have waged a furious campaign to eliminate homeless encampments even as civil liberties groups have sued the city over enforcement.
“My hope is that we can clear them all,” the staunch Democrat said at a news conference after the ruling. She has said that homeless people who refuse services are partly to blame for the city’s economic struggles downtown
In the Seattle suburb of Burien, Wash., city leaders are battling with the county sheriff, who runs the police force, over the enforcement of public camping bans. Citing concerns about constitutionality, the sheriff’s department has declined to take action, even after the Supreme Court ruling.
Mayor Kevin Schilling wanted more immediate action. He said he believes that enforcement, combined with outreach, would nudge those in need of drug treatment, mental health services or temporary shelter to choose those options. “If you don’t have that nudge, at the end of that day, people are not going to choose to do that on their own,” he said.
The Supreme Court ruling left many civil protections intact, including prohibitions on excessive fines and violations of due process. Local governments can still be sued, civil liberties groups note, and still must grapple with vast numbers of vulnerable, poor and unsheltered people.
In a recent webinar on the ruling, legal advisers in California recommended that municipalities provide ample notice of enforcement, set fines at an affordable level and frame anti-camping laws as a tool to persuade homeless people to accept services.
The police in Folsom, Calif., have begun to warn homeless campers that they could be cited under a new Supreme Court ruling. But they also have intensified homeless outreach.Credit...Andri Tambunan for The New York Time
“A playbook is developing,” she said. “But the clear aim is a race to the bottom where each local government tries to drive unhoused people out.”
Model legislation drawn up by the Cicero Institute, a Texas think tank, has underpinned new laws in Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma and other Republican-led states that cracked down on encampments and reversed a mostly government-funded approach that prioritizes housing individuals.
In Los Angeles, where many homeless campers live on Skid Row, Mayor Karen Bass criticized the Supreme Court decision and said her approach of moving people into hotels is working.
“This ruling must not be used as an excuse for cities across the country to attempt to arrest their way out of this problem or hide the homelessness crisis in neighboring cities or in jail,” Ms. Bass said. “The only way to address this crisis is to bring people indoors with housing and supportive services.”
Not everyone in Los Angeles agrees. Traci Park, a City Council member from the affluent Westside, coauthored a motion within hours of the ruling that demanded an examination of the existing anti-camping restrictions, along with a comparison of regulations in Los Angeles County’s 87 other cities.
Read the whole thing here.
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