Report: Local progressives/conservatives join forces to challenge Ninth Circuit homelessness ruling
Image by James Abbott
Folks of all political stripes who want safer, more humane streets are banding together to request the SCOTUS review Johnson v. Grants Pass, which builds on Martin v. Boise by prohibiting cities from maintaining certain restrictions on street encampments. Similarly, San Jose's mayor—among others like San Diego's—wants the city to enforce more stringent rules on illegal camping. From the National Review.
“Families can no longer walk the streets of Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle in safety,” a group of state attorneys general wrote. “The pungent smell of urine and human feces fills the air. Hypodermic needles used for narcotics cover the ground. And rats carrying diseases that were once thought eradicated scurry from encampments to nearby businesses and homes.”
Those are just some of the claims made in more than two dozen amicus briefs filed last month urging the Supreme Court to overturn a recent Ninth Circuit ruling that drastically limited the ability of local governments to enforce camping bans on many homeless people.
The briefs represent the perspective of hundreds of groups and people — city leaders, politicians, civic groups, business organizations, downtown residents, law-enforcement leaders, state attorneys general, conservative think tankers — united by their belief that the Ninth Circuit’s ruling last year in Johnson v. Grants Pass has hamstrung cities and allowed for the proliferation of squalid and dangerous homeless encampments in Western communities.
The Republican leaders of the Arizona legislature filed a brief, arguing that the Ninth Circuit ruling thwarts “the legislature’s efforts to address a crisis on its own doorstep.” Likewise, Gavin Newsom, the Democratic California governor, filed a brief claiming that Ninth Circuit rulings have “paralyzed communities” and left residents “at risk of exposure to criminal activity and controlled substances, and of subjugation to sex work or physical abuse.”
Grants Pass, a lower-income city in southern Oregon, petitioned the Supreme Court in August.
“I’m feeling pretty good that the court will take the case,” Augustus Ogu, the city attorney for Grants Pass, told National Review. “There’s too much uncertainty, especially in the Western part of the United States for the court not to take the case. Cities are kind of neutered. We don’t know what we can and can’t do.”
The Johnson v. Grants Pass ruling in 2022 is the second of two Ninth Circuit decisions that critics say have supercharged the proliferation of homeless camps in Western states. It came on the heels of a 2018 ruling in Martin v. Boise, in which the court held that enforcing criminal anti-camping restrictions on people who don’t have “access to adequate temporary shelter” is a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Just weeks after the Martin ruling, three homeless residents sued the city of Grants Pass. Last September, the Ninth Circuit ruled in their favor, extending the Martin ruling to include the prohibition on issuing civil citations to homeless campers, and affirming a class-wide injunction against Grants Pass’s enforcement of its anti-camping ordinance.
This article originally appeared in the National Review. Read the whole thing here.
Related:
CA city coalitions challenge Martin v. Boise's ever-broadening “involuntarily homeless” definition
Housing First not only ineffectual but deadly: LA case study
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