Rare alliance seeks to clear camps
Republicans, Democrats ask for legal power
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Garbage, feces, and needles run through the rivers in Missoula, Mont. On the streets of San Francisco, tents are so thick that sidewalks in the Tenderloin neighborhood have become “unofficial open-air public housing.” In Portland, Ore., a blaze shut down an on-ramp to the Steel Bridge for several days in March after campers tunneled through a cinder block wall and lit a campfire to stay warm.
In a surge of legal briefs this week, frustrated leaders from across the political spectrum, including the liberal governor of California and right-wing state legislators in Arizona, charged that homeless encampments were turning their public spaces into pits of squalor and asked the Supreme Court to revisit lower court decisions that they say have hobbled their ability to bring these camps under control.
The urgent pleas come as leaders across the country, and particularly in the West, have sought to rebound from the coronavirus pandemic and restore normalcy in cities. In more than two dozen briefs filed in an appeal of a decision on homeless policies in a southern Oregon town, officials from nearly every Western state and beyond described desolate scenes related to a proliferation of tent encampments in recent years.
They begged the justices to let them remove people from their streets without running afoul of court rulings that have protected the civil rights of homeless individuals.
“The friction in many communities affected by homelessness is at a breaking point,” the attorneys for Las Vegas, Seattle, and more than a dozen other cities, as well as national municipal organizations, wrote in one brief. “Despite massive infusions of public resources, businesses and residents are suffering the increasingly negative effects of long-term urban camping.”
Homeless rights advocates agreed that tent encampments were unsafe both for their vulnerable occupants and the communities around them. But they said the gathering legal campaign was merely an attempt to fall back on timeworn government crackdowns rather than pursue the obvious solutions: more help and more housing.
“They’re seeking to blame and penalize and marginalize the victims rather than take the steps they haven’t found the political will to take,” said Eric Tars, the senior policy director at the National Homelessness Law Center.
Homelessness has increasingly overwhelmed state and local governments across the country. In California alone, more than 170,000 people are homeless, accounting for about one-third of the nation’s homeless population. More than 115,000 of those homeless Californians sleep on the streets, in cars, or outdoors in places not intended for habitation, according to a federal tally of homelessness conducted last year.
Five years ago, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a case from Boise, Idaho, that it was unconstitutional for cities to clear homeless camps and criminally charge campers unless they could offer adequate housing. In the nine Western states covered by the circuit, that ruling has since prompted billions of dollars of public spending on homelessness.
Even so, very few cities in the West have enough shelter beds to serve everyone who is homeless in their jurisdictions, and that gap has made officials wary of enforcing local laws that prohibit individuals from setting up tents anywhere in public.
The recent filings stem from a case that focuses on whether the small city of Grants Pass, Ore., can write citations when people camp in public spaces such as sidewalks, playgrounds, and parks. Unlike Boise, Grants Pass had issued civil citations rather than pursue criminal charges until the 9th Circuit determined that municipal tickets were also forbidden, absent sufficient shelter beds.