Sunday Commentary: Grants Ruling Likely to Make the Homeless Problem Worse

Photo by Fredrick Lee on Unsplash

By David M. Greenwald
Executive Editor

Without addressing permanent supportive housing, it is difficult to see how the Grants Pass decision will do anything other than increasingly shuffle homeless people in and out of local jails.

This is far from a clear-cut left-right issue despite the split on the Supreme Court.

Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom supported the decision—as did other local Democratic leaders like Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg.

In an op-ed in CalMatters, Steinberg writes, “Today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Grants Pass case provides needed clarity to American cities dealing with homelessness.”

He notes, “The Grants Pass decision is limited because it focused on the wrong constitutional amendment.”

Instead, he notes, “By deciding that unsheltered people have no constitutional protection to camp on public property, the divided court reflects the political polarization around homelessness — where everyone is correct depending on which side of the glass they choose to look through.

“The dissenting justices rightfully note that tens of thousands of unsheltered Americans are the victims of poverty, an acute shortage of affordable housing and underlying physical, mental health and substance abuse conditions. They rightfully question where these people are supposed to go.”

On the other hand, Steinberg argues, “If allowing people to live in encampments or removing them without anywhere to go is the choice, most people see both choices as cruel and unusual.”

The problem of course is that the Supreme Court has now given communities a blank check—they can clear encampments without having to solve the problem of homelessness.

This is exactly the point that many on the other side would argue.

As the LA Times Editorial Board points out, “This decision, cruelly, allows cities to deal with homeless people by fining, jailing and ultimately shooing them away from sidewalks and parks, leaving them to search out other sidewalks and parks. Impoverished people cannot pay fines, and so the penalties accumulate — sometimes going on their credit report or triggering a court bench warrant for failure to pay. That only hurts their chances of finding housing when they get a rental subsidy and apply for an apartment.”

The Times argues that the solutions to homeless problem, “the only humane solutions,” are going to require “hard work, funding and patience” and they include “the hard work of creating interim housing, such as motel and hotel rooms, and permanent affordable housing, often with services.”

“This decision will result in local governments punishing people who already face exorbitant systemic barriers to housing,” said Rafa Sonnenfeld, Policy Director at YIMBY Action and YIMBY Law. “This decision will prevent people from sheltering themselves when they have no alternatives in their community; and it will create more barriers to their ability to access resources they need while on a path to being securely housed.”

YIMBY points out, “The Grants Pass ruling asserts that city and county officials can penalize ‘conduct,’ and that sleeping on public property outdoors is conduct that people can engage in regardless of housing status.”

“Arresting unhoused people for being unhoused is not only cruel and absurd, it also does nothing to end homelessness,” said Laura Foote, Executive Director at YIMBY Action. “Only homes can end homelessness.”

YIMBY Action and YIMBY Law urge local, state, and federal governments to pass and urgently implement policies that will result in abundant, affordable homes for people at every income level.

As the LA Times points out, “Anti-camping laws are not tools in the toolbox that fix homelessness. And citing people for living outside has nothing to do with creating housing.”

They continue, “[I]t is difficult to grapple with homelessness, but the problem is not solved by jailing and fining people and pushing them from one sidewalk to another. Only adequate housing and services — including treatment for mental illness and substance abuse — will solve homelessness. It takes time and it takes money. Decades of under-investment in affordable housing and the loss of rent-controlled apartments have made the homelessness problem worse year after year.”

We keep coming back to the same point on the homeless crisis—we know the solution to homelessness—it is permanent supportive housing.  Yes, it is costly.  But guess what, it’s costly to round people up, put them through the court system and turn them back onto the streets because you lack the housing and services they need.

Leaders will often point out that many homeless do not want services—which I think most advocates would argue severely understates and misrepresents the issue—but for the purposes of this discussion, the previous law wasn’t unresponsive to this.

The Boise ruling out of the Ninth Circuit actually addressed this point, only ruling that “homeless people could not be fined unless there was non-religious shelter available.”

That ruling created the incentive that public officials could clear encampments so long as they had somewhere to put the people they were displacing.

This ruling undermines that.  There will be a tendency to catch and release folks—temporarily cleaning up encampments while failing to address the real problems that lead people to become and stay homeless.

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