It is a measure of society’s priorities that the Supreme Court of the United States seems on the verge of allowing municipalities to arrest people for not having a home, instead of requiring municipalities to provide the safety and security of a place to stay.
For a court with certain justices who say they are guided by the words of this nation’s founders, the idea that people can be criminalized if they are too poor, too much in debt or too mentally ill to maintain a place to live is at odds with the most compelling phrase from America’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence — that all people have “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The case in question is City of Grants Pass, Ore. vs. Gloria Johnson, et al., on Behalf of Themselves and All Others Similarly Situated. The way these people are situated, to use the stilted language of the court, is living without a home in Grants Pass, a small city in eastern Oregon that has tried to solve homelessness by ticketing and fining people until they move somewhere — anywhere — else. The case’s original homeless plaintiff, Debra Blake, racked up $5,000 in fines and was forced to live far out of town, away from food and services. She died in 2021 at the age of 62.
The U.S. Court of Appeals said Grants Pass and other Western cities doing the same thing had to stop. Making a crime out of involuntary homelessness was, that court ruled, unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. The case is now before the Supreme Court, and after oral arguments last month, it seems poised to reverse the lower court’s decision.
It is a shame for all of us that we have come to this, but those of us who have been working for a kinder, more just, more perfect union have seen this kind of thing before.
When it comes to homelessness, too many elected and appointed officials no longer look at the situation — at unhoused human beings — with empathy, and that is true in both blue and red cities. They look at the situation with frustration and desperation, as more and more people are unhoused. And when a person with mental illness is unhoused, discrimination and stigma can quickly contort the housing issue into a public safety issue — which leads directly to criminalization of poverty and mental illness.
Remedies like arresting people or imposing fines on people with no ability to pay them are a simplistic surrender to what seems at a distance to be an intractable problem.
The history of policies to address homelessness reveal that our responses are actually cyclical and lathered in racism. Vagrancy laws, for example, were part of the so-called “Black Codes” passed after the Civil War by several Southern states. Among other things, these laws criminalized unemployment and homelessness, with the goal of allowing police to arrest and jail newly free Black people for not having homes of their own.
Then, as now, part of the motivation for pushing homeless people out of sight or into jail was a sense of otherness, an unwillingness or inability to see the humanity of people struggling with life.
But this cycle of progress and setback gives us hope that this latest setback is temporary. There are solutions that exist. One is “Housing First,” which provides shelter without imposing conditions like sobriety. Others include supportive housing and rezoning communities to allow more affordable housing — but society’s political and financial will has not yet caught up to its humanity. We believe it will, because it has happened before.
For example, in the early 1980s New York City reversed its decades-long assault on single-room occupancy (SRO) housing, and invested millions of dollars in renovating derelict buildings. A series of court decisions, including Callahan vs. Carey, that required New York to provide emergency housing fostered a public commitment to end mass homelessness.
That commitment, even in the wake of recent surges in demand for shelter, remains largely intact. We now see other signs for hope in suburban areas seeking to remake communities in a more supportive way.
Sometimes, the fear of homeless people stems from the recognition that many people are just a few missed paychecks away from it themselves. Seeing yourself or those you love in an issue is a step toward a solution that leads to a better world. That day is coming, and so we continue the work.
Beck is executive director of the Sozosei Foundation, which works to decriminalize mental illness. Hayes is CEO of the Community Healthcare Network and won the legal case establishing the right to shelter in New York.
