Unhoused senior citizens Kim Morris and Kevin Gevas call a homeless advocate from Mint at Tussing Park in Grants Pass, Oregon on Thursday March 28, 2024. Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Helen Cruz has been a resident of Grants Pass, Oregon, for roughly four decades, but for the last five of those years, she’s had no home in which to live. She’s not alone. Her small mountain town with a population of 39,189 provides no public homeless shelters. She is among up to 600 people experiencing homelessness in that community.
On Monday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments about their disputed right to sleep outside. At issue is an effort from 2013, when Grants Pass attempted to address the town’s burgeoning number of unhoused people by fining and subsequently issuing trespass orders with criminal penalties for sleeping in the park with as little as a blanket. By the end of June, the justices will issue a decision on the case that may determine whether their situation of being unhoused with no place to go is a protected constitutional status—or a crime.
Some of the court’s conservative justices seemed moderately sympathetic to the position of Grants Pass. Chief Justice John Roberts inquired whether the ordinances in the city would be permissible if a surrounding town had vacant shelter beds. The court’s eventual decision may very well reverberate outside of Grants Pass to affect the more than 650,000 people who are homeless at any given time in the United States. If the justices give Grants Pass the go-ahead to criminalize homelessness, other towns and cities may also opt to follow suit. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it: “Where do we put them, if every city, every village, every town, lacks compassion, and passes a law identical to this? Where are they supposed to sleep?”
Even as someone who is employed regularly as a house cleaner, 49-year-old Cruz has not been able to make it work. She can’t afford a hotel or an apartment, much less the $295-plus tickets the city slapped her with for sleeping in the parks. When the city’s unhoused people returned to sleep in the park after receiving tickets, city code allowed police to arrest them. The unpaid fines sank their credit scores and the jail stays showed up on background checks, further adding to the obstacles they faced when seeking stable employment and permanent housing.
“Those kinds of punishments not only don’t end homelessness or move us toward a solution; they move us in directly the wrong direction,” says Ed Johnson, Oregon Law Center’s director of litigation, who first sued Grants Pass over the fines. “They make matters worse, and they increase the number of people who are unable to escape homelessness.”
Despite a consensus among housing experts that civil and criminal penalties are counterproductive, conservative and liberal local governments alike are turning to them in an attempt to appease critics of homelessness in their communities without addressing its underlying causes, chief among them being the lack of affordable housing.
America has 7.3 million fewer affordable rental units than demand requires. A record-breaking 22.4 million renters spend more of their incomes on rent and utilities than the government deems financially prudent. This supply-and-demand imbalance has pushed more people towards a housing instability cliff. On one night in January 2023, more than 650,000 Americans were found to be experiencing homelessness, the highest point-in-time count since 2007 when the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) started tracking the numbers.
As a result, “Homelessness has become a much more visible problem. And elected officials are put into........