Beleaguered mayors of blue cities might get some relief from the homelessness problems that nettle their cities. If they do, it will come from conservatives. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review a court decision from Oregon that has handcuffed cities trying to remove homeless encampments.
The city of Grants Pass, Ore., a community of about 40,000 in the southwestern part of the state, prohibited the homeless from sleeping in public while “using a blanket, pillow, or cardboard box for protection from the elements.” A district court ruled and a divided panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed in 2022, that such a law was tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment and violated the Eighth Amendment. That decision follows a precedent established in a 2018 ruling by the same circuit court that a municipality, Boise, Idaho, could not enforce anti-camping ordinances on public land unless sufficient beds were provided in shelters for the residents of the encampments. (READ MORE: Will Democrats Finally Address the Mental Health Crisis?)
If the Court reverses Grants Pass v. Johnson, the former case, it would negate Martin v. City of Boise, the latter case, and give cities more leverage in dealing with a problem that is growing by the year.
Conservatives to the Rescue in Blue Cities?
Could it be that conservative justices will ride to the rescue of liberal politicians who can’t solve problems largely spawned by their own policies of utopian hyper-compassion? Or, as the Wall Street Journal put it: “Wouldn’t it be rich if conservative Justices rescue progressive cities from themselves?”
The homelessness problem is particularly severe in the nine Western states that compose the Ninth Circuit. Indeed, 42 percent of all homeless individuals in the U.S. live in those states. California leads the nation by a long shot; with more than 145,000 homeless, the Golden State accounts for about 35 percent of the nation’s homeless and more than half the people (52 percent) living on the street. Portland, Ore., and Seattle also suffer acutely from the crisis.
As the problem has worsened, cities have felt pressure to get tough on homelessness due to the steep costs they face in dealing with the issue and the failure of some localities to prioritize new housing construction. Given the limitations imposed by the courts, cities in the West have used creative measures to deal with the tent cities, like banning encampments in selected areas or at selected times of the day, or making camping a felony. (READ MORE: Washington Post Blames Conservatives for ‘Housing First’ Disaster)
Last November, in compliance with a lawsuit filed by adjacent businesses and residents contending that a 15-block homeless encampment near downtown called “The Zone” was a public nuisance, the city of Phoenix cleared the camp, which numbered about 1,000 individuals at its largest, from the street. Officials in Portland, Ore., banned homeless camping on public property between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. The Missoula, Mont., city council passed an emergency ordinance last year that made removing encampments, of which the city of 78,000 has approximately 60, from parks used by groups like children much easier. In Los Angeles County, government officials occasionally brought in clean-up crews to remove lengthy stretches of homeless tents bordering freeways and elsewhere, and in the recent Los Angeles City mayoral race, candidates’ plans to reduce the city’s homelessness problem were a decisive factor in the election. San Francisco famously — or infamously — cleaned its city streets of the homeless and their feces in preparation for Chinese strongman Xi Jinping’s visit.
Numerous blue cities have filed amicus briefs in Grants Pass, setting up a set-to with homeless advocates — progressives at odds with other progressives, in this case. San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland, Seattle, and Phoenix have all filed amicus briefs. They maintain that the present situation is untenable.
Progressives v. Progressives
The usual suspects, of course, disagree. The only thing Martin and Grants Pass means, Eric Tars, an attorney for the National Homeless Law Center, told Portland TV channel 8 (KGW), is that “communities can’t punish people experiencing homelessness for undertaking basic survival activities – sleeping, sheltering themselves from the elements – if they don’t offer them an adequate alternative place to do those things. So the only reason that you would want to overturn that is if you want to be able to punish people for those activities without even bothering to have to offer an alternative.”
The ACLU also weighed in after the Supreme Court granted certiorari to Grants Pass:
Today’s decision could upend decades of established Supreme Court precedent, and reopen a definition of cruel and unusual punishment that protects Americans, housed and unhoused, from unconstitutional treatment in the criminal legal system. The Grants Pass case questions whether governments can jail people simply for the crime of being too poor to afford housing.
But every blue city west of the Rockies seems to be pushing back against their erstwhile allies on the left. It seems that, after billions spent on idyllic plans to house at government expense everybody either down on his luck or sleeping on the street by volition, some on the left are finally waking up to reality.
San Francisco, in its amicus brief, said the quiet part out loud: “In recent years, San Francisco has spent billions of dollars providing shelter and housing to persons experiencing homelessness, including over $672 million during the past fiscal year. But the City cannot feasibly provide shelter for everyone.” (READ MORE: The Destruction of the Family Was Not Inevitable)
In 2020, Portland started a program to end homelessness in the region. Now it sees the light: “Even if cities could build enough shelters to house the entire homeless population—a budgetary impossibility for most cities—it is not clear even that would be enough.”
In its brief, Seattle laid out the staggering dollar figures these Western cities have devoted to homelessness: Los Angeles — $1.3 billion in 2023–2024; San Francisco — $672 million in 2022–2023; Seattle — $153.7 million in 2023. It adds: “In the last four years, the State of California allocated $17.5B for homelessness responses.”
A Taste of Reality
The homelessness debate may be shifting. One columnist for the Seattle Times, Danny Westneat, has taken a more realistic approach to the debate. He wrote last September:
I’ve been arguing in this space for more than a decade that Seattle’s approach is both too utopian (apartments for everyone) and too lowly (while we look for money and time to build the apartments, you can go live or die in wretched, dangerous conditions under this bridge).
We should have stood up temporary, cheaper, emergency-style shelters — FEMA tents, tiny houses, tilt-ups — and then had a backbone about getting people into them. You can’t force anyone, and there’s no need to criminalize the issue. But you can say: “You can’t sleep here, in this park or on this sidewalk. You can sleep over there. Those are the Seattle rules.”
We could still do this today. It would be a step to get many people up off the streets, hopefully, to start stabilizing their lives. It wouldn’t be utopian. It wouldn’t be permanent, or, unfortunately, universally effective. What it would be is doable.
A Supreme Court comprised of a 6–3 conservative majority overturning the Grants Pass case would allow blue cities — blue cities with the sand and sanity to do so — to be more forceful in dealing with a homeless crisis much of their own making that threatens the quality of life in those largely beautiful locations.
And, yes, it would be ironic.