The U.S. Supreme Court will weigh in on whether cities can legally ban or limit unhoused people camping in public spaces — a case that could grant California officials more power to sweep homeless camps.
The case, originating from the Oregon city of Grants Pass, could overturn or narrow a five-year-old precedent from a federal appeals court that limited how much cities in Western states could criminalize those who sleep on the streets when there aren’t enough shelter spaces available.
In the older case — Martin v. Boise — the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2018 that it’s cruel and unusual punishment to criminalize camping on public property when the people in question have nowhere else they can legally sleep. The ruling was binding on West Coast cities, where rising rates of unsheltered homelessness that later spiked during the pandemic were driving local politicians to pass public camping prohibitions. In 2019 the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of that case.
Since then, California cities have often been subject to federal lawsuits after passing restrictions on when and where the unhoused can set up camps. Relying on the ruling in the Boise case, judges have delayed or outright halted camping bans from being enforced in cities including San Francisco, Sacramento, Chico and San Rafael, finding that the cities had failed to provide adequate alternate shelter options for the residents they were about to sweep from their encampments.
The situation has led city officials —and Gov. Gavin Newsom — to complain that the Boise ruling has tied their hands from addressing the state’s sprawling encampments, arguing they need to sweep camps both for health and safety reasons and for the well-being of encampment residents. It’s led liberal state and local officials, including Newsom, to join conservatives in asking the court for more power to penalize the homeless for sleeping outside. The high court has a 6-3 conservative majority.
In a high-profile case that has particularly drawn Newsom’s ire, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals this month backed a judge’s 2022 ruling restricting San Francisco’s enforcement of certain bans on sleeping on sidewalks and in parks, because the city hadn’t shown there were other locations that were “realistically available” to unhoused residents before a city sweep.
“California’s elected officials who seek in good faith to improve what often appears to be an intractable crisis have found themselves without options, forced to abandon efforts to make the spaces occupied by unhoused people safer for those within and near them,” Newsom’s administration wrote to the Supreme Court in September.
An attorney for the homeless Grants Pass residents said in a statement today that politicians were wrong to blame judges for the homelessness crisis. He said cities have always been allowed to regulate encampments, even under the recent rulings.
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Categories: Local Government, Local News
I believe that changing the Boise Decision to allow jurisdictions to once again fine people who have no place to go for standing, sitting or sleeping in public spaces will have less impact than one would think.
If these people have no place to go, and the city / surrounding area has no places for them, and North Orange County has beds for only 30% of its homeless population now — meaning that the cities of North Orange County have solemnly decided that they _prefer+ keeping 70% of their people who are homeless sleeping on the streets, urinating on their lawns and being their kids biggest fans at their various little league tournaments in our parks — then all that’s going to happen is that those 70% of our homeless population will just have an added number of fines (and eventually warrants) tacked on their record — making it even harder for them to ever get off of the street again. What apartment owner or employer is going to hire people with “warrants” on their record — no matter how trivial those “warrants” may be?
It’s doubtful that most of those who will be cited and fined for sleeping, standing or sitting in public spaces will willingly go to court to either challenge or pay the fines.
So in the end … the city will have to arrest them, and the County will have to house them at “Chez County Jail” at a cost that far outweighs just building a decent shelter with more beds or even just getting them a hotel room, so that they can watch the Food Channel or Cartoon Channel or Fox News / CNN or Hallmark in peace, rather than having them argue with the refs — “she missed the tag, she missed the tag!” — on our kids’ behalf at the soccer or baseball tournaments in the parks.
So basically striking down or amending Boise will simply be choice in favor of keeping our poorest of the poor in our parks “mit or ohne schlag” (fines). Because they aren’t going to go anywhere, if they have no place to go …
To exist means to exist _somewhere_. In the universe that we have, only ghosts can presumably float without taking up space.
So IMHO, the best response to Boise is not to waste millions of dollars on court cases (and then on our prisons). The best way to use the money is to offer more beds for the homeless.
Our part of the County’s meager two shelters are almost always full, and have been for the better part of the last couple of years … There’s the problem, not Boise …
Dennis, you are so right.
Sure wish we had rallied to get Fullerton to buy that hotel that was for sale awhile back.
It is raining tonight. Where is Fullerton’s emergency shelter?
How can we be spending so much money and still have so few shelters?
Curtis Gamble’s idea of a safe tiny house village and a vehicle parking place is good.
We could locate it at minimal city expense at the Brea Dam Park on Harbor.
It has a restroom, running water, trash pick up, and fencing already in place.
And right next to it is a nice piece of vacant parking place land.
And it would be a central space for care-giving agencies.
Would that work?
Yes, we were recommending the Brea Dam Park for safe parking or managed camping a number of years ago.
There are quick possibilities that would bring greater peace to everyone concerned:
Hotel vouchers for those who find themselves homeless, plus incentives to hotel owners to accept them.
Vouchers for still employed people who find themselves homeless to pay for move-in expenses to get them back into apartments, plus again incentives to landlords to accept them.
(I’m not a fan of the “tiny houses” … they cost a lot, take a lot of time to build and in the end still stigmatize the people who would use them).
Then yes, applying for state money to buy a number of hotels in Fullerton / across North OC to be able to shelter / house people with strong ties to the area who find themselves homeless (about 70% of those who find themselves homeless are locals).
A lot of this could be done. And actually our current mayor Nick Dunlap came from the apartment rental business. There are possibilities here, especially when we come to accept that if we do little with regard to homelessness, we just keep people homeless, serving absolutely nobody.