Supreme Court to rule on clearing homeless encampments in California, other states

The U.S. Supreme Court said on Friday it will hear whether towns and cities that block unhoused people with no access to shelter from camping on public property violate the Eighth Amendment’s protections from “cruel and unusual punishment.”

The case, which California lawmakers including Gov. Gavin Newsom encouraged the Court to hear, could grant officials more power in penalizing unhoused people who set up encampments by overturning a precedent set by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2018.

That precedent in Martin v. City of Boise said that it was a cruel and unusual punishment to criminalize camping on public property when the people there had nowhere else to sleep legally. The Ninth Circuit ruling applies to Western states.

Rising rates of homelessness, particularly during the pandemic, led California municipalities to pass laws to limit encampments in recent years. Federal judges have in different instances blocked enforcement of these ordinances, including in Sacramento, citing the 2018 ruling and saying cities failed to offer adequate shelter alternatives.

California has almost a third of the United States’ homeless population, with an estimated 171,000 people unhoused.

Newsom and other lawmakers have said this precedent has prevented officials from sweeping encampments for health and safety reasons.

They have also asked for clarity on what qualifies as adequate shelter when seeking to shutter an encampment, whether they can set times or locations for where people can camp, and if rules apply when an individual is what they call voluntarily homeless, or when someone refuses alternative shelter.

“California has invested billions to address homelessness, but rulings from the bench have tied the hands of state and local governments to address this issue,” Newsom said in a statement on Friday. “The Supreme Court can now correct course and end the costly delays from lawsuits that have plagued our efforts to clear encampments and deliver services to those in need.”

The case that will come before the Supreme Court originated with a challenge to local ordinances in Grants Pass, Oregon. The area barred sleeping and camping in public areas like sidewalks, parks and streets through civil fines.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson argued that there weren’t homeless shelters and limited housing programs, which left people with no option but to sleep outside.

They wrote that Grants Pass a decade ago started “aggressively enforcing” local ordinances that prevented people from sleeping in these public spaces “with so much as a blanket to survive cold nights, even if shelter is unavailable.”

Through a system of civil citations, if an officer cited someone twice, the person could be barred from city parks for a month. This, they said, aimed to force unhoused residents into neighboring areas.

The practice punished residents who were involuntarily homeless “for their existence,” the lawyers argued, and violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

In 2022, a three-judge panel at the Ninth Circuit restricted enforcement of the civil citations, citing the 2018 ruling.

Lawyers for Grants Pass argued that the Eighth Amendment does not apply to these civil citations, that there was “nothing cruel or unusual about a civil fine for violating commonplace restrictions on public camping.” They said that refusing to clear encampments had dire consequences for those living in and around encampments, including crime, fires and diseases.

A bipartisan coalition of local and state lawmakers has asked the Court to intervene. Housing advocates decried the idea of criminalizing homelessness, which they said furthers the issue instead of addressing it.

“Criminalizing homelessness is cruel, misguided, expensive, and counterproductive,” Diane Yentel, the president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, wrote on social media in response to the case. “Ultimately, criminalization makes it harder for people to exit homelessness.”

In September, Newsom urged the Supreme Court to take on the case in an amicus brief, a legal document submitted by a person or organization with strong interest in a case that is not part of it.

He said in a statement at the time that while he agrees “with the basic principle that a city shouldn’t criminalize homeless individuals for sleeping outside when they have nowhere else to go within that city’s boundaries, courts continue to reach well beyond that narrow limit to block any number of reasonable efforts to protect homeless individuals and the broader public from the harms of uncontrolled encampments.”

The Sacramento County District Attorney’s office was the first prosecutor’s office in the country to file an amicus brief urging the Court to take the case. Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho said in a statement Friday that his office would file another brief encouraging the Court to overturn both of the Ninth Circuit’s decisions.

“With the unprecedented increase of the unhoused population in Sacramento and our community at a breaking point, my office was the first prosecutor’s office in the country to file an amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Grants Pass case and overturn Martin v. City of Boise,” Ho said. “I am grateful that today the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review these poorly reasoned cases.