The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to weigh in on whether homeless individuals have the right to camp on public property. The issue is the biggest SCOTUS case in decades on the rights of the homeless, and the decision has the potential to impact how cities across the U.S. handle the homelessness crisis.
Grants Pass, located in southwestern Oregon with a population of nearly 40,000, requested that the high court review a lower court decision that ruled it unconstitutional to punish homeless residents for camping on public property when no shelter alternatives are unavailable.
According to court filings, there are there are no homeless shelters in the city and the two privately operated housing programs in town “serve only a small fraction” of the homeless population. The plaintiff’s lawyers wrote how in 2013, Grants Pass “began aggressively enforcing a set of ordinances that make it unlawful to sleep anywhere on public property with so much as a blanket to survive cold nights.”
The filing added, “The Ninth Circuit correctly concluded that the City’s efforts to punish involuntarily homeless persons for simply existing in Grants Pass transgress the Eighth Amendment’s ‘substantive limits on what can be made criminal and punished as such.’”
The issue has brought together liberal and conservative leaders in an unlikely position of urging the Supreme Court to overturn the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, and other Democratic leaders in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Honolulu, have asked the high court to review the restrictions on homeless encampments — joining conservative Arizona legislators, and district attorney offices backing the appeal.
“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 wrote in a statement 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.”
In a previous amicus brief, the California governor argued that as the state “invests billions to address housing and homelessness, the courts have tied the hands of state and local governments that seek to use common sense approaches to clean our streets and provide help for unhoused Californians living in inhumane conditions.”
The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in April and a ruling is expected to be issued June.
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