Supreme Court upholds ban on sleeping outdoors in homelessness case

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday upheld an Oregon city’s ban on homeless residents sleeping outdoors, a decision likely to reverberate far beyond the West Coast as cities across the country grapple with a growing homelessness crisis.

The ruling, by a 6-3 vote, split along ideological lines. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for a conservative supermajority, found that the ordinances, enacted in Grants Pass, did not violate the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. The measures penalize sleeping and camping in public places, including sidewalks, streets and city parks.

Those ordinances, Gorsuch wrote, did not criminalize the homeless but rather the act of camping outdoors.

“It makes no difference whether the charged defendant is currently a person experiencing homelessness, a backpacker on vacation or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building,” he wrote.

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote that the decision would leave society’s most vulnerable with fewer protections.

“Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime,” Sotomayor wrote. “For some people, sleeping outside is their only option.”

That the local laws impose fines and potential jail time for people “sleeping anywhere in public at any time, including in their cars, if they use as little as a blanket to keep warm or a rolled-up shirt as a pillow” effectively punishes people for being homeless, she wrote.

“That is unconscionable and unconstitutional,” Sotomayor said in reading her dissent from the bench, a rare move that signals profound disagreement.

The decision was greeted with mixed reactions among leaders in Western states, particularly in California, where increasingly visible encampments in major cities have put political pressure on governments to act.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, who had urged the justices to take up the case, welcomed the ruling, acknowledging the competing demands for greater enforcement of encampments with concerns about the treatment of vulnerable people.

Even as the decision “removes the legal ambiguities that have tied the hands of local officials for years,” he said, the state will “continue to work with compassion to provide individuals experiencing homelessness with the resources they need to better their lives.”

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who has worked aggressively to bring the city’s homeless people indoors and into treatment and housing services, expressed disappointment in the ruling but vowed to continue the city’s push for housing and supportive services.

Lawmakers in Western states had pointed to a crucial appeals court ruling in 2018 that they say has tied their hands from clearing encampments.

That decision, by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers many Western states, declared it cruel and unusual punishment for cities and states to penalize someone for sleeping outdoors if no shelter beds were available.

In California alone, 171,000 people were recently estimated to be homeless, nearly one-third of the country’s homeless population and 40,000 more than six years before. Tents and encampments are common in many parts of the state.

The dispute arose from Grants Pass, a city of about 40,000 in the foothills of southern Oregon. After residents complained of people sleeping in alleyways and property damage downtown, city leaders enforced a series of local ordinances that banned sleeping in public spaces. The city had no homeless shelter, aside from one run by a religious organization that required, among other rules, attendance at Christian services.

A group of homeless residents sued the city, challenging the ordinances and contending that the local laws essentially criminalized homelessness.

A federal judge temporarily sided with the homeless plaintiffs, finding the city had no shelter that met the requirement from the 2018 decision.

A divided three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit appeals court upheld the lower court, and the city asked the Supreme Court to weigh in.

The Supreme Court’s majority found that the ordinances in Grants Pass were not unusual because cities and states across the country have long imposed similar penalties. Under the laws, the city issues a limited fine for a first offense, a temporary order banning camping in the parks for repeated offenses and a maximum of 30 days in jail for violating such an order.

In his opinion, Gorsuch asserted that the public camping laws applied equally to everyone and therefore did not target homeless people.

The 9th Circuit ruling that laid the groundwork for the Grants Pass case was undoubtedly well intended, he wrote, but it established a legal test that proved unworkable for the cities and states governed by it. “Issued by federal courts removed from realities on the ground, those rules have produced confusion,” Gorsuch wrote.

Gorsuch, whose family roots are in Colorado and who served as a federal appeals judge in Denver, infused the decision with a viewpoint from the West.

Homelessness in the United States has reached its highest levels since the federal government began reporting data in 2007. The five states with the highest rates of homelessness — California, Oregon, Hawaii, Arizona and Nevada — are all in the West, he wrote.

Policymakers should be given a wide array of tools to tackle the problem, Gorsuch wrote, adding that the 2018 appeals court ruling removed one of them.

Rather than helping “alleviate the homelessness crisis,” Gorsuch wrote, the lower court ruling may have “inadvertently contributed to it,” paralyzing communities and inciting confusion as courts and cities turned to litigation.

He said decisions about how to solve homelessness were better left to state and local policymakers, not judges.

“A handful of federal judges” could not match “the collective wisdom the American people possess in deciding” how to respond to “a pressing social question like homelessness,” he said.

Although the court’s liberal justices agreed with the conservatives on the scope of the problem and the multitude of reasons people become homeless, they said the question before them was simple.

“The only question here is whether the Constitution permits criminalizing sleeping outside when there is nowhere else to go,” Sotomayor wrote, adding that the issue had become “increasingly relevant because many local governments have made criminalization a front-line response to homelessness.”

To criminalize homelessness, she wrote, causes “a destabilizing cascade of harm.” When homeless people are fined or incarcerated, she wrote, they can lose their jobs, health benefits and housing options.

That is precisely what is unfolding in Grants Pass, she wrote, forcing someone with no available shelter to leave the city.

As the decision came down, many people living in tents in Grants Pass parks were beginning to stir.

Laura Gutowski, 56, who became homeless about 2 1/2 years ago, said she felt conflicted over the ruling.

Even as she said she understood the frustration some residents had about the homeless population, she said there seemed to be no solution that acknowledged those who were homeless.

“We should give the parks back to our children,” Gutowski said. “But they can’t just give them back and not give us anything at all. There has to be somewhere else that we’re still allowed to go.”

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