A new U.S. Supreme Court ruling is once again letting a host of municipalities – including Orange County – begin enforcing their anti-camping laws.
Now, it’s opening questions on what the future of government-funded shelters and homeless response efforts looks like.
Orange County Supervisor Don Wagner, who also chairs the board, praised the decision on Friday morning, noting that it gives elected officials “the responsibility … and obligation to deal with homelessness.”
He said officials don’t plan on cutting funding to shelters or similar programs, but that if state funding were pulled due to this year’s state budget deficit, they could see cuts to various programs.
“Those would be driven by financial issues, not this decision,” Wagner said. “We are committed to doing anything we possibly can, but I don’t know if we will have all the resources to continue doing all we have been.”
In a Friday text message, OC Supervisor Katrina Foley said the decision will help county officials.
“Enforcement of anti-camping ordinances is not meant to criminalize homelessness, but rather a critical tool to encourage individuals on our streets and parks to accept the services within our system of care. Encampment prohibitions ensure safe and accessible sidewalks, parks, and public spaces, and in some cases prevent wildfires, litter and destruction of nature preserves,” Foley said.
She added, “The Supreme Court’s decision today allows the county and our impacted cities to continue efforts to move people from encampments to shelter, treatment, wraparound care, and ultimately permanent supportive housing.”
Supreme Court Justices’ ruling in the Grants Pass v. Johnson case reverses the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal ruling in Martin v. Boise, which mandated that cities provide shelter beds before they can push homeless people off the streets.
The Boise decision has faced strong pushback from both Republican and Democrat leaders for years, with figures such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom calling for the ruling to be reexamined, claiming it hamstrings their ability to curb homelessness.
“Encampments are dangerous – period,” Newsom said in a March news release, announcing the state signed onto the Supreme Court case.
“The United States Supreme Court can establish a balance that allows enforcement of reasonable limits on camping in public spaces, while still respecting the dignity of those living on our streets,” Newsom said.
The governor praised the decision in a Friday statement.
“This decision removes the legal ambiguities that have tied the hands of local officials for years and limited their ability to deliver on common-sense measures to protect the safety and well-being of our communities,” Newsom said.
Now, the Supreme Court ruling opens the door for cities to both close their shelters and enforce anti-camping laws.
Justices sided with city leaders in Grants Pass, Oregon in a 6-3 ruling – saying it was within a city’s rights to criminalize sleeping in public, but not criminalize homelessness itself.
The country’s highest court also found that the Eighth Amendment was never intended to protect homeless people in this way.
“The Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause focuses on the question what ‘method or kind of punishment’ a government may impose after a criminal conviction, not on the question whether a government may criminalize particular behavior in the first place,” wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch, the author of the majority opinion.
To read the opinions, click here.
Gorsuch also noted that the anti-camping rules weren’t targeted at homeless people because they applied to everyone.
“The public camping laws prohibit actions undertaken by any person, regardless of status,” Gorusch wrote. “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 concluded by warning judges against legislating their own solutions to homelessness.
“A handful of federal judges cannot begin to ‘match’ the collective wisdom the American people possess in deciding ‘how best to handle’ a pressing social question like homelessness,” he wrote.
Eve Garrow, a policy analyst with the Southern California branch of the ACLU, said this decision could throw California’s cities back into a “race to the bottom.”
“Local governments may just have a field day when it comes to targeting unhoused people now that they’ve been unleashed from this constitutional protection,” Garrow said in a Friday interview. “No place is safe when pretty much every city is criminalizing being unhoused.”
She noted one defense for homeless people is the necessity defense that they have nowhere else to go, but they can’t use that until they’ve already been arrested and brought before a judge, and they could easily be recharged any time.
“It doesn’t prohibit someone from being criminalized or charged, being jailed, it just provides them with a defense,” Garrow said. “That’s a small comfort.”
In 2018, Orange County officials began evicting the Santa Ana Riverbed homeless encampment until a federal lawsuit was filed and U.S. District Judge David Carter blocked the evictions.
[Read: Lawsuit Seeks End to Santa Ana Riverbed Homeless Evictions; County Says It Won’t Stop]
Carter then regularly toured the riverbed encampment and mandated a host of protections for homeless people – like providing motel rooms for them while county and city officials scrambled to build homeless shelters.
[Read: Federal Judge Walks Entire Length of Santa Ana Riverbed Homeless Camp For Firsthand Information]
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who dissented along with Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Jackson, said this ruling absolutely amounted to “cruel and unusual” treatment of the homeless.
“Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime,” Sotomayor wrote. “For people with no access to a shelter, that punishes them for being homeless. That is unconscionable and unconstitutional.”
“The majority focuses almost exclusively on the needs of local governments and leaves the most vulnerable in our society with an impossible choice,” she continued. “Either stay awake or be arrested.”
Foley noted that moving forward, the county has to keep developing housing to get people off the streets.
“In order to truly solve the moral dilemma of homelessness, enforcement must accompany an aggressive housing first policy and a commitment to develop necessary housing units, so no one is faced with the choice between a tent, a jail cell, or the security of a home.”
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @NBiesiada.
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