You don't want them panhandling on the corner. You don't want them sleeping on park benches. You don't want the shelter too close to your house.
So where are homeless people supposed to go?
The question has long confronted local government officials, advocacy groups, loved ones and, most importantly, unhoused people themselves.
It's also the question at the heart of a case before the U.S. Supreme Court known as City of Grants Pass, Ore. v. Gloria Johnson, which experts say is one of the most important cases related to homelessness in modern history.
The case is a version of the circumstances described above; in fact, most cities in America have faced these issues. It's astonishing that it's just now coming before the high court.
Plaintiffs argue that by passing municipal ordinances against camping and sleeping in public, the city of Grants Pass seeks to criminalize homelessness. Grants Pass argues — as did Springfield fifteen years ago and as did Birmingham, Ala., when we hosted the World Games in 2022 — that ordinances are aimed at promoting public health and safety.
Specifically, the constitutional question on which the justices heard oral arguments is whether such anti-homelessness ordinances are tantamount to "cruel and unusual punishment," which is prohibited under the Eighth Amendment.
Some constitutional law experts hold that if the court permits the criminalization of homelessness here, the ruling could erode precedent that protects citizens from other forms of cruel and unusual punishment, such as imposing the death penalty for non-homicide offenses.
The Washington Post reported that based on justices' questions Monday, the court was not surprisingly split along ideological lines, with conservatives Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh questioning the appropriateness of the court, rather than community leaders, dictating local policies that govern housing and homelessness.
Justice Elena Kagan called sleeping "a biological necessity,” akin to inhaling and exhaling. "For a homeless person who has no place to go, sleeping in public is kind of like breathing in public," Kagan said.
Sonia Sotomayor, another Democratic-appointed justice posited: “Where do we put them if every city, every village, every town lacks compassion? Are they supposed to kill themselves, not sleeping?”
Such ordinances are rooted in law that stretches back across the sea, before America as we know it was born. In the U.S., laws governing offenses loosely described as vagrancy proliferated as a means to uphold white supremacy, especially in the South.
For example, Virginia passed its Vagrancy Act of 1866 to force employment on any person who appeared to be homeless or unemployed. On its face, the law was race neutral but just so happened to be passed around the time millions of formerly enslaved African Americans became newly freed from bondage and were forced to roam around in search of work.
Using a loophole in the 13th Amendment that prohibits forced, unpaid labor — except as a punishment for being convicted of a crime — Southern states went ham on creating Black Codes to criminalize the existence of formerly enslaved people and trap them in the penal system, where their bodies could be profited upon under a system known as convict leasing.
By 1888, the state of Alabama leased all prisoners in its custody, about 90% of whom were Black, to a Birmingham mining company, paying them 30 cents a day — about 10 bucks in today's money. Alabama was the last state in the union to abolish the practice of convict leasing, in 1928.
"Through convict leasing, Southern states and private companies derived enormous wealth from the labor of mostly Black prisoners who earned little or no pay and faced inhumane and often deadly work conditions, generations after slavery was formally abolished," wrote authors of a report published by the Montgomery, Ala.-based Equal Justice Initiative.
The causes of homelessness today are complicated, with many unhoused people having experiences with substance-use and mental health disorders, incarceration and housing and income insecurity, domestic violence and more. Oftentimes, myriad factors compound onto one another.
Before he died, Tim once explained to me: “People want to say it’s all mental illness and all drug abuse — but it’s not just one easy answer."
