20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY MAY 2-8, 2024 www.montereycountyweekly.com Home Court Supreme Court hears a case about homeless encampments, with huge implications for California. By Jeanne Kuang FORUM The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Monday, April 22 in a case that has implications for how much power local and state officials have over homeless camps. The case, originating from the Oregon city of Grants Pass, could overturn or narrow a precedent that limited how much cities in Western states could criminalize those who sleep on the streets when there aren’t enough shelter spaces available. In the older case, Martin v. Boise, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2018 that it’s cruel and unusual punishment to criminalize camping on public property when the people in question have nowhere else to legally sleep. Since then, California cities have often been subject to federal lawsuits challenging restrictions on when and where the unhoused can set up camps. Relying on the ruling in the Boise case, judges have delayed or halted camping bans from being enforced in cities including Sacramento, Chico and San Rafael, finding that the cities had failed to provide adequate alternate shelter options for the residents they were about to sweep from their encampments. The situation has led city officials to complain that the Boise ruling has tied their hands, arguing they need to sweep camps both for health and safety reasons and for the well-being of encampment residents. It’s led liberals, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, to join conservatives in asking the court for more power to penalize the homeless for sleeping outside. “California’s elected officials who seek in good faith to improve what often appears to be an intractable crisis have found themselves without options, forced to abandon efforts to make the spaces occupied by unhoused people safer for those within and near them,” Newsom’s administration wrote to the Supreme Court in September. Court rulings have led to a patchwork of interpretations on what qualifies as the “adequate shelter” cities must provide before sweeping homeless camps. The Oregon case could provide some clarity—or so California officials hope. Advocates for the unhoused say the Boise ruling is clear. They point out that most cities have hardly enough shelter beds to accommodate the homeless population, and say banning public camping does more harm than good by pushing homeless people from location to location. “All you need to do to be compliant with [the Boise case] is stop using our criminal system as the stick to solve this problem,” says Will Knight of the National Homelessness Law Center. UC Berkeley law professor Jeffrey Selbin, who has studied responses to homelessness, thinks the Supreme Court is unlikely to provide a refined direction on managing homeless encampments as some leaders hope, and instead predicts the justices will simply overturn the 2018 Boise precedent and allow cities to broadly criminalize encampments. “It’s just going to return California to the whack-a-mole of prioritizing punishment over services,” he says. Jeanne Kuang covers state government and politics for CalMatters, where this story first appeared. OPINION “Stop using our criminal system as the stick.”
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