The Patriot Post® · Supreme Court Says No Right to Vagrancy

Last Friday, the Supreme Court came down on the side of local governments and clean streets when it ruled that city ordinances restricting homeless encampments — which involved fines and jail time for multiple repeat offenses — were not “cruel and unusual punishment” as outlined in the Eighth Amendment.

Thus, by reversing a 2022 decision by the Ninth Circus Circuit Court of Appeals, the High Court allows Grants Pass, a small Oregon city 250 miles south of Portland, to place “time, place, and manner restrictions” on a growing homeless population in the town, in compliance with state law that dictates the restrictions be “objectively reasonable.” (Strangely enough, while “Live Rogue” may be the local slogan for Grants Pass, it doesn’t now seem to work that way in practice.)

The case, Johnson v. Grants Pass, originated as Blake v. Grants Pass and shifted plaintiffs in 2021 due to the death of 62-year-old Debra Blake, who owed the city upward of $5,000 in fines. It was filed in the wake of Grants Pass trying a workaround after SCOTUS opted not to hear a similar case in 2018, Martin v. Boise. In that case, the Ninth Circuit held that criminally punishing the homeless for sleeping in public was cruel and unusual punishment and ruled similarly in the Johnson case, despite the penalty being a civil monetary fine.

But this time, SCOTUS overturned the Ninth Circuit with a 6-3 ruling that was foretold by the questioning during oral arguments in April.

The minority, led by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, complained, “For people with no access to shelter, that punishes them for being homeless. That is unconscionable and unconstitutional.” Yet it’s worth pointing out that there is a shelter available in Grants Pass. It’s just that many homeless people don’t care to stay there because, according to NBC News, it’s “run by a religious organization that has limited space and imposes conditions that some homeless people object to.”

Yet Sotomayor and her fellow poop-patrol proponents may get another crack at this. Johnson’s lead counsel, Ed Johnson (no relation) of the Oregon Law Center, noted that the High Court “also left open the possibility of other constitutional challenges to homeless camping bans under the Constitution’s excessive fines clause and the due process clause of the 14th Amendment.”

But the Supreme Court ruling will, for now, bring a little bit of clarity to the situation, as cities complained they were hamstrung by a maze of lower-court rulings, particularly those decreeing that cities had to offer the homeless “adequate shelter.” Homeless people objected to these shelters for a number of reasons: prohibitions on pets, drugs, alcohol use, and the like. The beds may have been available, but the rules weren’t to the liking of the unhoused population. Now, there may be a financial reason for the homeless to deal with those shelter-based inconveniences.

Ultimately, the issue is, on the one hand, a matter of personal responsibility. As our Thomas Gallatin pointed out in April: “Homelessness has gotten out of hand because of misplaced compassion, which avoids the deeper issue of personal responsibility and instead faults society writ large. Unless people are held accountable, the problem will grow out of control, as it has in Democrat-controlled cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco.” On the other hand, as Nate Jackson noted last year, the economy is a big reason, too.

Our misplaced compassion means “schizophrenics and opioid addicts end up sleeping under bridges and yelling at clouds on public streets,” Jackson noted. “It’s tragic, and it shouldn’t happen in America (or anywhere else).”

We used to have places for those who were mentally ill or addicted. Those were places where people in need could be served by their fellow man and get help. However, the stigma of having government-run institutions was too much for some, who demanded those institutions close because there now was medication to address their problems. Of course, not everyone wants to be medicated, but the institutions are no longer in place to accommodate them. Now, they live in tents or other makeshift shelters, such as their cars, along the highways and byways of large cities.

However, we also used to have an economic system wherein people could afford to pay rent. Oftentimes, you’ll see stories about the woman who works full-time but has to sleep in her car because she can’t afford housing. In some places, new construction has become so restrictive that housing supplies have dried up. In others, directives that illegal immigrants be prioritized for shelter ahead of other needy populations create a new homeless cohort where none existed.

While the Supreme Court has decided a case, it’s not the solution. Many local governments are trying solutions like “tiny houses” and the like to give homes to the homeless, but this requires cooperation. It requires a modicum of self-help, which might be wishful thinking. At the same time, we need to recreate an economy where people can get ahead and stay ahead, allowing free-market resources to naturally filter to the neediest among us instead of being redirected to those favored by a government that picks winners and losers. To put it as John F. Kennedy once did, “A rising tide lifts all the boats.”

Homelessness isn’t a right, and it shouldn’t be a way of life — at least not here and certainly not in these numbers. That it’s reached these proportions is a national disgrace.