Democratic-led cities split on handling homeless crisis after Supreme Court ruling

Democratic-led cities are divided on addressing a Supreme Court ruling that allows authorities to remove homeless people’s tents on public grounds, with some leaders championing the decision as others vow to ignore it.

In the 6-3 opinion known as Grants Pass v. Johnson, the high court lifted restrictions preventing municipalities from taking action to tear down encampments. It ruled that the small Oregon town of Grants Pass’s efforts to remove unauthorized tents did not infringe on 8th Amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment.

But despite the high court removing the legal obstacles that kept cities from enacting stricter laws against tents on sidewalks and public parks, officials across the nation are divided on how they will implement the new precedent.

For example, Cleveland’s Democratic mayor recently declared that the Grants Pass decision will not change much at all about how the city handles its roughly 1,400 homeless people, according to 2022 estimates.

The “Supreme Court ruling will exist by name only in Cleveland,” Mayor Justin Bibb told Axios earlier this month. Bibb has opted to follow a similar approach to the one touted by homeless advocates, and the city announced in June that it will aim to bolster existing initiatives to provide housing for up to 150 people by the end of the year.

Conversely, officials in Washington’s King County, where Seattle is located, are more open to embracing the high court’s decision.

Seattle City Attorney Ann Davidson supported Grants Pass’s efforts to apply its anti-camping ordinances, and Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell stated last month that the city’s main objective is to continue providing shelter for homeless people while also prioritizing the clearance of encampments and “keeping public spaces clean and accessible for everyone.” As of 2024, the northwestern city is home to more than 16,000 homeless people within the area, an all-time high.

Perhaps one of the most immediate impacts of the high court ruling is the way it is quickly affecting lawsuits surrounding similar encampment disputes. On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit overturned an injunction that has blocked San Francisco from enforcing laws that forbid sitting, lodging, or sleeping on public property, citing the Grants Pass ruling.

Additionally, the question of how the ruling will affect California’s widespread homeless crisis — the state reported more than 123,000 people who are homeless in 2023 — will vary depending on the mayors in charge of various cities.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed has suggested authorities will begin citing or arresting homeless individuals if they refuse to go to a shelter, and officials told the San Francisco Standard that city workers will likely have more leeway to clear encampments.

For Los Angeles, the matter is more complex due to a law on the books known as 41.18, which makes the city’s anti-camping enforcement vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. Mayor Karen Bass recently told the Los Angeles Times that neighboring localities have more discretion to close down encampments. Bass noted that she would “be very concerned that the numbers of people moved into L.A. from other cities will increase.”

Mark Miller, an attorney with Pacific Legal Foundation who supported Grants Pass’s efforts to enforce its laws against public camping, said the Supreme Court majority decision “gets it right.”

“Protecting the most vulnerable among us, including the homeless, is properly the responsibility of our public policy makers, elected and appointed officials, charities, churches, civic associations, and each of us as individuals according to our conscience,” Miller said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.

Meanwhile, advocates who oppose measures to remove homeless encampments, such as the nonprofit organization Community Solutions, called the Grants Pass ruling “deeply disappointing.”

“We’ve seen that communities can reduce homelessness when they set a clear goal and hold themselves accountable for meeting it,” Community Solutions President Rosanne Haggerty told the Washington Examiner in a statement.

Haggerty said better efforts to collect precise data, such as the names of homeless residents, would help “identify their needs and provide the right services,” noting that “cities like Houston, Cincinnati, and Denver have successfully reduced homelessness using these methods.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch, the author of the majority opinion, emphasized that the status of homelessness was not the core issue of the case. Rather, it was whether anyone has a right to defy local ordinances against public camping, not just homeless individuals.

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,” Gorsuch wrote.

Grants Pass’s position gained surprising support from a major Democratic leader, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), who said on the day of the high court decision that local officials have now been given definitive authors to “clear unsafe encampments from our streets.”

Despite the differing reactions to the ruling from Democratic mayors and other local leaders thus far, the one thread of commonality among their responses is a concern for minimizing criminality for homelessness, a point highlighted by the Democratic-appointed justices’ dissenting opinion in Grants Pass.

“It is possible to acknowledge and balance the issues facing local governments, the humanity and dignity of homeless people, and our constitutional principles,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

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Echoing Sotomayor’s sentiment, Bass recently claimed that punitive responses against violators of anti-camping ordinances would be the lowest consideration on her list of priorities, pointing to a 5.1% decline in makeshift encampments in Los Angeles County this year alone.

“Giving people tickets and punishing them — how are they supposed to pay for their ticket?” Bass said. “And what happens when they don’t pay? Does it go into a warrant and now it gives us an excuse to incarcerate somebody? These are failed responses. We know for a fact that it will not work.”