Until recently, federal appellate courts limited how far cities could go to clear homeless encampments. Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that they could remove homeless residents sleeping outdoors, a decision that has already begun to reshape how they deal with homelessness, reports the New York Times. Three days after the decision, police in Folsom, Calif., announced they would start citing recalcitrant illegal campers, though they also would team up with nonprofits to provide more homeless outreach. In the two weeks since the Supreme Court decided that the city of Grants Pass, Ore., could penalize sleeping and camping in public places, city leaders across the U.S. have responded by revising local ordinances and preparing to take a harder line on homeless encampments. Nowhere has the crisis been more severe than in Western states, where tent communities have proliferated since the pandemic.
Some cities are particularly eager to get moving. “I’m warming up the bulldozer,” said Mayor R. Rex Parris of Lancaster, Calif., 62 miles north of Los Angeles. “I want the tents away from the residential areas and the shopping centers and the freeways.” Shelter populations increased last year in the Antelope Valley, which includes Lancaster, but unsheltered homelessness rose more, with more than 5,500 people sleeping unhoused in a stretch of high desert prone to extreme cold and heat. “I get that some of these people have fallen on hard times,” the mayor said, “and we have a state-of-the-art shelter with beds available. But the population we’re talking about doesn’t want a bed.” In San Francisco, where Mayor London Breed has faced a tough fight for re-election, businesses have waged a furious campaign to eliminate homeless encampments even as civil liberties groups have sued the city over enforcement. “My hope is that we can clear them all,” Breed said. She has said that homeless people who refuse services are partly to blame for the city’s economic struggles downtown. Some communities, like Grants Pass itself, have hit legal snags. Homeless people in Grants Pass continue to seek refuge in dozens of tents spread across the city’s parks. A court injunction remains in place for the time being, although officials in the community of 40,000 people expect it to lift soon.
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