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Be shocked, very shocked. As TomDispatch regular Liz Theoharis and Shailly Gupta Barnes, both of whom play key roles in the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice, make clear today, the way this country has dealt with the homeless, whose numbers have soared recently, has hardly been impressive (though it was certainly better during the pandemic years). Worse yet, as they report, there's a case before the all-too-well-housed Supreme Court that, if five of the six conservative -- and that's a polite word for them these days -- justices concur, will criminalize misery in a genuinely original fashion. It will essentially make it possible for community after community to declare homelessness illegal.
And given recent rulings, don't be faintly surprised if (when?) they do so. As PBS's Supreme Court expert Marcia Coyle, who listened to the oral arguments in the case, Grants Pass v. Johnson, commented: "It does seem as though the conservative majority is leaning towards the city [of Grants Pass, Oregon]. And the implications are huge" because so many cities are dealing with this problem and what the Supreme Court has to say about what Grants Pass can do is going to affect how all the other cities try to address this problem."
And while you're at it, imagine that, if the 2024 election goes the way the latest polls are suggesting, four-plus years from now such a ruling could seem mild. If Donald Trump and crew have the chance to appoint yet more Supreme Court justices because liberals Sonya Sotomayor and Elena Kagan decided not to retire during the Biden presidency, the present court could seem almost "liberal" by comparison and, in a sense, so many Americans might find themselves homeless indeed in a grim new all-American world. Tom
Housing, Not Handcuffs
The Moral Response to Homelessness
By Liz Theoharis and Shailly Gupta Barnes
On April 22nd, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for Grants Pass v. Johnson, a case that focuses on whether unhoused -- the term that has generally replaced "homeless" -- people with no indoor shelter options can even pull a blanket around themselves outdoors without being subject to criminal punishment.
Before making its way to the Supreme Court on appeal, the Ninth Circuit Court held that municipalities can't punish involuntarily homeless people for merely living in the place where they are. This is exactly what the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, did when it outlawed resting or sleeping anywhere on public property with so much as a blanket to survive in cold weather, even when no beds in shelters were available. The law makes it impossible for unhoused residents to stay in Grants Pass, effectively forcing them to either move to another city or face endless rounds of punishment. In Grants Pass, the punishment starts with a $295 fine that, if unpaid, goes up to $500, and can escalate from there to criminal trespass charges, penalties of up to 30 days in jail, and a $1,250 fine.
The issue before the court is whether such a law violates the Eighth Amendment's restrictions against cruel and unusual punishment. The city is asking the court to decide that the Eighth Amendment doesn't impose any substantive limit on what can be criminalized, so long as the punishment itself isn't considered cruel and unusual. If so, municipalities across the nation would be free to make involuntary homelessness unlawful.
In response, more than 40 amicus briefs with over 1,100 signatories were filed against the city's case, representing millions of people concerned about or potentially affected by the far-reaching consequences of such a decision. The Kairos Center for Religions, Rights & Social Justice -- to which the two authors of this piece belong -- submitted one such brief together with more than a dozen religious denominations, historic houses of worship, and interfaith networks. Along with the 13 official signatories of that brief, many more clergy, faith leaders, and institutions support its core assertion: that the Grants Pass ordinance violates our interfaith tradition's directives on the moral treatment of poor and unhoused people. Indeed, the Supreme Court's decision could dramatically criminalize poverty and homelessness nationwide, especially if cities near Grants Pass, in the state of Oregon, and across the country, put in place similar restrictions.
Sadly, such a scenario is anything but far-fetched, given not just this Supreme Court but all too much of this country. Since the early 2000s, our nation has regularly turned to policing and "law and order" responses to social crises. Often wielded against poor and low-income communities in the form of fines, fees, and risks of jail time, such threats are regularly backed up by police in full body armor, using tactical gear and, in this century so far, hundreds of millions of dollars of military equipment transferred directly from the Pentagon to thousands of police departments nationwide.
All of this has made the possibility of using violence and brute force more likely in relation to many situations, including the world of the unhoused. Most recently, of course, militarized police have swarmed campuses to help quell largely peaceful student protests over the war on Gaza. Consider it anything but ironic that when Northeastern University students were arrested for their Gaza encampment, they were taken to the same facilities where unhoused people were being processed during homeless encampment sweeps, as local contacts in Boston have told us.
Poverty and Housing Insecurity
The homelessness and housing crises unfolding today reflect a broader national crisis of economic insecurity. In 2023, after all, approximately 135 million people or more than 40% of the nation, were considered poor or low-income and just one crisis away from becoming homeless. In a dramatic return to pre-pandemic conditions, this included 60% of Latinos (38.9 million), 59% of Native Americans (2.3 million), 55% of Blacks (22.5million), 36% of Asian people (8 million) and 32% of Whites (61.8 million).
Among those tens of millions of Americans, housing insecurity is alarmingly widespread. Before the pandemic, there were approximately 8 to 11 million people who were homeless or on the verge of becoming so, relying on a crumbling shelter system and a growing constellation of informal encampments on America's streets, or trapped in a rotating series of sleeping places, including cars and couches, or doubled or tripled up in apartments. Worse yet, even those numbers were likely an underestimate: when the pandemic hit in 2020 and millions of people lost their jobs, 30 to 40 million people suddenly found themselves at risk of becoming homeless.
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