After Homelessness Ruling, Cities Weigh Whether to Clear Encampments

FOLSOM, Calif. — K.C. Alvey treads carefully when she and her dog, Stuart, walk the dappled trail behind their apartment in Folsom, California. Since the pandemic, her neighbors have included homeless campers along a brook known as Humbug Creek.

There’s the man who periodically emerges from the brush, yelling in fear and tearing at tree limbs. There’s the hoarder who fled with his dog as a cleanup crew again cleared his massive campsite — shopping carts, three beds, throw pillows, art, books, mirrors on trees, rugs, torch fuel. Rogue campfires have been frequent.

Until recently, federal appellate courts limited how far cities could go to clear encampments. But late 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.

Three days after the decision, the Folsom police announced they would start citing recalcitrant illegal campers, though they also would team up with nonprofits to provide more homeless outreach.

Alvey, 57, a marketing manager, is waiting to see what happens. There have been times when the homeless campers “really creep me out,” she said. But she also wants “to be sure they have somewhere they can go where they feel safe.”

In the two weeks since the Supreme Court decided that the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, could penalize sleeping and camping in public places, city leaders across the country have responded by revising local ordinances and preparing to take a harder line on homeless encampments. Nowhere has the homelessness 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, a Republican, of Lancaster, California, an exurb 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, according to the area’s latest point-in-time count, 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.”

That sentiment is not limited to Republican leaders. In San Francisco, where Mayor London Breed has faced a tough fight for reelection, 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,” the staunch Democrat said at a news conference after the ruling. She has said that homeless people who refuse services are partly to blame for the city’s economic struggles downtown.

In the Seattle suburb of Burien, Washington, city leaders are battling with the county sheriff, who runs the police force, over the enforcement of public camping bans. Citing concerns about constitutionality, the sheriff’s department has declined to take action, even after the Supreme Court ruling.

On a recent afternoon, homeless residents were milling around tents and tarps and pallets that composed about two dozen makeshift structures on a patch of land across the street from the county courthouse. Some said they hoped the city would let them be until they could find more permanent housing.

Mayor Kevin Schilling wanted more immediate action. He said he believes that enforcement, combined with outreach, would nudge those in need of drug treatment, mental health services or temporary shelter to choose those options. “If you don’t have that nudge, at the end of that day, people are not going to choose to do that on their own,” he said.

Some communities, like Grants Pass itself, have hit legal snags as city leaders formulate their next steps. A court injunction remains in place there for the time being, although officials expect it to lift soon.

Recently, they called a meeting to seek feedback from the community on how to enforce and manage homeless camping, but for some residents, that was insufficient. On Wednesday night, many lined up at a microphone to express outrage that city leaders were not immediately clearing parks of homeless people.

“Get them out!” one man shouted. “Give us our town back,” a woman told officials.

“I am hoping and praying that we can make the city of Grants Pass a homeless-free zone,” said Kim Hector, a resident. “You know they have gun-free zones. Well, the citizens of Grants Pass deserve a homeless-free zone.”

The Supreme Court ruling left many civil protections intact, including prohibitions on excessive fines and violations of due process. Local governments can still be sued, civil liberties groups note, and still must grapple with vast numbers of vulnerable, poor and unsheltered people.

In a recent webinar on the ruling, legal advisers in California recommended that municipalities provide ample notice of enforcement, set fines at an affordable level and frame anti-camping laws as a tool to persuade homeless people to accept services.

Eve Garrow, a senior policy analyst and advocate with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, dismissed the “carrot-and-stick approach” as “deeply disingenuous” in a state with yearslong waiting lists for subsidized housing.

“A playbook is developing,” she said. “But the clear aim is a race to the bottom where each local government tries to drive unhoused people out.”

In 2018, the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that it was unconstitutional to punish people for sleeping outside when they had no other legal option. That decision and subsequent rulings limited the ability of cities throughout the circuit’s nine Western states to address homelessness with arrests and citations. Politicians blamed the courts for an onslaught of highly visible encampments. But governments, forced to confront the crisis with less enforcement, also approved a torrent of spending on homeless services and affordable housing.

Conservative policymakers say that has not worked. Model legislation drawn up by the Cicero Institute, a Texas think tank, has underpinned new laws in Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma and other Republican-led states that cracked down on encampments and reversed a mostly government-funded approach that prioritizes housing individuals.

In Democratic-led areas, however, strategies such as rousting or arresting are viewed as less effective than determining why individuals are homeless and then offering appropriate remedies such as housing, jobs, substance abuse treatment or mental health care.

Los Angeles has struggled to reduce homelessness for years, its Skid Row an often-cited illustration of the problem in California. But under Mayor Karen Bass, the city has made progress in moving people off the streets and into motels and shelters, and the city had its first decline in years in unsheltered individuals. Bass, a Democrat, swiftly criticized the Supreme Court decision.

“This ruling must not be used as an excuse for cities across the country to attempt to arrest their way out of this problem or hide the homelessness crisis in neighboring cities or in jail,” Bass said. “The only way to address this crisis is to bring people indoors with housing and supportive services.”

Not everyone in Los Angeles agrees. Traci Park, a City Council member from the affluent Westside, co-authored a motion within hours of the ruling that demanded an examination of the existing anti-camping restrictions, along with a comparison of regulations in Los Angeles County’s 87 other cities.

The balance between enforcement and providing services remains a challenge. In Folsom, a community of about 80,000 known for its hiking trails and its nearby prison, the ruling has revived a debate over compassion and order. The city’s homeless census has leaped from fewer than 20 before the pandemic to more than 130 this year.

Folsom has long had restrictions on camping in public spaces and fire zones, punishable by citations. But since the 9th Circuit ruling in 2018, the community has largely relied on other ordinances to control encampments, such as public nuisance laws.

A special task force to address tent camps in neighborhoods like Alvey’s began work this month, just after the Supreme Court decision was released. “We’re here to help,” said Lt. Chris Emery of the Folsom Police Department, who was overseeing the removal of a camp from a ravine full of tinder-dry foliage Thursday. “We’re not the hammer of justice, and not everyone is a nail.”

As waste removal crews arrived, his team tried to persuade the homeless camp proprietor to speak to an outreach worker. They were unsuccessful, but Jeanne Shuman, founder of Jake’s Journey Home, a local nonprofit, said Folsom’s homeless people have begun to understand that the ruling has narrowed their options.

At the public library during a heat wave, Paul Hebbe, 58, said that officers with flashlights awakened him at 3 a.m. on July 4 as he slept in his usual spot just outside the reading room window. Three other homeless men separately offered similar accounts; the police said they had no record of the encounter.

“They said, ‘You can’t be here; there’s a new law,’” Hebbe said, recounting how he had refused to move to a shelter and instead trundled into the dark with his sheet, sleeping bags and assorted backpacks. He was not cited, he said, but “it’s not right; I’ve had probably 10 hours of sleep in the last four days.”

Rick Hillman, the police chief in Folsom, said the Grants Pass decision gives his department an additional tool, restoring teeth to the city’s camping restrictions. But “the last few years have been a big education,” and only the most egregious repeat offenders will be cited, the chief said. No citations have yet been issued, he added.

“I don’t want to bog down our justice system with tickets for people experiencing homelessness,” he said. “To me, that just puts them in a worse situation. We’re trying to get them to take advantage of services.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .