California Governor Gavin Newsom has ordered authorities to dismantle thousands of homeless encampments across the state, just weeks after the Supreme Court issued a ruling allowing states to restrict the rights of homeless people.
The case of Grants Pass v. Johnson centered on Grants Pass, Oregon, where the city punished homeless people for sleeping on public property despite failing to provide emergency shelter. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that this was a form of cruel and unusual punishment, violating the Eighth Amendment.
But the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Grants Pass law, giving cities and states the green light to fine, ticket, or arrest homeless people without any obligation to support them or address the underlying conditions that made them homeless. This ruling will only exacerbate a crisis that city governments and residents are desperately trying to solve.
City governments tend to view homelessness as a problem that needs to be solved by the police. A survey of mayors of the 100 largest U.S. cities found that police departments influence homelessness policy more often than housing authorities or health departments. And in more than half of the cities with homeless response teams, the team is housed in the police department. It’s no surprise that they favor punitive measures there.
Criminalizing homelessness does not help solve the problem. It has been tried many times. Currently, all but two states have laws against the homeless. Some prohibit sleeping in public, while others prohibit loitering, vagrancy, or sleeping in vehicles. In 2022, Tennessee became the first state to make sleeping in a tent on public property a crime punishable by prison.
It should not surprise us that these laws do not work. If you punish people who sleep outside because they have nowhere to go, they still have nowhere to go and they are worse off than before.
Criminalizing homelessness makes it harder for people to get housing and essential services. A 2024 survey found that 76% of homeless people lost their ID or birth certificate after cities cleared encampments or issued tickets. 83% of community leaders surveyed said the raids left people with criminal records. Not having an ID can make it harder to access counseling or medical help, while criminal charges make it harder to find housing or work.
Furthermore, forcing homeless people into the criminal justice system is counterproductive, as homelessness is often a result of a lack of reintegration structures for former inmates. Data shows that a significant portion of homeless people have a criminal record. In California, more than 80% of homeless and unhoused people report spending at least one night in jail in the past 6 months and have had an incredible average of 42 contacts with police per year.
Communities seeking to reduce homelessness should focus on improving infrastructure for reintegration into society rather than pushing vulnerable people back into the situations that led to their homelessness in the first place.
Making homelessness a crime is also unnecessarily expensive because it costs more than providing housing. One report found that counties in Central Florida spent $31,065 per homeless person per year to arrest, detain or hospitalize them. That’s three times what it would have cost to provide the same people with assisted housing for a year. For taxpayers frustrated by homelessness in their cities, providing housing would be a much better use of public money.
Our current approach simply isn’t working. Nationally, homelessness increased 12% from 2022 to 2023 – the highest rate ever.
But homelessness is not increasing everywhere. In fact, in some places it has almost completely disappeared. These communities are dealing with homelessness in the right way.
In Sacramento County, officials collect data on each homeless person, including name, age, health issues and history of homelessness. By updating the data monthly, all organizations involved can track changes in the homeless population, match people with housing and support services as needed, and ensure no one falls through the cracks.
This approach is already making a difference. According to the county’s point-in-time count, 29% fewer people were homeless in 2024 than in 2022.
To solve the problem of homelessness, we must go further. One thing the police cannot do is build houses. Cities and states must roll back the expensive and ineffective laws that turn our neighbors into criminals because they have no place to sleep. Instead, they must invest in housing and infrastructure that provides immediate and long-term help for the homeless.
Following the Supreme Court’s ruling, we can expect more politicians to follow in Governor Newsom’s footsteps and instead require cities and towns to prevent homelessness from continuing to persist by criminalizing and over-policing people who need help the most.
Tinish Hollins is executive director of Californians for Safety and Justice.
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