Opinion

US Supreme Court has sanctioned making homelessness illegal

Worldview: Rough sleeping and urban decay are some of the largest drivers of reactionary politics in the US

A homeless encampment under an overpass in Oakland, California. Photograph: John G Mabanglo/EPA
A homeless encampment under an overpass in Oakland, California. Photograph: John G Mabanglo/EPA
Jack Sheehan
Sat Jul 13 2024 - 06:00

One of the defining objects of our current decade is surely the tent. An item for recreation – a few days’ camping or a music festival – is instead the shelter of last resort for growing numbers of people in cities (and warzones) across the world. Political systems at local and national level seem incapable of providing quality, secure, and permanent housing for a significant fraction of people. At best, homeless people are provided with emergency shelter. Frequently, they are given a cheap tent. In Dublin, we see the cruel pantomime of one government agency or NGO giving out a tent only for another, a few days or weeks later, to dispose of it, along with that person’s belongings.

The right wing majority on the US supreme court delivered several political earthquakes last month, from a broad expansion of presidential immunity from prosecution to a full-throated attack on the ability of federal agencies to govern the country. Lost among them was the decision in City of Grants Pass vs Johnson, which established the right of local and city governments to criminalise rough sleeping. The case originated with the small Oregon City passing an ordinance that in effect criminalised homelessness, despite not offering emergency accommodation. Justice Sotomayor, writing a dissenting opinion, lamented that the laws the court endorsed “sought to punish persons merely for their need to eat or sleep, which are essential bodily functions” and are plainly “intended to criminalise being homeless”.

In cities across the US and the world, homelessness has been growing inexorably over the last decade. The Great Recession caused a spike in foreclosures and evictions, and a rolling series of addiction crises have contributed. However, the overwhelming cause of homelessness in the US and virtually everywhere else is a critical lack of public and affordable housing. From the 1970s onwards, state and federal governments retreated almost entirely from building public housing, selling off some stock and allowing others to fall into disrepair. Decades of underinvestment have led to our current mess: cities that need vastly more housing units without the state capacity or political will to deliver them, and private landlords and developers whose livelihoods depend on keeping rents high and supply restricted.

These eye-watering rent increases have been supercharged by Silicon Valley technology designed to extract the maximum possible from tenants while providing a minimum of repairs and maintenance. The FBI recently raided the offices of one of the country’s largest landlords, who stand accused of using software like RealPage to undertake an enormous, nationwide conspiracy to artificially inflate rents.

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‘The responses to homelessness verge from a liberal-libertarian sympathetic acceptance of large-scale rough sleeping to an increasingly violent anti-homeless fervour’

The effect of this is not just a huge rise in homelessness generally, which encompasses people who are working and not, and people sleeping in emergency accommodation and with friends, but an exponential increase in rough sleeping. Such large numbers of people sleeping in dangerous and unsanitary conditions on the streets, along with efforts to keep them out of certain areas, lead to an agglomeration around larger and larger encampments. Some of these are government-run facilities, of varying quality. Others are informal settlements that last weeks, or months. It is increasingly common here to see a couple of dozen tents clustered together under a freeway overpass.

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Without anyone in American politics challenging the power structures that are causing this crisis or offering the sort of large-scale project that would be required to house people, the responses to homelessness verge from a liberal-libertarian sympathetic acceptance of large-scale rough sleeping to an increasingly violent anti-homeless fervour.

Rough sleeping and urban decay are some of the largest drivers of reactionary politics in the US. Visible homelessness, especially in LA, Philadelphia, Portland and New York, is exploited by the right and centre to portray cities as dirty, dangerous, failed places. Their criticisms have some purchase because governments have indeed failed the people living on the streets. Their political remedies, however, are violent and nihilistic. This supreme court case was brought because Grant’s Pass is just one of many municipalities attempting to police their way out of the homelessness crisis, through encampment sweeps, fines and imprisonment. In just one example, authorities in Lancaster, California have pushed unhoused people out of the town, into unincorporated desert land on the edge of the Mojave, without water or services, where dozens die each year. Even Portland, Oregon, which had experimented with less carceral approaches, has begun enforcing a ban on public sleeping. These so-called “crackdowns” have the effect of moving people away from the social services they desperately need, making their lives more dangerous and difficult, and making finding permanent accommodation almost impossible.

The only people less likely to tackle this issue than the crisis-ridden Biden government is the increasingly likely second Trump administration. At state and local level, this ruling will embolden those who want to criminalise homelessness. People without homes mostly do not vote. Their desires are far subordinate in the American political system to those of homeowners, who have long wielded enormous power. Without fixing the housing system, the only practical action taken will be harassment and imprisonment, as homeless people are moved from place to place, out of cities and into the margins in the hope that they become someone else’s problem.

Jack Sheehan is a writer based in New York