In many cities across the United States there are laws that ban people from sleeping outdoors or from engaging in “public camping.” While this may sound like a restriction that is imposed on all people equally, this cryptic language actually means there is a ban on homeless people. Wherever homeless people may be and whatever they may be doing, especially getting the sleep required to be minimally functional, such ordinances effectively criminalize being homeless.
However, due to an unexpected filing by the Department of Justice, the ban on homeless people sleeping outdoors may well be declared unconstitutional under the 8th amendment. In the filing The Department of Justice stated:
When adequate shelter space exists, individuals have a choice about whether or not to sleep in public. However, when adequate shelter space does not exist, there is no meaningful distinction between the status of being homeless and the conduct of sleeping in public. Sleeping is a life-sustaining activity-i.e., it must occur at some time in some place. If a person literally has nowhere else to go, then enforcement of the anti-camping ordinance against that person criminalizes her for being homeless.
The filing comes from a case in Boise, Idaho, a city that has seen a dramatic spike in its homeless population and is also renowned for having some of the strictest anti-homeless ordinances in the entire United States. In Boise, the city has criminalized homelessness itself by not offering enough shelter space for people who have been victims of a system that benefits from their failure.
In Seattle, homelessness is at a crisis level. According to the 2015 One Night Count, an annual event in which volunteers set out to count all the homeless people in the city, there were reportedly 3,772 people just on the street, not counting those in shelters or transitional housing. This number for 2015 represents a 21 percent increase from the 2014 One Night Count results. And Seattle is not the only city in which the prevalence of homelessness continues to grow. In 2014 the federal government estimated there were about 153,000 unsheltered homeless people on the street in the U.S. on any given night.
Revolutionary-minded people understand that today’s growth in homelessness is a product of the capitalist system in which a sector of the population is kept idle as the “reserve army of the unemployed,” and in which housing is a commodity rather than a human right. But given that understanding, socialists cannot just say, “Let’s wait until the revolution to solve the problem of homelessness by building socialism.” Socialists need to be part of the struggle of to end homelessness now. This ruling in the case in Boise may provide fuel for this struggle, by pointing out the essential injustice of “anti-camping” laws, which prohibit rich and poor alike from sleeping outdoors.
We can’t rely on the Department of Justice and court rulings alone to stop the criminalization of homelessness. But, grassroots activists can strategically use this filing to fight back against the numerous local laws that criminalize the mere fact of being homeless. Ending the criminalization of homelessness is not an end in itself–we need to fight for safe, decent, affordable housing for all, not just shelter beds. There is no rational reason why each person in our society can not have a decent place to live. It is only because housing is treated as a source of profit instead of as a human right that it is seen as normal for some people to not have a place to stay even though there are more than enough homes to house all the people.
