“In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” Anatole France
On June 28, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that local and state governments have the power to criminalize homelessness through ordinances banning unhoused people from sleeping in public spaces.
The ruling comes from Grants Pass v. Johnson, a case that made its way up from Oregon and questions whether such bans constitute cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment. The SCOTUS ruling only changes current law in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes California and eight other Western states.
This ruling will only embolden city and state officials across the country to target unhoused people, pour public resources into brutal sweeps of encampments, heighten police presence and expand criminal prosecution instead of actually addressing the roots of the homelessness crisis.
It is a total failure of the system for elected officials to punish entire populations of people solely for the “crime” of not having a place to live, instead of taking action to meet their needs with housing that is safe and affordable for working-class and poor communities.
The Grants Pass case started in 2018 when a court ruled that the town’s ordinance was unconstitutional. This was upheld by the 9th District Court. Grants Pass then appealed and the case made its way to the Supreme Court. Many liberal Democrat city governments wrote briefs in support of Grants Pass, agitating for the ability to sweep homeless people and/or arrest and deprive them of their personal belongings.
Martin v. Boise (2018) was the foundation for Grants Pass. In Martin, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that states may not criminalize conduct that is an “unavoidable consequence of being homeless,” specifically, sitting, lying, or sleeping on the streets, when there are not enough shelter beds available. In 2019, the Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to this case. Thus, Martin prohibited cities in the 9th Circuit from enforcing anti-camping laws if they didn’t have shelter spaces. Despite Martin, many cities continued to sweep homeless people sleeping on public property. The 9th Circuit includes Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington.The decision in Grants Pass is likely to intensify sweeps and the criminalization of homelessness.
Housing crisis in LA and other Western cities
Los Angeles has been at the center of the housing crisis for years. More than 75,000 people are experiencing homelessness across Los Angeles County. Despite the rhetoric from elected officials who all ran on platforms to “end homelessness,” Angelenos have only experienced worsening tenant protections and skyrocketing rents that displace longtime community residents. These conditions are mirrored in other cities in the 9th District jurisdiction.
Accessible housing options are extremely hard to find, while luxury developments are being constructed all across the city, taking over once-affordable residential communities.
In 2021, Los Angeles implemented municipal ordinance 41.18, which has been used as a wide-reaching tool for city officials to sweep encampments, seize personal property and increase police patrol under the guise of “public safety.” Ordinance 41.18 is a cruel and malicious policy that has only pushed unhoused people from one neighborhood to another, disregarding the abysmal lack of affordable housing to meet the growing crisis in Los Angeles. By alleging the issue of safety, even before the Grants Pass ruling, the city was able to get around the requirement to provide shelter or housing instead of punishment.
Under the capitalist system, individuals are forced into terrible conditions because the system fails to care for our most basic needs. Instead, the ruling class cultivates a culture of violence and dehumanization against people suffering from systemic poverty. Many people are just a few paychecks away from falling into homelessness, yet Los Angeles City Council has failed to pass comprehensive rent control in the city with the second-greatest homeless population in the U.S. Rent control is either non-existent or under constant attack in many of the major cities impacted by the ruling.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has touted the success of the Inside Safe program, a directive that declared a state of emergency to bring people inside from living on the streets. But the program has come under scrutiny for its issues of retention, funding transparency, and its low success rates: of the city’s 46,000 unhoused people in 2023, only 1% were reportedly “permanently housed,” drastically falling short of the urgency of the crisis. Similar programs exist in many cities, yet the crisis of homelessness has deepened.
The conditions of Los Angeles and other cities in the West serve as an indictment against the entire capitalist U.S. system that prioritizes profits over the essential right to safe and secure housing. Elected officials would rather fund brutal police responses like sweeps and arrests to criminalize people experiencing homelessness instead of committing to creating the affordable housing required and demanded by the people. More than a third of documented police uses of force are in incidents against unhoused people.
Violence against the unhoused
On June 17, a University of Southern California fraternity member stabbed an unhoused man to death, claiming that he thought the man was armed and that he feared for his life. The investigation concluded that no weapons were found on the man who was stabbed, yet the student faced no charges for this crime. The reports made no mention of the extent to which USC has been an invasive force across neighborhoods in South Los Angeles, expanding its real estate territory and driving up rent prices, actively displacing low-income communities.
We should reject the myth that unhoused people are inherently violent and we should instead indict the capitalist system that deprives its people of the human right to housing, and that denies its people the ability to live and work in a society that takes care of their basic needs.
We must fight to change the system that is driving countless thousands of people into homelessness every year by organizing for a socialist future. We must abandon the corrupt two-party system that only serves the rich and powerful. Building a people’s movement is the only way to secure the human right of housing for all — from the unhoused people living on our streets, to the tenants being threatened with eviction, and the communities living in low-quality housing conditions due to systemic neglect.
Fight for socialism, fight for housing as a human right!
