There are not enough beds in shelters or subsidized housing to allocate to the homeless demographic.
Even where there are beds and/or subsidized housing, not all homeless people qualify to access those beds/units.
All shelters impose prioritization and criteria, oftentimes in the form of state and federal directives.
When there are no beds to provide to homeless people and when shelters use criteria to sift homeless people, homeless people are forced to sleep outdoors.
When public food places and public grocery stores and public libraries and restrooms at public parks closes, homeless people have no access to bathroom infrastructure.
Homeless people need to eat and sleep and use the bathroom and clean up somewhat in those public bathrooms.
You want homeless people to get themselves better and stable, right? That starts with sleeping at night and cleaning up in the morning and eating and having 24/7 access to a toilet.
When they are denied the ability to sleep and use the bathroom, that is cruel and unusual punishment.
When they are denied the ability to eat food in public and access free water water fountains, that is cruel and unusual punishment.
Charities and non-for-profits spend millions providing food and heavy jackets and blankets and bedrolls and pillows and tents and hygiene kits and water jars and toilet paper to the homeless demographic to enable them to have some kind of normalcy and comfort living in the streets. Cities banning homeless from sleeping overnight (not daytime, overnight and sleeping only, not sex, not drug orgies, s l e e p i n g), cities waste millions of dollars spent on preparing the homeless to survive on the streets or in the woods outdoors 24/7.
The imposition of criminal penalties for sitting, sleeping, or lying outside on public property for homeless individuals who cannot obtain shelter unconstitutionally criminalizes homeless and inflicts cruel and unusual punishment on them for being homeless.
The Eighth Amendment bars punishing a person only for lacking the means to live out the universal and unavoidable consequences of being human.
All 50 states are rapidly passing laws criminalizing homelessness, essentially sentencing homeless people to death.
Homelessness
policy is one of the most contentious issues facing local governments
throughout the nation, and there are big questions about what those
governments can legally do. One of the key recent precedents is the
Martin v. Boise case, which came out of the Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals three years ago. It said that homelessness cannot be
criminalized if people have no option of sleeping indoors. Other cases
have hinged on different protections guaranteed in the Bill of Rights
like the Fourth Amendment, which is focused on property and the 14th
Amendment, the Equal Protection Clause.
The Martin v. Boise case concerned a group of people experiencing homelessness in Boise and they had challenges finding sufficient shelter there because a number of the shelters in Boise imposed religious requirements on people who would go to those shelters. There was a question about whether those camper and unsheltered residents of Boise had sufficient access to shelter. The case made its way all the way up to the Ninth Circuit and the Ninth Circuit analyzed it under the Eighth Amendment, which is the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, and determined that the Eighth Amendment prohibits punishing people for circumstances that they can't control. And the language that the court used is often referred to in Eighth Amendment jurisprudence as quote, "the unavoidable, the universal and unavoidable consequences of being human".
In other words, we all need a place to sleep, we all need a place to sit down at times, we all need a place to eat. That's just part of being human. And the and the Martin Court itself said that that protection extended to conduct that is the unavoidable consequence of being homeless. So that means sitting, lying down, sleeping in public.
The city of Boise argued that it had sufficient shelter beds to accommodate the homeless population. The Ninth Circuit looked more closely and determined that there were a number of obstacles that rendered those shelters functionally inaccessible to many homeless Boisians. And one shelter closed down. The Martin Court said that as long as there is a greater number of homeless individuals in a particular jurisdiction than the number of available beds, then the government can't prosecute homeless individuals for those unavoidable consequences of being human.Let's say a shelter bed is available, but it's in a place that doesn't allow dogs, or requires females to have children, or requires male and female parents of a child to be married, or requires mandatory bible study, or requires people to be illegal immigrants or refugees from Ukraine or disabled or seniours etc. Does a person who won’t leave their dog behind, have a place to go, in the eyes of a court. There's all sorts of obstacles to getting a shelter bed for one night. All shelters only allow you entry for that night then you must fight for a bed the next night. Many shelters do not allow people to bring in laptops or tablets or notebooks or cell phones. Many shelters only allow people to bring in one bag of clothing and hygiene products. Many separate people from their belongings, from their spouses, from their children. There are all sorts of obstacles that are really well documented that show that a number of people experiencing homelessness would rather sleep outside and basically die (refusing shelter means refusing eventual rehousing process that shelters are supposed to initiate) rather than allow shelters to control them and destroy their lives before they even lay their heads the pillow. Those very stringent eligibility criteria that screen out people like me who are clean cut and educated and want to work and have a history of take great care of housing we once had. Shelter criteria literally gives beds to criminals to keep them off the streets, away from the public, to reduce crime committed by the truly criminal homeless (junkies, alcoholics, etc).
The religious imposition of religious restrictions that was at issue in Boise was probably a stronger case because that had an overlay of First Amendment issues. People have a right not to be religious and the right not to have to comport with somebody else's religious views. In Boise the judge acknowledged that if the only shelter beds that are available are places that have religious ceremonies or have a real religious element, in terms of their programming, and if you don't subscribe to that religion, that's not a bed that's counted as one that you would have to go to. People have a right not to be religious, under the First Amendment.
Another thing, it's really important to understand that when you're talking
about unsheltered people, a lot of people suffer from chronic illnesses
and chronic disabilities that make it extremely difficult for them to
do well in congregate or crowded communal loud rowdy tense unpredictable environments like shelters. There's a lot of very rational reasons why
people choose not to avail themselves of shelters and those will still
need to be figured out under Martin precedent. Meaning there are plenty of legitimate reasons for refusing shelter, that does not mean people want to be homeless sleeping outdoors, it means America is failing to invest in and save its own people.
Meanwhile, Sweeps are still happening up and down
the west coast, the location of the ruling that allows homeless to sleep in public places overnight. Sweeps are happening all over America. Truly terrifying that millions of dollars are being spent to strip homeless people of everything charities have given them to survive.
The criminalization of homelessness refers to all sorts of laws that prohibit or restrict your ability to engage in a range of basic life sustaining activities. Laws that prohibit or severely restrict your ability to sleep, to sit, to eat, to protect yourself from the elements, to ask for help, all of those sorts of life sustaining activities or things that none of us could forego for long and still survive. And yet there's a very complicated web of laws across the country exponentially webbing knots that make it impossible for people experiencing homelessness to escape the reach of these laws. City leaders across the entire nation have referenced the Martin decision and hired teams of legal minds to create laws around it. Their lawyers have looked at the law and they've decided that when they're moving people from different areas, whether it's near a high speed road or some other public area, that they're doing these sweeps in a legal way, even post Martin v. Boise. Cities are paying millions of dollars to lawyers to explore for the greatest elasticity in the law/ Martin v. Boise, any judicial decision is subject to interpretation based on a different set of facts. So what they're doing is testing how the law might be applied/gutted/stretched under a different set of facts. It's really important though, to understand that the law has not hindered any city's ability to address homelessness, to address the underlying causes of homelessness. Martin has nothing to do with the underlying causes of homelessness. What it is focused on is protecting people from cruel and unusual punishment. The number of cases that are occurring across the country, there's a steady stream of litigation, challenging laws that are testing/circumventing Martin.
This Martin ruling and the Ninth Circuit covers nine Northwestern states. Does it affect the rest of the country? It certainly influences it. After the Ninth Circuit issue its ruling the ruling went up to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the U.S. Supreme Court determined that it was a solid ruling and passed on hearing the challenge/appeal to the case. So to some extent, I think that suggests that that would be sort of the law of the land right, in terms of the nation, precedent, but the Ninth Circuit case is the case that really controls the Pacific Northwest and other jurisdictions within the Ninth Circuit. So there's a lot of interpretation that's occurring in terms of what the federal courts say, and there are cases in Florida and in other places outside of the Ninth Circuit that cite Martin.
I've been reading about the 4th Amendment being used as a weapon against homeless. The 4th Amendment relates to unusual, unreasonable property seizures during encampment sweeps. So what we see in practice is very frequently, in the process of encampment sweeps, people don't just lose their personal property, but they lose items of sentimental value, pictures of children, special treasures/mementos. Some people who have lost veterans have lost things associated with their service. People lose medication. And so those sorts of challenges to sweeps appear to be pretty successful with payouts and rapid rehousing. It's one of the more common types of claims that are brought against encampment sweeps. And there have, there’s precedent in the Ninth circuit that says that unhoused people have protected property interest in their own belongings, even if those belongings are left temporarily unattended. And so those cases tend to have a decent success rate. About half of the cases that have been tracked under the 4th Amendment have been successful.
When a claim is brought under the 14th amendment, it can be a procedural due process or a substantive due process claim. People have a fundamental right to life and bodily integrity. If a state has affirmatively placed somebody who's unsheltered in some sort of danger by seizing their tent during heat or excessive weather, then that state actor created a danger to that person. So there are substantive due process claims, there's procedural due process claims, there's state created danger claims, and the 14th Amendment challenge also has a reasonably good rate of success. Overall, from what I've read, in the last probably 15 to 20 years or so, more than half of the cases that come through challenging sweeps and encampment sweeps have been successful. And yet sweeps are still happening, people are still losing their possessions and in plenty of states in the U.S., legislation is being proposed to try to force homeless people into shelters.
The Cicero Institute is a very well funded libertarian conservative group. It'’s the same group that announced that they were going to establish a hypothetical college, I believe they were calling it the University of Austin, and the purpose of it was to basically fight wokeism and other sort of evils that it perceived to be among the progressive thinking, that it, that the Cicero Institute thinks prevails in higher education. And so this particular group, the Cicero Institute, has been, has a lot of funding, has some very slick marketing that's been tested and refined. They're creating videos and other propaganda. They're creating templates, legislative templates, that are being picked up, especially in some jurisdictions in the South. And there is no sort of well funded answer anywhere else on the political spectrum. So, right now, they're sort of dominating the narrative about not helping the homeless, they are challenging evidence-based practices like housing first, and supportive housing, which have been shown to be the most effective interventions for chronic homelessness for decades and decades. But because the Cicero Institute is among the voices that's well funded and trying to fight those evidence based practices, there is some momentum towards law enforcement led efforts as opposed to evidence based interventions.
The interventions that are most effective for the homeless, that have been studied for decades and shown consistently to be the most cost effective solution to chronic homelessness, would be housing first and permanent supportive housing. This is being done but with prioritization and criteria and selectiveness instead of first come first serve for whoever steps up and asks for it.
Also with the Martin ruling: blocking homeless from sleeping overnight on library steps, city hall
steps, public parks, public woods, public fields, public camping sites, etc, means forcing homeless out of
location, forcing them to move on, forcing them to be transient and
nomadic and banishing them out of city. The Martin ruling said Nope, if
there are no beds, they may sleep in public places and if the city
doesn't like it, the city can build more housing and place these people
in housing and direct their shelters to stop discriminating against homeless and stop imposing prioritization practises and start unconditionally sheltering every single person first come first serve and make the effort to rapidly rehouse and find employment or mental health/disability services for every single person.
Allowing Homeless To Sleep Overnight In Public Parks Or Public Woods, Homeless Are Re-Integrated Into The City's Public, The City Is Forced To Invest In Getting People Housed And Working And In Any Health Care Programmes
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