Many More Homeless Sweeps Are Coming

What the Supreme Court ruling means for California's plan to reduce homelessness.

The Supreme Court has ruled that cities are not required to offer shelter before sweeping encampments, ending a major legal barrier to cities dismantling homeless encampments. It’s a loss in a new strategy among homeless activists to depend on the court system rather than legislators for protection. Previously, the Ninth Circuit ruled (Martin v. Boise) that no sweeps could be conducted without available shelters offered to residents before dismantling an encampment. I thought the ruling would create political will to construct shelters, but predictably, California’s political establishment just whined about the ruling preventing them from removing encampments and stoke popular anti-homeless resentment.

There has been criticism of Martin v. Boise among small some more radical homeless activists in favor of total decriminalization of encampments, charging that shelter beds aren’t a solution to homelessness and can be coercive. They’re electorally fringe, but in more left-wing cities around the Bay Area (such as Berkeley’s Peoples Park and the Wood Street encampment in Oakland) and Los Angeles, these have been held up as reasons not to dismantle encampments. But shelters are important stop-gaps for people in short term jams, and research does suggest sheltered homelessness live longer than unsheltered.

A literary review of homelessness research shows that unsheltered homeless have significantly higher mortality rates than sheltered. One very comprehensive national study found no difference in mortality rates between sheltered and unsheltered homeless people in most of the country, but also found that NYC, with its over 80% sheltered homeless population, had a 13% lower mortality rate than the national standard. Researchers conclude that shelters that come with services help reduce the fatality of unsheltered homelessness. Any combination of services could be rendered with or without a housing unit as a shelter, but it’s easier to do that when someone has a housing unit or shelter bed.

Still, shelter beds are not the end all, be all. In calmer climates with encampments that follow a baseline of health and safety standards can accomplish much of what shelter beds offer. Cities can make sanctioned encampments safer with regulations, equipment and services support during periods when supportive housing isn’t available. Cities can collaborate with encampment residents to provide sanitation and fire safety options. Encampments themselves vary in quality, behavior, cleanliness and self-policing like any other community. All too often though, cities are more interested in aesthetic regulations rather than safety ones — taking a universal anti-encampment approach and sweeping away homelessness people who aren’t causing harm.

With this ruling, it’s hard to envision how the growing issues of homeless encampments will be resolved without a major federal public housing akin to the large sums of housing built during the New Deal era, WWII and War on Poverty combined. But a lot of people are wondering why tent cities have sprung up everywhere in the last two of decades. Politicians keep insisting its an enforcement problem or populists charge its economic conditions such as low wages. The rise of encampments themselves are really neither an enforcement issue or even an economic one (American’s economic profile is much better than in previous generations) but it’s housing.

Prior to the 21st century, tent encampments weren’t common, but homelessness was. Cities like San Francisco have as many homeless people today as it did in the 1980s, but if you’re just counting encampments it feels like its ballooned in the last 20 years. Most people who live in encampments would’ve lived in residential hotels, or other privately owned low-income housing that could be rented for dirt cheap in the past. These housing units were very flawed. Many were dangerous and rife with drug dealing, while others were fairly calm places that poor seniors on small pensions or welfare resided. But most housing unstable people or those who couldn’t afford quality housing, opted for these cheap places rather than setting up tents.

Since the 1970s, most cities made an effort to get rid of residential motels or neglected to purchase them as family-run residential lodging business died and lodging turned into a corporate oligopoly. The decline of SROs in the United States is directly linked to the rise of encampments and unsheltered homelessness. And now with the Supreme Court’s ruling, and the Republican effort to cut HUD funding for Section 8 vouchers and public housing, it’s not clear where or how you’re supposed to live if you can’t afford housing. But in an attempt to remove all the options away from homeless people, these same mechanisms also ensure that sweeping encampments will fail. Sure, sweeps will keep encampments out of the wealthiest communities but in aggregate, unsheltered homelessness will only continue to rise because there’s no other options.

California in particular is truly on its way to becoming a dystopian state where it’ll appear impossible to solve homelessness. The state knee-caps its ability to solve problems. California has too few homes yet its one of the hardest and most expensive places to build in the world for political reasons. Because California cities can’t tax land, they tax new housing which worsens an already inactive and inefficient housing sector. Lack of housing efficiency reduces public deliverance on the homeless housing and affordability, despite the high amount of taxes paying for it. Since the state’s budget depends heavily on capital gains taxes, which are volatile, we compensate with high-income taxes on middle-class households. When California taxpayers don’t see homeless reductions happening, they go into austerity mode and eventually elect people who will just sweep the homeless around.

I’d like to end this with a positive note saying if we just pass this or that we can solve the problem, but from my almost 10 years of discussion in these communities, I have little hope. Even the proponents of Housing First in California often have little interest in implementing the housing cost reduction policies and construction reforms that enabled Houston’s program to cut homelessness by 66% over a decade. When California does accidentally discover successful low income housing programs, like Los Angeles had with a simple directive that enabled 18,000 subsidized housing units, they scale it back for disrupting suburban neighborhoods.

Regardless of how many encampments get swept in the coming months, this ruling isn’t going to do anything to reduce homelessness other than harass people. It won’t make any dent whatsoever in the amount of people without homes.