A San Francisco police officer asks two homeless people on the sidewalk to move off the street during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, in San Francisco on Nov. 14, 2023.
Posted on 02/05/2024 9:10:30 PM PST by SeekAndFind
The homeless crisis in America is set to come to a head with a Supreme Court ruling as early as this spring, in the case of Johnson v. City of Grants Pass, Oregon.
The Supreme Court could—depending on what it decides—force changes in city ordinances and homeless policies across the country.
The decision is one of the most anticipated in years for San Francisco and other cities facing legal challenges from homeless people and advocacy groups.
At the heart of the case is the challenge by three homeless people to ordinances in the Oregon town of Grants Pass that prohibit homeless people “from using a blanket, pillow, or cardboard box for protection from the elements.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, drawing on logic applied in the 2018 decision in Martin v. City of Boise, sided with the plaintiffs and blocked Grants Pass from enforcing its ordinance in the absence of shelters or other accommodations for the homeless.
The decision applies across nine western states, Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington.
Officials are left with two unappealing choices: let the sprawling encampments stand, or provide immediate emergency housing far beyond what their strained budgets allow for.
The Supreme Court, which announced on Jan. 11 that it will review the case, must either uphold or throw out the 9th Circuit’s ruling.
With close to 600,000 homeless people in America, according to recent Department of Housing and Urban Development figures, many cities that are bickering about what to do are paying attention to the case.
In Los Angeles, some 75,000 people live on the street, and the current mayor’s first action on taking office was to declare a homeless state of emergency.
In San Francisco, the crisis is so severe that residents are fleeing a city they have long cherished as one of the world’s most beautiful and livable locales, not to mention a dynamic tech hub. Nearly 8,000 people now live on the streets there.
Rampant public drug use, panhandling, urination, defecation, and other unruly conduct have taken over some areas of the City by the Bay and the city’s administration’s inability to enforce its own laws and clear out homeless encampments makes the crisis much worse.
“San Francisco is a mess, and even if it were to reduce its homeless population modestly, by a third, the streets would still look worse than most American cities,” Stephen Eide, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who studies homelessness and public policy, told The Epoch Times.
The city is a battleground for myriad legal, social, economic, and political forces amid rising public alarm about homelessness. Lawyers there want to press pause on their own court battle over an injunction forbidding the police from cracking down on homeless camps. In their view, the looming Supreme Court case will render other legal struggles moot.
Homelessness advocates insist that longstanding legal precedent guarantees rights to people living on the street, and the city is not free to disregard those rights and take away homeless people’s property without due process, just because some of the homeless commit more serious violations and spark a public outcry.
But others who have studied the issue find providing housing for ever-growing numbers of homeless to be an unsustainable burden.
A San Francisco police officer asks two homeless people on the sidewalk to move off the street during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, in San Francisco on Nov. 14, 2023.
San Francisco’s impasse has its roots in a lawsuit that a local advocacy group, the Coalition on Homelessness, launched in September 2022 with the aid of the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, and the global law firm Latham & Watkins. Also named as plaintiffs in the suit were seven people who were, or had recently been, homeless.
One goal of the lawsuit was to stop the city from arresting and ticketing people who lived on the street, and clearing out their encampments—in short, to put an end to sweeps of homeless settlements and to put pressure on the administration to ramp up temporary housing for the undomiciled.
In a Dec. 23, 2022, ruling, Judge Donna Ryu of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California slapped the city with a preliminary injunction, denying it the power to enforce or threaten to enforce laws and ordinances that barred “involuntarily homeless individuals” from lying, sleeping, or sitting on public property.
Judge Ryu sided with the plaintiffs who believed that San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) actions had violated their Fourth Amendment right to be secure in their persons and possessions against unreasonable searches and seizures.
“Plaintiffs have presented significant evidence of a practice of seizing and destroying of homeless individuals’ unabandoned personal property in violation of the Fourth Amendment … and San Francisco’s own bag and tag policy, which clearly requires the City to store personal property so that homeless individuals may retrieve,” the judge wrote.
Lawyers for San Francisco unsuccessfully challenged Judge Ryu’s decision in federal court. In September 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit shot down the city’s claim that Judge Ryu had overstepped legal bounds set in Martin v. Boise and Johnson v. Grants Pass.
On Jan. 11, another Ninth Circuit Court ruling clarified the definition of “involuntarily homeless” while substantially upholding the injunction.
Instead of appealing. San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu on Jan. 17 has filed a motion to essentially pause proceedings to wait for the Supreme Court decision on Grants Pass.
“It makes no sense to spend months litigating this case and expend enormous resources collecting evidence and expert testimony when the entire legal landscape may soon change,” Mr. Chiu said in a statement.
Read more here...
I hadn’t really thought about the homeless problem in Alaska. Something tells me that largely takes care of itself, no?
Inother words: America is rapidly becoming unfit for human habitation
All of our social safety net dollars are going to illegal aliens now instead. Won’t see any of them on the streets, they’re living in hotels.
We already have it in Reno. Have had it for a few years.
The problem in the winter is drunk natives in Anchorage. They have money, housing, lots of liquor, and nothing to do, nothing required of them other than to get drunk.
Then we need to place the homeless in mental institutions. We are enabling them to make bad choices so it's our fault.
You don't see this crap happening in Singapore.
Living on the streets in many northern states is not feasible during the winter.
It would be more like freezing to death on the streets.
Kind of a self-correcting problem.
My Midwest college town has a frightening number of homeless, and most of them don’t look like drug addicts. They look like people who lost their jobs and their homes and were kicked out onto the street.
I'm not seeing the problem.
Not enough coffins to go around?
Regards,
Watford city North Dakota had a homeless guy.
And ten degrees below zero weather.
The guy jumped into a dumpster and fell asleep.
When he woke up his feet were frozen and they had to amputate both of them
And we exacerbate the issue by inviting millions and millions of ILLEGALS into our country. America is committing suicide right before our very eyes. The politicians haven’t figured it out yet that they can insulate themselves by the ruins coming to their compounds too. They may end up being prisoners on their own estates.
Soon it’s gonna look like “Escape from New York” where they wall off the decaying cities and tell them to fend for themselves.
From a good source - there are three types of homeless.
There are the “urban campers”. those people have resources, family, etc. They just enjoy living in the streets (believe or not, there are a lot of them!).
There are the people who got some family problems, like hostile divorce, lost job, etc. . which forced them on the streets (yes, there are some like that on the street, the media try to convince us that all are like that, we the conservative, tend to discard them all), and then there are the mentally ill and drug addicts.
There should be different approach to these groups.
The urban campers should be banned from the streets, the poor shall be given some job and the mentally ill should be sent to hospital.
None of them really need a shelter, homelessness is a symptom, not a disease.
apparently, all of them have some money/resources from welfare, food stamps, and all those kitchens and thrifts stores. They do not really starve, what they really need is to be treated like individuals and address their underlying problems.
Unfortunately our welfare/police/lawsuits system is exactly the wrong medicine!
It’s what happens when a nation goes into economic depression/collapse.
Not all America.. just liberal run shxtholes that allow it. You block a road around here in protest you’d become tired tread slime, try stealing a bunch of stuff in a store and running out you’d have several folks pointing guns at you. Try car jacking you’d be blocked in and beaten severely. Breaking in to a house, even the elderly would be shooting.
Instead of new laws and ordinances, how about just enforcing what’s already on the books. I’m sure it’s not legal to urinate and defecate in public anywhere. Fine them. Lock them up. Whatever the law calls for.
Enforce the anti-littering laws, public drunkenness, no smoking within 25 feet of an entrance...there is a ton of nuisance laws that the rest of us have to live by. Set up a free needle exchange in front of councilmen and judges houses. See how they like it.
More importantly, it’s well past time to hound these “church affiliated” NGOs that are assisting the illegals to assist the homeless instead.
EC
Controlled demolition
Apt description.
What happened to “sanctuary cities”?
How about States’ rights?
One size fits all legislation is why we have this problem. And the rights of homeless peeps should not infringe on the rights of the entire populace. (Well, the Constitution used to say that.)
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