Las Vegas Weekly Staff / Miranda Alam / Special to the Sun
Homeless advocates protest a proposed city ordinance outside of Las Vegas City Hall on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2019. The ordinance would make homeless encampments illegal if beds are available through the city or nonprofit organizations.
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The health of a culture can be evaluated by two observations: how the citizens of that culture conduct themselves in public and how well vulnerable members of a society are cared for by their culture. On both counts the homeless crisis in America highlights failures of our culture that we need to work together to remedy.
In cities across the country, homeless encampments and the squalor that accompanies them make entire public areas unsafe for people, including the homeless — as open-air drug use, mental health crises, criminal behavior, public defecation and other unsafe and unsanitary conditions proliferate.
More than an aesthetic shock, homeless encampments in American cities are untenable, both for the individuals and families that occupy them, as well as the neighbors and community members who must navigate the challenges the encampments bring.
America’s homeless crisis is a testament to our country’s inability to address the difficult problems that lead to housing insecurity: corporate speculation and a wealth gap that puts homeownership out of reach for young adults while pricing seniors out of the houses they have lived in for decades; rising poverty afflicting children and families; predatory rental markets; a failure to treat drug addiction and mental illness; abandonment of veterans and people with disabilities; ignoring the plight of vulnerable families and women; and more.
The homeless crisis is a civic failure in modern America almost without peer.
Last week, the Supreme Court took up an element of homelessness in a case that is nearly surreal in how badly it distorts the issue at hand. It dealt with a law in Grants Pass, Ore., a city of approximately 39,000 people, that criminalized the act of sleeping in public places.
The law appears to have been implemented by a cruel city government so desperate to resolve the homeless crisis in their community yet so out of ideas that were politically and financially tenable that it simply wanted to force its homeless population — even those who were members of the community and called the city home for years — to get out of town.
By defining a “campsite” as anywhere a person exists with a blanket, the city created a scenario where it is physically impossible for a homeless person to live in Grants Pass without being subject to fines or even jail time.
According to Oregon Public Radio, Grants Pass City Council President Lily Morgan even admitted that the point of the law is “to make it uncomfortable enough for (homeless people) in our city so they will want to move on down the road.”
Testimony from the police chief of Grants Pass verified that “if a stargazer wants to take a blanket or a sleeping bag out at night to watch the stars and falls asleep, you don’t arrest them. … You only arrest people who don’t have (another) home.”
A law designed to be selectively enforced against a targeted group of people raises serious questions about the equal protection of the law under the Fifth and 14th Amendments.
Moreover, in 2019, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — which has jurisdiction over Oregon — held in Martin v. Boise that cities cannot enforce anti-camping ordinances if they do not have enough homeless shelter beds available for their homeless population. That decision was based on a 1962 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which declared that criminal penalties enforced against a person based upon their status, rather than specific conduct, violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
Despite the Boise ruling, “camping bans” have been implemented across the country, setting the stage for last week’s hearing before the court. The absurdity of the entire situation is almost unfathomable.
Instead of officials from every level of government coming together to address the root causes of homelessness, precious resources are being used to ask federal judges if the Constitution includes an inalienable right to sleep while local governments try to pass the buck of addressing homelessness on to other people in different places.
We’ve all been passing the buck for too long — indeed, Nevada used to put homeless people on buses to the Bay Area.
Rather than working to ensure that our cities’ neighborhoods and public spaces are safe and accessible to all members of our community, including those without stable finances or housing, society has convinced itself that if we just ignore the problem of homelessness long enough — or worse, try to harass people until they flee to other places — perhaps it will go way.
It’s a cruel and distasteful (non)solution to a homelessness problem that has, as a result of our failure to act, grown to such epic proportions that it can no longer be ignored.
Residents and civic leaders of communities like Grants Pass are right to be concerned about the threat of homeless encampments. Regardless of how people came to be homeless and what compassion we may feel for their plight, the risks and dangers of these spaces are well documented and very real.
But by the same token, the squalor and human tragedy of the camps is a call to moral action in our society: We must fix this. There is a moral imperative that society can’t ignore if we want to take pride in being members of a healthy culture filled with public spaces that are civil, safe and populated by people with hope and housing security.
Remedies are available, but not if vulnerable people continue to be persecuted for sleeping in public while too many of us publicly sleep on the issues that lead to homelessness. We must wake up and get busy fixing the shared problems that plague the homeless and housed alike.
