The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday morning in a case out of Oregon, which will determine whether local governments can ban people experiencing homelessness from camping in public places — even when no shelter is available. The court’s decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson could determine how Western cities — including Los Angeles — enforce their own public camping ordinances.
Due in part to previous rulings by the Ninth Circuit Court, including Martin v. Boise in 2018, LA is currently limited in its ability to enforce its anti-camping ordinance, known as LA Municipal Code 41.18. The city can effectively enforce its camping ban only in specific areas: near schools, day cares, parks, libraries, and hundreds of other specific areas determined by city council members. Ahead of encampment sweeps, the city must post written notices and involve outreach teams.
Most importantly, LA must provide an offer of shelter to people in locations selected for enforcement. That 2018 legal ruling has spurred construction of shelters and interim housing around LA, and reduced the number of citations under the city’s anti-camping ban.
The City of LA is not trying to go as far as Grants Pass, which issues fines to people sleeping outdoors, despite the city having no public shelter. In an amicus brief filed in the case, Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto says LA accepts that it can’t criminalize homelessness without adequate offers of shelter. But LA leaders also say the previous Ninth Circuit rulings have left many enforcement issues open to interpretation and ask the court for more clarity on what enforcement is legal, and under what circumstances.
“There's some uncertainty around the Ninth Circuit's opinion that sets up all of this case – and some lingering restrictions on the tools available in Southern California,” says Justin Levitt, professor of law at LMU Loyola Law School. “The Ninth Circuit has set a standard, and there's some dispute over how specific it is, or how murky it is.”
If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Grants Pass, and the city can effectively make it a crime to sleep outside, that could greenlight other so-called criminalization policies across the Ninth Circuit, which includes nine western states. However, if they uphold the lower court ruling, cities including LA will likely maintain their current policies and explore another legal avenue to increase enforcement.
LA advocates for the unhoused rallied at the federal courthouse in Downtown LA today in support of the homeless plaintiffs in the Grants Pass case. They argue that the previous Ninth Circuit ruling should stand. They say the law in Grants Pass effectively says you can’t sleep in public places if there’s nowhere else to go, which clearly violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Local advocates also argue that enforcement policies don’t succeed at getting people into housing or clearing encampments.
Inner City Law Center Executive Director Adam Murray says the question before the court gets at the heart of LA’s approach to homelessness: “There's a really strong tension between whether we're going to take that punitive approach to homelessness, or whether we're really going to focus on what the ultimate solutions are collectively to homelessness – having more shelter, having more housing, having more opportunities for folks to get employment and mental health care and the other things that people need to get off the street.”
In Monday’s hearing, both liberal and conservative justices seemed skeptical about the constitutionality of the Grant’s Pass law, but constitutional scholars say there’s no clear indication of the Supreme Court’s next steps.
“I would be surprised if even this court would allow what is effectively banishment of homeless people from public spaces,” says Clare Pastore, professor at USC’s Gould School of Law. “Allowing cities to compete for the most punitive regime so that people will just go to whatever place doesn't do that — that would be extraordinary.”
The Supreme Court is set to rule on Grants Pass v. Johnson by the end of June.