Violators face hundred-dollar fines and possible prison terms for repeat offenders.
Washington:
The US Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments on whether cities can ban homeless people from sleeping outside, as the country grapples with a rising rate of Americans living on the streets and a shortage of shelter beds.
The case centers around regulations in the city of Grants Pass in the western state of Oregon, which banned camping or using any kind of bedding on public property after public parks were filled with tents, blankets and cardboard. had given
Violators face hundred-dollar fines and possible prison terms for repeat offenders.
Homeless advocates have argued that banning people from camping when there is nowhere else to sleep amounts to “cruel and unusual punishment” — prohibited by the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The nine-judge Supreme Court decision, which is expected by June 30, could carry high stakes. According to the 2023 count, a record 653,100 people are homeless across the country.
“By design the ordinances make it physically impossible for homeless people to live in Grants Pass without facing unlimited fines and jail time,” attorney Kelsey Corkran, who argued against the ban, told the Supreme Court on Monday.
Corkran added that the ban “turns the city’s homelessness problem into someone else’s problem by forcing its homeless residents into other jurisdictions.”
Grants Pass’ attorney, Thane Evangelis, defended the city’s punishments as “not unusual in any way.”
“This court must reverse and strike down the Ninth Circuit’s failed experiment,” Evangelis told the justices, referring to the appeals court that blocked the city’s ordinance in 2022.
Evangelis said the 2022 decision “proliferated the camps while harming those it seeks to protect.”
Grants Pass, population 40,000, does not have a municipal homeless shelter and instead relies on private charity.
Asked by Chief Justice John Roberts what the city would do if its appeal to the Supreme Court failed, Evangelis said its “hands would be tied.”
“It will be forced to surrender its public spaces,” he added.
Roberts said the city’s ban was not necessarily a criminalization of the homeless “status” because that can change, and was instead about “conduct.”
“You can remove homeless status in an instant if you move to a shelter or circumstances change and of course it can be moved the other way if you get kicked out of the shelter,” Roberts said. ” said Roberts.
Elena Kagan, one of three liberal justices on the conservative-dominated bench, blasted city officials for criminalizing “biological necessity.”
“You could say that breathing is also conduct, but probably, you wouldn’t think that breathing in public is okay to commit a crime. And for a homeless person who has nowhere to go, in public Sleeping on is like breathing in public.”
In addition to a lack of shelter beds driving poverty, addiction and homelessness, economists argue that the nation’s market-rate housing stock is woefully behind target — the United States lacks millions of homes needed to meet demand and Rising prices of existing housing.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
