Capitalism' Homelessness Trap

The Court Will Rule on the Legality of Tent Bans, but Homelessness Will Remain an Issue

My book As An Alien in a Land of Promise is a hybrid work that looks at the problem of homelessness through the literal camera lens of Sherry Rubel and our reporting work in Lakewood, NJ.

The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing a case today that, in the words of The Guardian newspaper, “could significantly change how US cities respond to the growing homelessness crisis.”

The case involves a local ban in Grants Pass, Oregon, on sleeping outdoors, a law that criminalizes homelessness without doing anything to address its root causes or effects on those forced to find shelter in the now-banned tent encampments. A lower court already has ruled in favor of the homeless in this case, building on a 2018 decision barring the enactment of such bans.

But Grants Pass is now taking this to the Supreme Court, and it is unclear how a bench ruled by six conservative justices might respond.

This all seems too familiar. Men and women with nowhere else to go, cobble themselves together into a ragtag community. They pitch tents. Find ways to provide food and other forms of aid. Knowing they will face reaction from the powers in city hall. They do this because they have no choice, because the alternative may just be worse, even as the city turns to its police forced to roust the men and women from their tents and chases them into the darkness.

This is familiar because it happens repeatedly. I remember, back in 2012 and 2013, watching several police SUVs rumble down the central dirt road of a tent encampment in Lakewood, N.J. The encampment, run by the Rev. Steve Brigham, was home to about 75 to 100 displaced men and women. A houseless population, but not necessarily homeless, because the encampment was offering a rough version of what most of us think of as home.

The use of law enforcement is a failure of both policy and imagination. Criminalizing the homeless (as I write here) only exacerbates the homelessness problem.