The Supreme Court is currently hearing a case which would allow cities to officially criminalize poverty.

A majority of Supreme Court justices on Monday appeared sympathetic to an Oregon city making it a crime for anyone without a permanent residence to sleep outside in an effort to crack down on homeless encampments across public properties.
The case, City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, carries enormous stakes nationwide as communities confront a growing tide of unhoused residents and increasingly turn to punitive measures to try to incentivize people to take advantage of social services and other shelter options.

This rationalization is a joke. Grants Pass doesn't have a public shelter.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said in a decision last year that a homeless camping ban amounts to "cruel and unusual punishment" under the 8th Amendment. But several members of the high court's conservative majority took a critical view of that conclusion.

"Have we ever applied the Eighth Amendment to civil penalties?" asked a skeptical Justice Clarence Thomas.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett worried about where to draw the line, wondering aloud whether the Eighth Amendment could reasonably be invoked to prohibit punishment for hungry people who steal food or engage in other behaviors necessary for survival.

I wonder if Justice Barrett has ever been hungry, or read Le Miserables? Maybe she had read it and missed the point.
Instead of ticketing and arresting people who had no money, for the crime of not having money, we have actual solutions to homelessness. One good example is currently being done by the VA.

Despite more than two decades of working in homelessness, the sight of anyone—veteran or not—lying on the street or curled on a park bench comes as a shock. Yet it is part of what drives him and others in his organization to work toward ending veteran homelessness—“keeping,” Johnson says, “the two words ‘veteran and ‘homeless’ out of our mouths.”
The efforts have paid off. Over a 12-year stretch that ended in 2022, the population of unhoused veterans dropped by more than half. Although that trend reversed over the last year—rising 7.4% from 2022 to 2023—it was still lower than the 12% overall increase in homelessness.

Part of the long-term success of reducing the number of unhoused veterans is the Veterans Affairs’ pledge to end it—as well as the funding to cover the costs of that goal.

Coordinated efforts between local, state, and federal agencies that can act as safety nets; screening protocols to identify veterans at risk for homelessness; billions of dollars in federal money; and the prioritization of veteran homelessness by lawmakers across political parties has also contributed to that success. To date, 83 communities and the entire states of Connecticut, Delaware, and Virginia have effectively ended homelessness among veterans.

But that level of progress hasn’t been replicated in the homeless population at large. This year’s increase in overall homelessness signifies the largest jump since the federal government began counting in 2007.

Coordinated efforts and billions of dollars. In other words, it became a priority after officials were shamed into acting.
We CAN do this, but classism and victim blaming keeps us from acting. The reality is that half of the homeless have jobs. There is also another method to address homelessness - direct action.

“We want affordable, permanent housing for human beings,” Sprowal was known to say, “so they have some control over their life.”

In Philadelphia, the gambit worked.

The ’88 housing takeover enraged nearby residents, who demanded immediate remedy from both City Hall and the federal government. Officials quickly vowed to break up the occupation, but police never stormed in.

Two days later, the group left peacefully, with a promise from the city to negotiate a deal with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Similar takeovers followed, and within weeks, Sprowal’s group helped secure hundreds of units of publicly owned housing to be transferred to the unhoused in the late ’80s.