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The Supreme Court issued a ruling today in a case that will have a major impact on how cities can deal with homeless people and tent camps on the West Coast.
I wrote about this case last year under the headline “Progressive elected officials beg conservative Supreme Court for relief on homelessness” and that’s exactly what happened here. Cities up and down the coast have been prevented from doing much about homeless people settling on sidewalks or in public parks thanks to two different decisions by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers the western states including Hawaii and Alaska. In those decisions, the 9th Circuit had ruled that it was a violation of the 8th Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment for cities or arrest or interfere with homeless people who had no where else to go.
The result of these rulings was that cities like Portland, San Francisco and Seattle were scrambling to find ways to deal with people living on the street without getting sued. San Francisco actually did get sued and had to stop cleaning up tent camps.
Leading the campaign to get the Supreme Court to overturn the 9th Circuit was none other than Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. He was joined by all of the major cities on the West Coast plus Honolulu. Many of their mayors supported the appeal as well, progressive Democrats all.
“It’s just gone too far,” Mr. Newsom said in a Sacramento forum held by Politico this month, in which he vowed to seek clarity from the Supreme Court and recognized that he was asking for help from the same conservative jurists whom he had sharply rebuked for decisions on abortion and gun regulations.
“People’s lives are at risk,” he said. “It’s unacceptable, what’s happening on streets and sidewalks.”
The court agreed to take up the case in January and oral arguments were held in April. Today the court issued a 6-3 decision overturning the 9th Circuit.
In a 6-3 decision, the high court reversed a ruling by a San Francisco-based appeals court that found outdoor sleeping bans violate the Eighth Amendment.
Western cities had argued that the ruling made it harder to manage outdoor encampments in public spaces, but homeless advocates said punishing people who need a place to sleep would criminalize homelessness.
