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DON’T ARREST THE HOMELESS - HOUSE THEM!  
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Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, Shailly Gupta Barnes
May 21, 2024
Tom Dispatch [[link removed]]

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_ A ruling in a case now under consideration by the U.S Supreme Court
must show that those with no home to call their own must be met with
compassion, not the cruelty of punishment. _

homeless person nyc A homeless person is seen near a subway station
in New York City on February 21, 2022., Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency
via Getty Images

 

On April 22nd, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for _Grants Pass
v. Johnson_ [[link removed]], a case that focuses on
whether unhoused — the term that has generally replaced
“homeless” — people with no indoor shelter options can even pull
a blanket around themselves outdoors without being subject to criminal
punishment.

Before making its way to the Supreme Court on appeal, the Ninth
Circuit Court held
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that municipalities can’t punish involuntarily homeless people for
merely living in the place where they are. This is exactly what the
city of Grants Pass, Oregon, did when it outlawed resting or sleeping
anywhere on public property with so much as a blanket to survive in
cold weather, even when no beds in shelters were available. The law
makes it impossible for unhoused residents to stay in Grants Pass,
effectively forcing them to either move to another city or face
endless rounds of punishment. In Grants Pass, the punishment starts
with
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a $295 fine that, if unpaid, goes up to $500, and can escalate from
there to criminal trespass charges, penalties of up to 30 days in
jail, and a $1,250 fine.

The issue before the court is whether such a law violates the Eighth
Amendment’s restrictions against cruel and unusual punishment. The
city is asking the court to decide that the Eighth Amendment doesn’t
impose any substantive limit on what can be criminalized, so long as
the punishment itself isn’t considered cruel and unusual. If so,
municipalities across the nation would be free to make involuntary
homelessness unlawful.

In response, more than 40 amicus briefs with over 1,100 signatories
were filed against the city’s case, representing millions of people
concerned about or potentially affected by the far-reaching
consequences of such a decision. The Kairos Center
[[link removed]] for Religions, Rights & Social Justice
— to which the two authors of this piece belong — submitted
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one such brief together with more than a dozen religious
denominations, historic houses of worship, and interfaith networks.
Along with the 13 official signatories of that brief, many more
clergy, faith leaders, and institutions support its core assertion:
that the Grants Pass ordinance violates our interfaith tradition’s
directives on the moral treatment of poor and unhoused people. Indeed,
the Supreme Court’s decision could dramatically criminalize poverty
and homelessness nationwide, especially if cities near Grants Pass, in
the state of Oregon, and across the country, put in place similar
restrictions.

Sadly, such a scenario is anything but far-fetched, given not just
this Supreme Court but all too much of this country. Since the early
2000s, our nation has regularly turned to policing and “law and
order” responses to social crises. Often wielded against poor and
low-income communities in the form of fines, fees, and risks of jail
time, such threats are regularly backed up by police in full body
armor, using tactical gear and, in this century so far, hundreds of
millions of
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dollars of military equipment transferred directly from the Pentagon
to thousands of police departments nationwide.

All of this has made the possibility of using violence and brute force
more likely in relation to many situations, including the world of the
unhoused. Most recently, of course, militarized police have swarmed
campuses
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to help quell largely peaceful student protests over the war on Gaza
[[link removed]]. Consider it anything but
ironic that when Northeastern University students
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were arrested for their Gaza encampment, they were taken to the same
facilities where unhoused people were being processed during homeless
encampment sweeps, as local contacts in Boston have told us.

POVERTY AND HOUSING INSECURITY

The homelessness and housing crises unfolding today reflect a broader
national crisis of economic insecurity. In 2023, after all,
approximately 135 million people
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of the nation, were considered poor or low-income and just one crisis
away from becoming homeless. In a dramatic return to pre-pandemic
conditions, this included 60% of Latinos (38.9 million), 59% of Native
Americans (2.3 million), 55% of Blacks (22.5million), 36% of Asian
people (8 million) and 32% of Whites (61.8 million).

Among those tens of millions of Americans, housing insecurity is
alarmingly widespread. Before the pandemic, there were approximately 8
to 11 million
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people who were homeless or on the verge of becoming so, relying on a
crumbling shelter system and a growing constellation of informal
encampments on America’s streets, or trapped in a rotating series of
sleeping places, including cars and couches, or doubled or tripled up
in apartments. Worse yet, even those numbers were likely an
underestimate: when the pandemic hit in 2020 and millions of people
lost their jobs, 30 to 40 million
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people suddenly found themselves at risk of becoming homeless.

In a nation once known as “the home of the brave” and “the land
of the free,” there are untold numbers of brave souls who are
without homes or on the verge of homelessness. Today, there is not a
single state or county where someone earning the federal minimum wage
can afford [[link removed]] a two-bedroom apartment.

As reported this May, between 2019 and 2023, rents rose by more than
30% [[link removed]]
nationally. Despite a number of local and state increases in the
minimum wage this year, a living wage [[link removed]]
adequate to cover housing and other basic needs would often have to be
at least twice as high as what those hourly increases add up to. In
California, where the minimum wage rose to $16 an hour, single parents
would need to earn at least $47 an hour to meet their basic needs,
whereas a household with two working adults and two children would
need close to $50 an hour. In Alabama, where the minimum wage is just
$7.25, a single parent would need an hourly wage more than four times
as high to meet basic household needs.

This, of course, means that tens of millions of people of every race,
age, and gender identity, in every state and county in the country,
are facing multiple forms of deprivation daily and will do so for
years to come.

Although the depths of this crisis are hard to fathom, it can be
measured in death. In 2023, researchers from the University of
California, Riverside, found that poverty is the fourth-leading cause
of death
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nationally, claiming 183,000 of us in 2019. Their research also showed
that cumulative or long-term poverty was associated with 295,000
deaths annually, or 800 deaths a day. During the pandemic crisis, poor
and low-income counties experienced Covid death rates that were three
to five times higher than wealthier counties, while the mortality rate
among renters facing eviction was 2.6 times
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higher than that of the general population. Housing insecurity led to
increased death by Covid and had negative health impacts more
generally.

UNDERESTIMATING THE CRISIS

The extent of the (un)housing crisis is so much greater than the
systems and structures that exist to respond to it. In part, this is
because, as with poverty, measures of housing insecurity generally
underestimate the need at hand. The most commonly used reference point
on housing is the point-in-time (PIT) homeless count
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The “PIT count” includes both the number of the unhoused who are
in shelters and a street count of unsheltered homeless people.
However, it only deals with those it can reach and so literally count.
It also leaves out some forms of homelessness, including the millions
of people who are living “doubled up” or “tripled up” with
friends, family members, or even strangers.

In the pre-pandemic years, the PIT count was often around half a
million people
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but didn’t include the 2.5-3.5 million people living in temporary
homeless shelters, transitional housing centers, and informal
encampments or tent cities, or the estimated seven million people
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who had lost their own homes and moved in with others. In other words,
the PIT count was short by about 9 to 11 million people (and that was
before the pandemic caused greater homelessness and housing
insecurity).

Although grossly inadequate, the PIT count remains the measure used to
allocate federal resources toward homelessness. Unfortunately, when a
housing program is designed for tens or even hundreds of thousands
rather than millions of people, it will fail. For this reason, housing
organizers and advocates have for years been pushing alternatives
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and urging the consideration of housing solutions that could actually
respond to this crisis at scale. The Housing First
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model is one of those solutions, prioritizing access to permanent and
stable housing, alongside wraparound services for employment,
recovery, and greater housing stability for those in need. The use of
this model has been shown
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result in higher rates of housing retention among previously unhoused
people, with (not surprisingly) an improved quality of life as well.

In fact, some pandemic policies did temporarily (even if
unintentionally) implement and expand on the Housing First model. They
moved people into hotels or other available, unused rental units,
stopping all evictions and foreclosures; distributed economic stimulus
payments; and built up this country’s decrepit social welfare system
by expanding unemployment insurance and food security programs, while
issuing monthly payments to households with children. All of this did,
in fact, prevent massive dislocations of millions of people between
2020 and 2022, while providing more housing and keeping at least 20
million people
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above the poverty line.

A common thread of these programs was that they prioritized
financially vulnerable households over Wall Street, real estate
tycoons, and corporate landlords. Years later, a majority of Americans
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continue to support many of these policies, which were put in place
alongside breakthrough organizing among poor, unhoused, and
housing-insecure people.

During the early weeks of the pandemic, unhoused people living in
encampments also fought to become certified as “essential workers”
so that they could get protective equipment for their community
members. Around the same time, low-income housing organizers and
tenant associations became acutely aware of the vulnerabilities of
low-income tenants who couldn’t then afford to pay their rent and
feed their families. Despite fears of eviction, rent strikes broke out
in March and April
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2020, as tenants decided to withhold their limited resources to ensure
that they could provide food to their families. This happened weeks
before the federal eviction moratorium was enacted. When it expired
months later, communities blocked eviction hearings
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to make sure as many people as possible could stay in their homes.

Despite widespread support for a more robust right to housing, it
didn’t take long for powerful interests
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to begin pushing back. The real estate industry
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spent upwards of $100 million lobbying against pandemic eviction
moratoriums at both the federal and state levels. In 2022, the Cicero
Institute [[link removed]] created a
template
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for state legislation that would criminalize unhoused people. That
model legislation would have banned encampments on public land and
diverted funds from Housing First programs to short-term shelter
programs, while forcing unhoused people into state-run encampments.
Versions of this bill have been introduced in half a dozen states and
passed in Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas.

Recently, in New York (where we live), Governor Kathy Hochul enacted a
budget that prioritized the state’s wealthy residents over its poor
and low-income ones. Not only did she refuse to increase taxes on the
wealthiest New Yorkers and corporations, losing billions of dollars in
new revenue, but her housing policies provided tax incentives to
developers rather than focusing on creating stable housing for
housing-insecure and homeless New Yorkers.

According to the New York Labor-Religion Coalition
[[link removed]]
and the Housing Justice for All Coalition,
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at least 3.4 million tenants will be excluded from good-cause eviction
protections, among them all upstate municipalities, while those who
are eligible may not be able to exercise their rights unless they have
adequate legal representation in housing court. That budget also rolls
back rent-stabilization measures, making elderly tenants in particular
more vulnerable to eviction, while failing to allocate a single dollar
to move homeless New Yorkers into stable housing. And in all of this,
New York is anything but out of the ordinary.

WHAT YOU DO TO THE LEAST OF THESE, YOU DO UNTO ME

Although America’s political leadership is generally failing to
respond to the need at hand, millennia of religious teachings have
helped shape society’s views on our responsibility to care for, not
punish, poor and unhoused people.

Indeed, there are over 2,000 Biblical passages that address poverty
— most of them focusing on those made poor by a society that fails
to provide for all our needs. As Jesus says to his followers in
Matthew 25:

“[F]or I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you
gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me,
naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did
not visit me. Then [the nations] also will answer, Lord, when was it
that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in
prison and did not take care of you? Then [Jesus] will answer them,
Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of
these, you did not do it to me.”

This responsibility rests not only on individuals, but those in
positions of authority in society. As Isaiah 10:2 puts it: “Woe to
those who make iniquitous decrees, who write oppressive statutes, to
turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of
their right.” Instead, Isaiah 3:15 instructs those who make the laws
and issue decrees not to “grind the face[s] of the poor,” making
their already difficult conditions worse. Such teachings are
consistent not just with the Abrahamic tradition but other belief
systems like Hinduism, which prioritizes non-violence and non-injury
as a core moral responsibility.

A law like the one now before the Supreme Court in _Grants Pass v.
Johnson_ [[link removed]] that would punish unhoused
people for simply living departs from such moral wisdom in a radical
fashion. As Justice Elena Kagan
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pointed out during oral arguments over the case, “For a homeless
person who has no place to go, sleeping in public is kind of like
breathing in public.” How true! If only four other justices would
see the situation similarly.

Our faith traditions and constitutional values certainly should be
clear enough that it is cruel and unusual punishment to treat the
homeless the way Grants Pass wants to do. The court and the nation
should respond to this moral crisis with care and compassion, with
housing, not handcuffs.

May it be so.

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* Homelessness; Grants Pass vs Johnson; The unhoused;
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