Punishment has never reduced homelessness. Yet, the Supreme Court recently decided civil penalties for sleeping in public are neither cruel nor unusual, and fining people without housing is legal as long as the fees are not excessive. Since the “social question” of homelessness is “complex,” six of the nine justices reasoned penal sanctions are one of several legitimate “public policy responses required to address” extreme housing inequality in America.
Homelessness is already a punishment; adding another log to the fire can’t lower the temperature. I’ve designed housing solutions for hundreds of people transitioning out of homelessness. A fine never helps. More often than not, penalties disrupt and delay the rehousing process. Only support can reduce homelessness.
Fines are cruel and unusual because a debt can never pay off another debt. Criminalization policies are not an evidence-based solution to homelessness, but their opposite can be. Remunerative policies come in many shapes and sizes, like rental subsidies, micro-loans, and basic income programs, but all can reduce homelessness. At UC Berkeley, the campus reduces student homelessness by paying students’ security deposits.
Community support ended homelessness in my backyard. Two summers ago, I met someone sleeping in an unenclosed cement carport behind my rental unit. I learned he’d been unsheltered there for almost two years. Born in San Francisco, ‘Nardy’ Andrus spent the first half of his adult life serving time only to spend the latter unhoused in the Bay Area. I volunteered my legal aid. After 16 months, my unhoused neighbor became my housed neighbor.
Civil penalties will only prolong the plight of freeway-adjacent pay-by-the-month motel families like the one that raised me. I was living out of a suitcase until the age of 12, and a fee would not have helped my family exit homelessness. Aid, however, transformed my life. When my grandmother developed cancer, she decided to leave my mother her life savings with one final wish: use the funds to secure safe and stable housing.
Since aid-based policy approaches already out-perform penalty-based policy approaches, there is no humane reason any municipality should become more punitive. The political desire of cities like Grants Pass to punish reflects a greater interest in banishing their own rather than an interest in helping former lease-holding residents recover from housing displacement their local government failed to prevent. For cities that have their people’s back, the case of Grants Pass ought to be a profile in cowardice; nothing more.
The next national homelessness controversy will be in the courts sooner than you think. An address, or lack thereof, may determine whether you can vote, serve on a jury, obtain a state identification card, board an aircraft, and participate in the census. Too often, people who struggle to find a safe place to sleep cannot access public bathrooms, enjoy privacy, and practice self-defense.
The Supreme Court may have enabled municipalities to remain trapped in a pointless and pathetic process of punishing the poor. However, the fight for housing justice continues wherever people of conscience find the courage to aid their unhoused neighbors
Anthony R. Carrasco is a graduate student in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Department at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where he also co-directs the UC Berkeley Public Service Center Alumni Association.
