Supreme Court ruling may push more homeless into L.A., Mayor Karen Bass says

Many leaders in the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County are up in arms over the Supreme Court’s ruling in support of anti-camping laws, which they fear other municipalities will use to push homeless people into Los Angeles.

But other leaders in Long Beach and Orange County support the decision. They believe it will give cities a new tool to promote public safety, clear encampments and address homelessness.

The opinion in Grants Pass v. Johnson on Friday, June 28, upholds cities’ ability to issue tickets to people for sleeping in public, regardless of the availability of local shelter beds.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath condemned the decision, saying it will result in the criminalization of people experiencing homelessness and shuffle people from community to community without addressing the overall crisis. Both the county and the City of L.A., they said, will not use the ruling to punish people for camping in public.

“If it’s OK for other cities to ticket and shoo people away, I will be very concerned that the number of people moving into L.A. from other cities will increase,” said Bass in a Friday morning press conference.

“I also do not believe that it is ultimately a solution to homelessness,” she said. “How are they supposed to pay for their ticket, and what happens when they don’t pay? Does it go into a warrant and give us an excuse to incarcerate somebody?”

Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson was happy with the ruling, saying that “for years cities have been constrained by legal ambiguities limiting our ability to implement common-sense measures to protect our residents’ well-being.”

Richardson said enforcing anti-camping laws alone will not end homelessness and that Long Beach remains committed to increasing permanent housing, shelter and homeless services.

The ruling comes the same day that the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority revealed the hopeful news that in 2023 a record number of people moved from the streets of Los Angeles into shelter, while the overall homeless population in the county stayed flat.

L.A. County officials say the Grants Pass ruling has the potential to erode that progress.

“This gut punch of a decision comes on the day we unveil our point-in-time count progress,” L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath said.

“As chair of LAHSA and the Board of Supervisors, I want to be crystal clear: the criminalization of homelessness and poverty is dangerous,” she said. “It does not work and it will not stand.”

But the Orange County Board of Supervisors had a very different reading of the ruling.

“The Supreme Court’s decision today allows the County of Orange and our impacted cities to enhance efforts to move people from unsafe encampments to shelter, treatment, wraparound care, and ultimately permanent supportive housing,” said Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley.

State Senator Catherine Blakespear, D-Encinitas, also praised the decision, saying it “allows local governments to create and enforce policies needed to keep our public spaces including parks, sidewalks and open spaces, free from unsafe encampments.”

Blakespear added that it’s essential communities uphold their responsibility to provide shelter for unhoused individuals and “not use bans as a way to simply move people to neighboring communities.”

But Bass argues that cities do not need anti-camping laws to get people to leave encampments. She pointed to the success of her Inside Safe program that cleared 52 encampments and moved more than 2,800 people indoors without issuing any citations.

Clare Pastore, a professor at the USC Gould School of Law, said she was “very depressed, but not surprised,” by the ruling, which was approved by the six conservative Supreme Court justices and opposed by the three liberal justices.

Pastore explained that ruling was based on the court’s interpretation of the 8th Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. In this case, the justices argued that the 8th Amendment did not place substantive limits on what can be criminalized and noted that fines and fees are common punishments.

Pastore, however, feels that the City of Grants Pass anti-camping law is cruel and unusual because the city does not have adequate shelter capacity for its homeless population.

“What Grant’s Pass is doing is essentially saying that sleeping in public when you don’t have another place to sleep is a crime,” said Pastore.

She said homeless people who get ticketed under anti-camping laws will likely be able to fight the tickets in court, based on the fact that sleeping is an involuntary human behavior.

“I think this is a far cry from the end of litigation about the criminalization of homelessness,” she said. “And really that’s very sad to me, because this kind of litigation is a enormous waste of resources, just as the criminalization of homelessness is an enormous waste of resources.”