The Supreme Court announced on Friday it would hear a pivotal case that could transform homelessness policy in the United States. The case is the most significant legal challenge to the rights of homeless people in decades, and how the Court rules in a decision expected later this year will shape how cities respond to tent encampments.
Four years ago, the Court declined to hear a similar challenge. But since then, the crisis of unsheltered homelessness in America has grown more severe, municipal backlash to court rulings that have limited cities’ response to the crisis has grown more organized, and what to do about people living in tents has become one of the most urgent issues in American politics.
The case in question — Grants Pass, OR v. Johnson, Gloria, et al — is a challenge to a 2018 federal class action lawsuit filed by three people who argued that the city of Grants Pass’s laws and customs illegally punished them for being involuntarily homeless. Attorneys representing the plaintiffs noted the dearth of affordable housing and homeless shelters in the city, and blasted Grants Pass’s arguments that unhoused people could simply leave and go elsewhere.
In 2022, a three-judge panel from the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of the homeless plaintiffs. This wasn’t a total surprise; the same appellate court had issued a landmark ruling four years earlier that said people without housing can’t be punished for sleeping or camping outside on public property if there are no adequate shelter alternatives available.
That pivotal decision, Martin v. Boise, has fundamentally shaped cities’ response to the homelessness crisis, especially in the nine Western states under the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction, where some 42 percent of the country’s homeless population now lives.
Leaders from dozens of cities and states — both liberal and conservative — have been hoping the US Supreme Court would overturn the Martin and Grants Pass decisions, which they…
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