Urban Camping Bans Can’t Hold Up in Court
Many cities – such as Denver – want the Supreme Court to act quickly to put a damper on urban camping.
Just a week ago, a Colorado state court nixed Denver’s outlawing of people camping in public. The court joined a number of tribunals in holding that people couldn’t be prohibited from camping in public when there was no reasonable alternative.
Just a year before, the Ninth Circuit had struck down a Boise, Idaho, urban camping ban as a form of cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. (Denver is in CA10).
Many Denverites were up in arms with the late December ruling; some attributed the rise in the number of street people to the Colorado law allowing recreational marijuana.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development counted the number of Americans sleeping out in the public at 550,000 in early 2018. Communities in the Ninth Circuit accounted for two-thirds of the homeless on the streets.
Last month – days before the Denver decision – Scotus declined to take the Boise case, City of Boise v. Martin, 19-247.
Throughout the West, communities are trying to walk the tightrope between their concern over safety, sanitation, the environment and the accumulation of garbage and the rights of the poor with no adequate shelter.
Portland, Oregon, has been proactive, setting aside parts of parks for the homeless to camp. Others are trying to keep up with shelters that don’t have draconian rules to drive would-be beneficiaries to stay away.
As you might expect, usually warmer and sunnier California has the lion’s share of the street sleepers. A story by Sarah Holder and Kriston Capps in “City Lab” this past September said some 15,000 people sleep on Los Angeles’ streets and 16,500 in cars in Los Angeles County.
The Trump administration has announced (Huffington Post, 12/20/2019) it would address the problem (by rounding up campers and putting them into “facilities,”) but it has no more constitutional authority to ban urban camping than do cities.
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