Supreme Court to hear biggest homeless rights case in decades. What both sides say.

Laura Gutowski’s husband always made her feel trapped.

The lifelong homemaker said her husband of more than 30 years never let her get a job in Grants Pass, Oregon, the small city surrounded by mountains where they lived, an hour north of the California border.

She shared a seven-bedroom home with her husband’s family, but when he died three years ago, she was told to leave, Gutowski told USA TODAY. Gutowski, now 55, was left with only $120. First, she lived in her Chevrolet Cavalier, then briefly at a shelter that shuttered 16 months after launching.

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Now Gutowski, who uses a walker, lives in a tent and sleeps on a cot under five layers of blankets in Morrison Centennial Park, about a mile and a half from the house she lived in most of her life. She has lymphedema, diabetes, high blood pressure and kidney disease, and this summer she might face more challenges living without a house.

“We’re not all bad. We’re not alcoholics. We’re not on drugs. There are a lot of reasons why we’re out here,” said Kimberly Morris who has been unhoused for six months. She walks through an unhoused camp in Tussing Park in Grants Pass, Ore. on April 10. Morris is one of hundreds living unhoused in Grants Pass that could be affected by the Supreme Court as it hears arguments in late April on an ordinance that could criminalize camping in the city’s public parks.

Grants Pass, a city of about 40,000, is at the center of a Supreme Court fight pitting the unhoused community against local officials, who say they want control of their parks back. The Supreme Court could have a deep impact on Gutowski and about 600 others who live outdoors when the judges on Monday hear arguments in a case about whether the city can enforce a ban on camping and sleeping at all times, in all public spaces.

Ashley Hanson, 29, reads a Grants Pass police notice notifying her that she needs to move her camp. Right now, the unhoused are required to move every three days. “If they gave us a spot to be, I’d be there,” said Hanson.

“I don’t like having to try to survive out here. It’s not comfortable and it’s not warm,” Gutowski said during a recent phone interview.

Homeless advocates argue the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment protects people from being punished based on a personal status outside their control − like being homeless, according to David Peery, a lawyer with the National Coalition for the Homeless. If Grants Pass wins the case, he said, homeless residents could face punishment for using as little as one blanket outside, in addition to any tent or other covering.

Laura Gutowski, 55, sits in a folding chair outside her tent in Morrison Centennial Park in Grants Pass, Ore., on April 2. The Supreme Court could determine whether unhoused residents like Gutowski can face tickets and be arrested for sleeping outside.

“This is the biggest human rights case you’ve never heard of,” Peery said.

City leaders await Supreme Court hearing

City leaders in the Ninth Circuit, which includes Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington, are watching closely as the hearing approaches. Lawyers representing each side say the court’s decision would impact a large chunk of the country’s unsheltered homeless population, either protecting them from criminalization or giving local authorities more leeway to permanently prevent sleeping in public.

The town of Grants Pass is at the center of a U.S. Supreme Court case over whether unsheltered, unhoused people can be criminalized for living outside in situations where their city/town/municipality lacks enough shelter beds for everyone. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments for the case, City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, on April 22.

If the court sides with the unhoused community in Grants Pass, cities and states across the U.S. that have similar 24-hour bans on sleeping in public will be unable to enforce them, legal experts told USA TODAY. If the court sides with Grants Pass, authorities in the Ninth Circuit can start ticketing and arresting people for sleeping outside.

National attention surrounding the case has increased stigma in Grants Pass, Gutowski said. These days, more residents − including children in the park − hurl nasty words her way.

“It wasn’t that long ago that I was a part of that same community that is now looking at all of us and thinking we’re the lowest scum of the Earth, that we should just be wiped off or bused out of the city,” she said.

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Like across the country, nonprofit food and health care providers and religious groups form a small but mighty stopgap for the unhoused in Grants Pass. Volunteers serve hot food and a nonprofit, Mobile Integrative Navigation Team, provides free transportation to much-needed medical care. But without housing or shelter, people remain living outdoors.

For the past three years, elected officials in Grants Pass have tried to create an appropriate shelter space, but nothing has worked, Mayor Sara Bristol told USA TODAY.

“We need to help establish a place where people can legally sleep, and it’s been a real uphill battle with all kinds of different challenges,” she said.

What is the Grants Pass ruling about?

In this case, Grants Pass says it needs to be able to clear residents like Gutowski out of parks. But the city hasn’t been able to enforce its around-the-clock camping ban on public property.

That’s because a 2022 U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decision ruled homeless people in places without enough shelter beds have an Eighth Amendment right not to face punishment for living outside and protecting themselves from the elements. In Grants Pass, that has meant tents, tarps and other belongings dot parks while public benches and picnic tables are often used for sleeping.

Authorities have been enforcing an ordinance that prevents people from setting up their tents in the same spot indefinitely, Bristol told USA TODAY. But lawyers handling the city’s case say that’s not adequate.

An encampment at Tussing Park on April 10 in Grants Pass, Ore.

Appeals court decisions have “limited the ability of towns and cities, large and small, to address this crisis and have taken away the ability to really address what’s happening in our communities,” said Theane Evangelis, one of the lawyers arguing the case for Grants Pass.

Homeless rights advocates say the enforcement city leaders want will only make the country’s homeless crisis worse, having dire consequences for unhoused populations where people from marginalized communities are overrepresented.

Some legal historians also argue the Supreme Court should not overlook the history of anti-camping bans, including vagrancy laws that served to bar people from certain spaces based on their race. In the 1800s, vagrancy laws in many parts of the U.S. largely targeted formerly enslaved people.

“That is our legacy, this desire to purge undesirable people from communities, to drive people out,” said Sara Rankin, a law professor at Seattle University, and author of The Wrong Side of History, a study tracing the origins of anti-camping laws.

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Where are homeless residents allowed to go?

In the West, cities like Denver, Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, and San Diego, are able to offer homeless people spots in new hotel programs and sanctioned campsites to clear away encampments.

But unlike those big cities, Grants Pass doesn’t have the same forms of assistance to offer unhoused residents, Evangelis said.

There is no city-run shelter, only a church-run program for homeless people that includes a shelter that requires residents to work. Transitional housing, in the form of a tiny home village, opened in 2021, but there are only 17 slots. Due to a severe lack of affordable housing in Grants Pass, turnover at the facility is low, service providers said.

“The city has no way to limit encampments, and it has no way to encourage people to accept services and to find a place indoors,” Evangelis said.

“Make them cook. Make them do laundry. They don’t know what it feels like,” said Kimberly Morris who puts away her dishes in her tent in Tussing Park on April 10, 2024 in Grants Pass, Ore.

Why does Grants Pass want to ban blankets, pillows, cardboard?

A 24-hour ban would give the city authority to clean up all encampments, said Judge Glock, director of research at the Manhattan Institute, a think tank supporting individual freedom and the rule of law.

“The main reason they should clear these encampments, even in the nighttime hours, is that these spaces aren’t fit for human habitation,” said Glock, who along with other researchers filed an amicus brief in support of Grants Pass. “A lot of these encampments are an incredible danger to the homeless themselves.”

If the city wins the Supreme Court case, Glock said, it should build more homeless shelters so that its unhoused residents have somewhere to go.

But in her first year in office, Bristol and city council members tried to launch a sanctioned campsite so that unhoused people could put their tents somewhere that wasn’t a park. But the plan went sideways and transformed into an effort to purchase a building for an indoor shelter, she said.

That idea fell apart, Bristol said, when in late 2022 Grants Pass residents pushed back, saying the site was too centrally located. It also would have been right across from a children’s dance studio, said Ruth Sears, the studio building owner.

“For the most part, we were compassionate and recognized something needed to be done to help people in need, but that was a terrible location and would have impacted so many,” Sears, 72, told USA TODAY.

As of this year, there is no shelter where someone living outdoors can go at night, and no money left for the city to fund any more plans, Bristol said.

Jackson Sutton is placed under arrest for failing to appear in court in Tussing Park on April 10, 2024 in Grants Pass, Ore. Others in the encampment say this happens frequently as tickets are given out daily and appearing in court frequently is inaccessible for many.

The lack of shelter means that if the Supreme Court sides with Grants Pass, there wouldn’t be any places in town − indoors or outdoors − where an unhoused person could legally sleep, said Gutowski.

“Where are all these people going to go? There are no other shelters,” Gutowski said. “I’m worried about them leaving the city and going up into the mountains.”

Homeless advocates warn against criminalization

National homeless rights advocates have decried the sweeping camping ban Grants Pass wants to enforce, arguing punitive measures work against efforts to end homelessness. More affordable housing and assistance with health care will help homeless people, not laws banning sleeping outside, said Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

“As communities address the homelessness crisis, they must follow the evidence of what works best − providing immediate help by connecting people to low-barrier shelter and services, while the long-term affordable housing and services are put in place,” she said.

An arrest record stemming from a camping ban would make it harder for someone to secure a job or housing, making it more likely they’d end up in jail repeatedly, said Samantha Batko, a researcher at the Urban Institute who studies city budgets.

“Criminalization doesn’t solve homelessness,” she said. “What happens is, this cycle of arrests and citations get people caught in a homelessness-jail cycle.”

Evangelis said the 24-hour camping ban has come as a last resort.

“This is just the bread and butter of running a city,” she said, adding that concerns from advocates about increased criminalization of unhoused people are “unfounded.”

“They want to be just like cities outside of the Ninth Circuit who have all of the tools available,” she said of Grants Pass.

Denver park ranger Caronia DiStefano and Kayla Bauer, mental health clinician with WellPower, check on an unhoused person sleeping in a tent along a city of Denver trail. Sleeping overnight in the parks is illegal, but rangers don’t enforce the law when it’s cold out, and instead focus on offering assistance or a ride to a shelter.

Ed Johnson, a public defender in Grants Pass, first took on the case after learning unhoused people were receiving camping fines they couldn’t pay. Fines are also a huge burden to homeless people, said Johnson, who is not related to the named plaintiff in the case, Gloria Johnson.

City advocates, however, say they’re necessary.

“Whatever the dangers of a fine − those can be a danger for some people out there − they pale in comparison to the danger they are facing in the encampments,” Glock said.

Across the country, statistics also show people of color are more likely to become homeless than their white counterparts, due to systemic racial and housing discrimination, Johnson said.

Last year, Black people made up 13% of the U.S. population, but accounted for 37% of all homeless people, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In 2023 there was also a 40% and 28% increase in the number of Asians and Latinos, respectively, experiencing homelessness.

Peery, who is Black, briefly ended up behind bars after a Miami landlord evicted him when he got laid off during the Great Recession in 2008. He was homeless for the next 10 years.

“Aside from the fact that it takes you away from where you’re at and scatters you, the hit to your psyche just sends you into a fog,” Peery said, adding, “there’s a huge racial equity component to this.”

For Rankin, anti-camping laws that prohibit tents and bedding are the latest version of vagrancy laws.

“That instinct that lives on is about punishing unemployment,” she said, describing how going back centuries, elected leaders and other officials have used criminalization to rid cities of homeless people perceived to be “economic threats.”

When was the last time SCOTUS heard a homeless case?

It has been decades since the Supreme Court heard a case that could criminalize those experiencing homelessness.

In 1972, the Supreme Court overturned a Jacksonville, Florida, law prohibiting vagrancy. The law banned begging and applied to people who slept during the day and wandered at night, the Florida Times-Union, part of the USA TODAY Network, reported.

The ruling in Papachristou v. Jacksonville said the city’s anti-vagrancy ordinance, which led to hundreds of arrests, made it too easy for authorities to criminalize activities that are “normally innocent.”

Across the country, states and cities outside the Ninth Circuit have in recent years passed more camping bans, to respond to growing unsheltered populations and encampments that block sidewalks and other public spaces.

In Supreme Court documents, lawyers representing homeless residents said most cities with anti-camping ordinances don’t go as far as the ordinance in Grants Pass.

Out of 200 cities with populations similar to that of Grants Pass, more than 80% do not ban sleeping on all public property, at all times, according to amicus briefs. In most other cities, bans are in place with exceptions, like allowing camping when there are no shelter beds available.

“Whatever their merits as a matter of public policy, such laws do not punish the status of homelessness in the way that the” Grants Pass ordinance does, lawyers wrote.

No matter what happens in late June, there will still be hundreds of homeless people living outdoors in Grants Pass, Gutowski said.

At that point, care teams will still be helping, reminding the people in tents that they matter, she said.

“They’re our angels. They truly are,” Gutowski said. “Not everybody realizes that, but the ones that help, we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for them.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Supreme Court to hear biggest homeless rights case in decades. What both sides say.