Supreme Court to Hear Case Over Homelessness Rules in Oregon

The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to hear a challenge to cities using local ordinances to enforce bans on public camping, a case that could reshape policy on homelessness for years to come.

The case stems from a lawsuit challenging local laws in Oregon that restrict sleeping and camping in public spaces, including sidewalks, streets and city parks. At issue is whether those rules violate constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. A ruling could help determine how states, particularly those in the West, grapple with a rising homelessness crisis.

It adds another high-profile case to a docket that includes abortion, the power of administrative agencies and a challenge to whether former President Donald J. Trump is eligible for Colorado’s Republican primary ballot.

Grants Pass, a city of about 40,000 in southwestern Oregon, asked the Supreme Court to revisit lower-court decisions that it said undercut its ability to address homelessness.

In court filings, lawyers for the plaintiffs detail how in 2013, Grants Pass “began aggressively enforcing a set of ordinances that make it unlawful to sleep anywhere on public property with so much as a blanket to survive cold nights.” They described it as a bid to nudge homeless residents into neighboring areas.

Because there are no homeless shelters in Grants Pass, the lawyers argue, and the few housing programs served only a slice of the city’s homeless population, homeless residents were left with “nowhere to sleep but outside.”

The plaintiffs say that the rules amounted to “punishing the city’s involuntarily homeless residents for their existence.”

A federal trial judge sided with the plaintiffs, blocking the city from enforcing its public camping laws during the day without a 24-hour notice and stopping it from enforcing the rules at night.

A divided panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed that the ordinances violated the Eighth Amendment if the local population of unhoused people was larger than the capacity of homeless shelters.

The dispute brings together an unusual coalition of liberal and conservative leaders. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, along with liberal-leaning cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and Honolulu, have joined conservative Arizona legislators, right-leaning legal organizations and district attorneys offices in asking the court to take up the case.

A lawyer representing Grants Pass, Theane Evangelis, said in a statement Friday that the Ninth Circuit’s decision had only “contributed to the growing problem of encampments in cities across the West.”

“The tragedy is that these decisions are actually harming the very people they purport to protect,” Ms. Evangelis said.

The plaintiffs sharply disagree with that assessment.

Ed Johnson, litigation director at the Oregon Law Center and lead counsel for the respondents, said in a statement that the case was “not about a city’s ability to regulate or prohibit encampments.”

“Nevertheless,” Mr. Johnson added, “some politicians and others are cynically and falsely blaming the judiciary for the homelessness crisis to distract the public and deflect blame for years of failed policies.”

In pressing the court to take the case, Mr. Newsom described the challenges he had witnessed in trying to address homelessness, including allocating more than $15 billion toward the issue during his time in office.

The crisis is particularly acute in California, where an estimated 171,000 people are homeless, or nearly one-third of the country’s homeless population. Encampments in parks and other public spaces are common in cities across the state as the number of people without shelter rises. There are now 40,000 more people who are homeless in the state than there were six years ago.

Mr. Newsom said that while local governments try to resolve the dual crises of high housing costs and homelessness, the laws gave them the flexibility to “address immediate threats to health and safety in public places.”

Encampments “foster dangerous and unhealthy conditions for those living in them and for communities around them,” he said, adding that the rules were “a vital tool for helping to move people off the streets, to connect them with resources, and to promote safety, health and usable public spaces.”

Shawn Hubler contributed reporting.