Cities Rush to Criminalize Homelessness After Supreme Court Ruling

Over the last 32 years, June Hart has made La Crosse her home. She was just 13 when she moved to the small city of about 52,000 in southwest Wisconsin. In the time since, she’s given birth to three children there. She’s gotten engaged there. She’s lost a child to cancer there.

La Crosse has “become the city I run to, not from,” Hart told The Appeal.

But on Aug. 8, the La Crosse city council voted to enact a camping ban on all city-owned property, including the nearby marshland where Hart currently resides. After being homeless for five years, she and the roughly 300 others who are living without shelter in La Crosse are on the verge of being forced out.

“We’re just trying to survive,” Hart said. “The city chases us out of everywhere that we go… They just want to get rid of us.”

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court released its decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, which the National Alliance to End Homelessness described as “the most important case regarding homelessness in the past 40 years.” Voting on ideological lines, the court gave local governments the authority to make it a crime to live outside, even involuntarily, when no shelter space is available. In doing so, the court reversed a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision, which held that such laws violated the Eighth Amendment, constituting “cruel and unusual punishment” against homeless people.

In Grants Pass, Oregon, legislators had specifically banned camping, which law enforcement took to include everything from living in a tent to sleeping on the ground with a blanket or pillow.

With its ruling, the Supreme Court gave Grants Pass—and jurisdictions across the U.S.—the green light to crack down.

In the two months since Grants Pass, at least 23 municipalities, including La Crosse, have passed or proposed new camping bans that levy the possibility of fines, tickets, or jail time against their homeless residents, according to The Appeal’s review of local news coverage. This count does not include cities or jurisdictions in California, where the ruling has emboldened Gov. Gavin Newsom to launch an aggressive statewide sweep on unhoused residents as new bans emerge across the state. In addition, a handful of city and state measures that had faced legal challenges before the Grants Pass ruling have now gone into effect or may soon.

For people like Hart, this means there are fewer and fewer places on the map where it is legal for her to exist.

“Trying to make people who are homeless go away by making your city a terrible place to live doesn’t work very well,” said Steve Berg, Chief Policy Officer at the National Alliance to End Homelessness, in an interview with The Appeal. “People who think otherwise will find out that they’re wrong.”

After Grants Pass, the Flood Gates Open

Grants Pass came amidst the backdrop of a rapidly compounding homelessness crisis. In 2023, over 650,000 people in the U.S. were homeless on any given night, the highest total since the Department of Housing and Urban Development began tracking in 2007. This represented a 12 percent increase from 2022 and included 23,000 more people experiencing unsheltered homelessness like Hart than the year before. Research has shown that homelessness rises 9 percent for every $100 increase in median rent. Nationally, the median rent is about 25 percent higher than in 2020.

As these trends contribute to a growing exodus from large coastal cities, small, non-coastal cities and towns are increasingly bearing the brunt of the crisis. Many of these jurisdictions have relatively small budgets and have not had significant issues with homelessness until recent years. Over the last decade in La Crosse, the unhoused population grew from a few dozen to the roughly 300 people they see today, according to advocates. Berg says these factors are key to understanding why places like La Crosse have been some of the first to push new anti-homelessness laws in the wake of Grants Pass. 

“If you’re a local official, and the market has historically taken care of your housing needs, you haven’t had to do a lot of work to get more housing in your community,” Berg said. “But they’re now being called on to do a bunch of work on [homelessness] that I think concerns them. They don’t know how to do it, or they’re afraid they’ll announce they’re going to solve the housing problem and then fail.”

With little federal funding or political will to tackle the larger structural problems driving homelessness, many officials have turned instead to criminalization to make the problem—or rather, the people—simply go away. But, as more than 1,000 organizations led by the National Homeless Law Center argued across more than 40 amicus briefs filed in Grants Pass, this approach is both costly and counterproductive, especially compared to investments in permanent supportive housing. Research has shown that despite its hefty price tag, ramping up enforcement does nothing to help people find stable housing—and often only complicates the process.

Since Grants Pass, jurisdictions with anti-homeless aspirations are forging ahead anyway.

Manchester, New Hampshire, was the first. Just two business days after the Supreme Court ruling, officials in New Hampshire’s largest city passed a new camping ban that levies fines of up to $250 for sleeping on city property. 

“With the recent opinion issued by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson case, I am pleased the [city council] voted… to ban camping and otherwise make our streets safe, clean, and passable,” Manchester Mayor Jason Ruais said in a press release on July 3. 

Within 24 hours, a video posted on X showed city crews beginning to clear a local encampment. Jennifer Chisholm, executive director of the New Hampshire Coalition to End Homelessness, has already seen the impact. She said she knows a resident who had already been ticketed twice by mid-July, saddling her with $500 in debt, on top of trying to find a job and a home. 

“I was surprised that the change did happen so quickly,” Chisholm said. “There’s just no place else for people to go, and we don’t want to make things worse for them.”

Now, the floodgates have opened. On top of Manchester and La Crosse, at least 12 other municipalities outside California have already passed new camping bans following Grants Pass:

• In late July, Duluth, Minnesota, passed an amended version of an ordinance that would have made public camping a misdemeanor. The final version imposed a fine rather than criminal charges, though a similar measure recently passed in Brainerd, Minnesota, kept misdemeanor charges in. 
• In Illinois, the Illinois Municipal League has drafted model language for a camping ban ordinance that levies a $75 fine for the first offense, with increased punishment for subsequent violations—including jail time. The cities of Pekin, Morton, O’Fallon, and Rosemont have adopted versions of the ordinance in recent weeks, and more jurisdictions seem poised to follow suit.
• In Bremerton, Washington, which had a version of a camping ban in effect before Grants Pass, officials amended the measure in early August to allow police to enforce it even when no shelter space is available. A similar camping ban passed in July in Lakewood, Washington, threatens unhoused residents with trespassing charges and arrest. 
• In Grants Pass, Oregon, the city council recently adopted its long-stalled camping ban, with language establishing four zones where homeless residents can safely sleep.
• Other bans have been passed in Española, New Mexico, where an emergency ordinance in August makes sleeping on public property a petty misdemeanor and “repeat offenses” can lead to arrest; Elkhart, Indiana, which allows officials to remove any “camping equipment” from public places with just 48 hours notice; and Cheyenne, Wyoming, which ruled that residents of the city’s largest encampment can no longer stay there overnight.

At least nine other cities are considering camping bans that appear on their way to passage. Ordinances in Des Moines, Iowa; Miami, Florida; Bristol, Virginia; Morgantown, West Virginia; and Fargo, North Dakota, have already passed through at least one vote, though additional action is required to enact them. In the four remaining cities—Cranston, Rhode Island; Peoria, Illinois; Roseburg, Oregon; and Atlantic City, New Jersey—officials will vote on proposed bans in the near future.

In addition, many other jurisdictions—including Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, Bozeman, Montana, and Baxter, Minnesota—have begun formally exploring the possibility of making camping a criminal offense.

These cities are becoming the vanguard of a post-Grants Pass landscape, where local governments increasingly treat their homeless residents as criminal nuisances rather than neighbors who need help.

“We’ve got to stop treating people like criminals,” Berg said. “The people who are homeless, they could be looking for a job, they could be looking for a landlord to rent to them, but instead they’re moving their tents around every day. It’s just not a very smart way to go about solving the problem.”

The new wave of anti-homeless measures follows a large number of cities that already had bans in effect prior to the court’s ruling. Many of those laws were facing challenges before Grants Pass, and advocates now have a much tougher path ahead. In Honolulu, Hawaii, less than two weeks after the Supreme Court ruling, the state’s ACLU dropped its lawsuit challenging an anti-homelessness ordinance on the grounds that it constituted cruel and unusual punishment. Similar lawsuits against measures in Phoenix, Arizona, and Boulder, Colorado, now also seem likely to fail. 

With its Grants Pass decision, the Supreme Court has also bulldozed a path for several Republican-led states to enact previously passed statewide anti-homelessness laws, now with less vulnerability to legal challenges of their own. Kentucky’s statewide camping ban went into effect on July 15, while Florida and Oklahoma have bans set to go into effect later this year. 

More bans are all but guaranteed to come.

La Crosse Turns on Their Neighbors

For Hart, La Crosse’s new camping ban does little to solve the obvious problem she sees in her city.

“There is no affordable housing in La Crosse,” she said. 

Hart has been on the streets for five years, almost all of which she’s spent on the waitlist for a popular federal housing voucher that would cover a substantial portion of a monthly rent payment. She currently lives in a tent off the side of a bike trail, on top of a patch of marshland created by the nearby La Crosse River. Roughly three dozen people live in Hart’s encampment, she says. When it rains, the river is known to engulf the march, and the community’s belongings get washed away. It’s far from an ideal location, but the city’s largest encampment sits in a park adjacent to a wastewater treatment plant that makes the whole place smell of sulfur. 

“They need to meet us where we are with a housing-first initiative,” Hart said, referencing an approach that provides permanent housing to unsheltered residents, typically without prerequisites around programming or sobriety.

About a month ago, Hart’s voucher finally arrived. But none of the landlords in the area will accept it, she says. With cheap apartments in such high demand, there are plenty of students or families with stable jobs to rent to instead. Living in the marsh has meanwhile made it almost impossible to find a job, Hart says. Most applications are online and require a phone number and permanent address to be submitted. She has neither. Plus, she has nowhere to shower. 

So, she’s still camping. But with La Crosse now set to begin enforcing the ban on Aug. 28, according to notices the city recently posted around the marsh, it’s unclear where Hart and the other unhoused people for whom camping was a last resort will turn next.

“We have broken systems,” said Sue Graf, the founder of What I Need Now, a homelessness outreach organization that serves La Crosse and the surrounding area. “[They] just keep pushing this class of people further down… And [the city council] doesn’t want to solve the problem. They just don’t want to see the problem.”

Although most votes in the La Crosse city council are unanimous, the vote on the ban was close, passing 7-5. Mark Neumann, a councilman who voted in favor, told The Appeal that much of the discussion was dominated by people who live near the encampments, some of whom felt “excluded” by the marshland being turned into a “wasteland of hovels” or complained that “the lifestyle [at the encampments] was aggravating.”

La Crosse’s downtown businesses also mounted a vocal push for the ban, Neumann said, with some owners expressing fears that unhoused residents had dissuaded customers from coming to their stores.

Both Neumann and Erin Goggin, another council member who voted for the ban, suggested that some of their housed constituents also wanted them to take a harsher stance toward unhoused people in La Crosse.

“Some people, they have the idea that they want to be completely free of rules, regulation, and responsibility,” Goggin said of the city’s unhoused population. “[Advocates] want to talk about the unsheltered population, but [homelessness] takes a toll on taxpayers and residents in this town as well.”

Neumann likened the ban to “working with a toddler.” The ban was meant to serve as a “timeout,” he said, which would “deprive [unhoused people] of what you want the most, and that is to be able to stay here.”

But Hart doesn’t want to be homeless. She’s tried to follow the rules, yet after waiting five years for a voucher, she’s no closer to finding stable housing. At the same time, the housing market—with routine rent hikes, rampant evictions, and almost nonexistent access to assistance—continues to push more and more people out of their homes. Despite that, Neumann said the council did not discuss these housing factors while debating the camping ban.“For this particular policy, I don’t think that was included,” he said.

Upon hearing this, Graf was incensed.

“Every week, I meet someone who is newly unhoused,” she said. “It’s often at no fault of their own. They didn’t break a rule. They didn’t run a trap house with drug use. Their rent went up, their groceries went up, or they work, but they don’t make enough.”

While some, including Hart, have expressed support for a housing-first approach that would prioritize providing homeless individuals with stable housing, Neumann has shown no sympathy for this argument. In a memo published alongside the new ban titled, “Where Will They Go?”, he categorically rejects the idea that his citizens have a right to housing.

“The question itself implies that our local government has a responsibility to provide some (or in fact any) people with a dwelling place… La Crosse doesn’t make that promise to anyone,” Neumann writes. “The responsibility for finding one’s place to live is upon the shoulders of the individual. … Mature and capable adults need to exercise their freedom to be the masters of solving their own problems.”

Officials like Neumann may oppose spending limited public resources on shelter for the unhoused, but the new criminalization regimes contained in camping bans carry costs of their own. Larger cities spend millions of dollars on encampment sweeps and other measures each year, and the expenses associated with newly passed bans are mounting quickly. In Manchester, Chisholm said city officials had moved $500,000 from the park rangers program budget into the police department to cover new enforcement costs. 

By prioritizing law enforcement efforts to target people like Hart, La Crosse is taking officers away from “real” police work, said Graf. This drain will likely continue after the larger encampments are cleared as the homeless population scatters throughout the city. 

If cities continue to shirk broader questions about housing availability and instead pour money into criminalizing and displacing the unhoused, advocates warn that the inevitable result will be hundreds of thousands of people perpetually battered back and forth between cities that have made it impossible for them to get back on their feet. 

“We’re seeing what people call the whack-a-mole approach,” Chisholm said. “You know, move them along, move them along. But the more we hit the mole, when it comes up, they’ll then just pop up over here. We hit them again, and they just keep scattering.”

Hart isn’t sure where she’ll be scattered to when the city begins enforcing the ban, but the clock is ticking.

“Everybody is stressed out and afraid of losing everything again,” she said. “None of us know what to do.”

When asked if she believed the ban would end up forcing her to leave the city, it became clear it was a thought she couldn’t wrap her mind around—three decades of calling La Crosse home had made the attachment hard to shake.

“My children are here,” she said. “Most of us have ties to this community. Most of us have children, parents, siblings here. We can’t just up and leave.”