Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
So income from your three jobs won’t cover your rent increase. There are no beds at the shelter and public housing has a waiting list decades long. You buy a tent and sleeping bag and move into a town park. This would have worked until June 28, when the Supreme Court essentially ruled that municipalities can kick out homeless encampments even without available shelter space. You ask the cop rousting and ticketing you where you’re supposed to go? He says outside city limits. You ask how you’re supposed to get to your three jobs? Not his problem. How are you supposed to eat without those jobs? He arrests you. You can’t make bail so you lose your employment. Welcome to destitute America, a bleak, fatal landscape peopled by between 3 and 4 million suffering souls.
Whence that number, when the official statistic is 653,000 homeless? Well, there’s another stat: 2.5 million homeless children. They are not all orphans. So let’s say every group of three kids is accompanied by one vagrant adult. That brings the number of poor folk sleeping under the stars to between 3 and 4 million – at a minimum. But of course, they’re not all dozing on the sidewalk. Many double up on couches of friends or relatives, while the shelters are packed. Thus at least one percent of the U.S. population lacks a place called home. Increasingly these are not mere vagabonds, but the working poor, with the lucky ones owning a car that serves as a domicile. Some cities, like Los Angeles, have enlightened policies regarding vehicle dwellers and designate special lots where they can park – and sleep – without fear of arrest. But not all localities are so understanding. In many, sleeping in your car will land you smack into trouble with the police.
The Supreme Court decision makes a bad situation worse. Previously, if local shelters had no beds, that was treated – by some – as a mitigating circumstance, and so encampments were allowed to stay. But this hard-hearted ruling rubs salt in the wound: those without a roof are deemed too unsightly to remain anywhere in view. So of course, ambitious politicians, like California Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, who know very well how devastating videos of Los Angeles and San Francisco tent cities are to his electoral prospects, when in the hands of GOP opponents, have stepped right up and announced these offensively indigent people will be moved. The Supreme Court decision is hailed as a breakthrough, a piece of common sense that will permit cities to sweep the impoverished out of sight, a bit of progress – instead of the invitation to ethnic cleansing of the poor that it is.
The high court ruled that people sleeping outside can be ticketed and that anti-camping laws are not cruel and unusual punishment. “The Constitution’s Eighth Amendment,” wrote “Justice” Neil Gorsuch, “does not authorize federal judges to…dictate this Nation’s homelessness policy.” So instead, Gorsuch dictates it. And cruel and unusual it is. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented: “Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime. For some people, sleeping outside is their only option.” The town of Grants Pass, Oregon of the eponymous case, she wrote, “punishes them for being homeless. That is unconscionable and unconstitutional.” It’s also the definition of cruelty. But then, no one ever accused the conservative majority on the Supreme Court of too much kindness.
Justice Elena Kagan made a telling comparison: Sleeping is “like breathing. You can say breathing is conduct, too, but presumably you would not think that it’s OK to criminalize breathing in public. And for a homeless person who has no place to go, sleeping in public is kind of like breathing in public.” Don’t worry, Kagan – if your conservative colleagues could criminalize indigent people breathing in public, they would. Just imagine if air were a commodity and some couldn’t pay. What do you think would happen to them if the local gendarme caught them breathing it for free in a park? The case would hurry to the Supreme Court, where Gorsuch and his reactionary brethren would likely condemn those who breathe publicly, or shoplifting air, to suffocation.
Homelessness has increased 12 percent since 2022. Why? Because rents have soared and so has inflation, as corporations gouge consumers for everything from potatoes, to Advil, to car insurance. According to CNN June 28, California hosts 180,000 homeless people, more than any other state, doubtless due to sky-high prices there for everything, but especially housing, as the state caters to wealthy tech bros and other such aristocrats. Another lure of California for your average vagabond is the weather. Until climate catastrophe-induced heat began walloping the West Coast, the temperatures there were not life-threatening – particularly in winter. Now, however, with homeless people dying of burns from 146-degree summer sidewalks in places like Phoenix, Arizona, California summers and fires are another, very dangerous matter. Anyway, because so many vagrants flock to it, California is closely watched by other states for how it treats these people. And the news ain’t good. Newsom basically said, “boot these destitute campers out.”
The National Alliance to End Homelessness, CNN reports, thinks this ruling “may shift the burden of the homelessness crisis to law enforcement.” This tactic, they charge, “has consistently failed to reduce homelessness.” But ah, the only means to reduce homelessness, as everyone, including the high court, well knows, is affordable housing, and the court dictated nothing in that regard, so yes, clearly its legal opinion’s thrust is to toss people who can’t pay rent into the tender arms, and guns, of the police. The Supreme Court’s ruling will fill the jails and morgues and leave the cause of these innocent peoples’ misery untouched. You could even say that the true criminals here are those who profit from a systemic scam in which 15.1 million homes sat empty as of 2022 and in which a human right – housing – morphed into an asset for predatory investors, so that for every person sleeping rough there are multiple, spanking clean new abodes with no one living in them.
Some argue that poor people have plenty of rights – the right to sleep under overpasses in winter, the right to skip meals, the right to forego chemo for cancer. The people who make such arguments are not worth the time of day, but unfortunately, they form the conservative majority on the highest U.S. court. Now they say the destitute don’t even have the right to sleep under bridges, because they don’t have the right to sleep at all. With the morality of Ebenezer Scrooge before meeting Jacob Marley’s ghost, these jurists cannot be convinced that human beings have economic rights – the right to food, shelter, medicine and education – or indeed biological rights. They regard that as commie nonsense rather than basic human decency, and so they issue wicked opinions. In Racine’s immortal words, echoing Psalms, “I have seen the wicked rise upon the earth.” Good in the world is weak and often self-effacing, minding its own business, and frequently sleeps under an overpass. When it makes it up high, onto the Supreme Court – it is speedily overruled.
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