Officials across nine Western states are powerless to address growing concerns regarding homeless encampments on city sidewalks after the Supreme Court decided not to hear a challenge on the practice.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against an outdoor sleeping ban proposed, in part, by the city of Boise, Idaho, last year. On Monday, the justices on the Supreme Court turned down hearing a challenge to the ruling without comment.
Lawyers representing the city argued the “creation of a de facto constitutional right to live on sidewalks and in parks will cripple the ability of more than 1,600 municipalities in the 9th Circuit to maintain the health and safety of their communities.”
The case revolves around how to process homeless people when shelters are available but individuals refuse to utilize them, preferring to sleep in public. The ruling found that a city ordinance “violates the 8th Amendment insofar as it imposes criminal sanctions against homeless individuals for sleeping outdoors on public property, when no alternative shelter is available to them.”
In Los Angeles alone, an estimated 8,000 to 11,000 homeless people live in a 50-block radius referred to as Skid Row, and the city has seen a 12% increase in its homeless population this year. In 2006, the Supreme Court ruled the California city could not enforce laws against sleeping in public places.
“Just as the state may not criminalize the state of being homeless in public places,” wrote 9th Circuit Court Judge Marsha Berzon, “the state may not criminalize conduct that is an unavoidable consequence of being homeless — namely sitting, lying or sleeping on the streets.”
