Tag Archives: grants pass

A new strategy to house homeless people

Originally published in Vox on May 29, 2024.
—-

Sometime in the next month, the Supreme Court could grant permission for cities to more easily criminalize people experiencing homelessness. 

Some are eagerly awaiting that permission. In April, Donald Trump released a video declaring that if he were president, he’d ban outdoor camping in most places, erect sanctioned campsites for “treatment,” and send people to jail who refused to go.

Yet even among Americans opposed to a punitive approach, it’s become common to sigh regretfully, lament that affordable housing is in short supply, and point out that unhoused people often turn down shelter — so what can cities really do? If the US Supreme Court rules in favor of the homeless plaintiffs in Grants Pass v. Johnson, local governments might just invest more money into building emergency shelters, so they can prove there were adequate shelter options available before anyone resorted to fines or arrests. 

But emergency shelters don’t end homelessness, they just get people indoors for brief periods. And there are better options available. 

This message is being shouted to anyone who will listen by Mandy Chapman Semple, the architect of Houston’s nationally recognized homelessness strategy, which reduced the city’s homelessness rate by 60 percent between 2012 and 2016.  

Semple was Houston’s first special assistant to the mayor for homeless initiatives, and she’s credited with helping to design the city’s “street-to-home” encampment response, which prioritizes getting people quickly into housing, permanently closing tent encampments, and working closely with landlords so they feel comfortable renting to tenants with more serious problems. 

“I am truly concerned that we are unintentionally giving up on reducing homelessness,” Marc Eichenbaum, the current special assistant to Houston’s mayor for homeless initiatives, told Vox. “Many acknowledge that housing is the long-term solution to homelessness, only to psych themselves out from being able to respond because of a lack of affordable housing. That is when cities chase expensive, short-term options to manage the situation or resort strictly to enforcement.”

Semple has since taken her work beyond Houston, and through her company — Clutch Consulting — she’s working with cities including New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Dallas, and Hartford, Connecticut. She brings an unapologetic approach to her consulting, rejecting both the idea that homeless people belong in jail, or should be allowed to camp wherever they feel most comfortable. She insists there is a better path forward if leaders and service providers approach their work in a new way. 

Her model works like this: Public subsidies can be used to pay rent for people experiencing homelessness, but private donations, which are not subject to the same federal rules and restrictions, can help finance things that make moving unhoused people into apartments more feasible — like apartment hold fees, application fees, security deposits, and furniture. Oh, you have a unit in your building opening up in a few weeks? We’ll pay you an extra $1,000 if you offer it to us, first. Her team spends time scouting and building relationships with landlords, then tries to house everyone living in an encampment at once.

“Every market has movement, even tight markets, even expensive markets,” Semple said. “You can get into that by using flexible private dollars to incentivize landlords. We’re creating a business relationship that provides us an advantage.”

Once people have moved into housing from a tent encampment, Semple ensures that landlords have a team they can call to help with any problems that may arise. The formerly homeless individuals have case managers to help them access social services, and the landlords, too, have their own liaisons they can call. The city permanently closes down the encampment, puts up signs and sometimes fencing, and uses law enforcement to bar anyone else from returning to the area. 

“I think we really hurt ourselves as advocates when we say that at the core homelessness is an affordability problem,” said Semple. “It is, but we do not have to wait for that affordability to be solved to move people into housing.” 

Semple’s “street-to-home” encampment response has helped dispel the idea that everyone sleeping outside just doesn’t want to be inside. Clutch and its clients say that over 90 percent of people offered the option to move into an apartment say yes, even if they’ve repeatedly rejected invitations before to sleep in congregate emergency shelters.

The approach is not without criticism or challenges. Not all homeless providers are inclined to abandon their focus on getting people into shelters, and some social workers say Clutch’s methods have been abrasive and too dismissive of client concerns. 

Some advocates argue that Clutch’s encampment approach has led to more inequitable distribution of resources by focusing help on those living in areas causing leaders the most political headaches, rather than necessarily the most vulnerable in a city. Others worry the solution is not really scalable, especially as rents continue to spike. 

Angela Owczarek, a New Orleans social worker who previously worked at an organization providing street outreach services in encampments being closed by Clutch, said she felt the company used inappropriate tactics to rush people into apartments.

“We cannot participate in things that coerce people; the ends do not justify the means,” Owczarek told Vox. “Not only is that bad ethically, but it also makes it harder to do our job in the future, because then people will be like, ‘Oh yeah, you guys were part of that effort that threw out my tent and told me I had two days to agree to an apartment I didn’t want to live in or who made me feel rushed or not listened to, even if I ended up living somewhere I liked.’ How we treat people matters every moment.” 

Semple acknowledged that some outreach workers “have struggled in some cases with this shift in expectations and it takes time to help them understand why and how they need to adjust their practices.” 

But she rejected the idea that living outside in encampments is acceptable for human beings, even if they may not feel ready to move indoors. 

“Staying on the streets can be their choice, but they will need to move if they choose [that],” she said. “Living in this location under these conditions cannot continue.”

System leaders have shown more enthusiasm than frontline workers for the Clutch approach. Jamie Caves, who is implementing the Clutch strategy in Oklahoma City, said it has been “fantastic” so far, and they’ve housed 126 people since launching in September. 

“It’s new and we’re building the plane while we’re flying it so there’s certainly things we’re learning and streamlining, but it is really, really powerful,” she told Vox. “We’re really beginning to close multiple encampments in a month and really move aggressively toward our goal, which is to house 500 unsheltered people by the end of 2025.”

Sarah Pavone, the director of strategy at Journey Home in Hartford, Connecticut, echoed the excitement. 

“Up to this point we never thought about prioritizing the unsheltered for any specific resources, we never had a different approach to those living outside than those who were in [emergency] shelters even though they have very different needs,” she said. “We also didn’t engage our systems to overcome systemic barriers that delayed people from entering housing quickly.” 

The fine print of Clutch’s model 

As Houston was bringing down homelessness, the number of unhoused people in Dallas was climbing: a 45 percent increase between 2015 and 2021. Armed with tens of millions of dollars from Covid-19 relief funds and new private donations, local government and civic leaders in Dallas decided to team up and try the Clutch model, setting a goal to move 2,700 people into housing by October 2023. 

More than 10,000 people have been rehoused since the effort began in 2021, and Dallas recently reported its lowest total number of people experiencing homelessness in nearly a decade. The latest Point in Time Count — an annual nationwide survey to estimate the number of people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January — showed Dallas with a 19 percent reduction in homelessness overall since 2021 and a 24 percent reduction in unsheltered homelessness. Last year, only 27 percent of communities nationwide reported reductions in homelessness.

“To scale we had to get more and more creative about master leasing,” Semple said. “So we said how do we consider new business relationships that give us access to whole buildings, or a whole bunch of units, or future units at a new property?” 

Despite the rare progress, convincing the public to stay the course and stick with the street-to-housing model isn’t easy. Sarah Kahn, the president and CEO of Housing Forward, which leads the homelessness response in the Dallas region, told Vox there’s been political pressure to divert resources to more short-term solutions like tiny home shelters.

“Honestly the challenge is that it doesn’t matter what the result of the Grants Pass case is, it still [will] not give local governments or communities any tools to resolve these issues,” Kahn said. “There’s clear evidence that you can’t actually enforce your way out of homelessness. Really the only solution is resolving homelessness and we do that by moving people into housing.”

In Oklahoma City, leaders currently implementing the Clutch model are focused on how it could save them money in the long run. Armed with a $12.5 million investment to reduce unsheltered homelessness by 75 percent in two years (with at least $5 million coming from private donations) the city says it’ll be spending about $24,000 per person to house 500 people. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, a chronically homeless person costs taxpayers $35,578 per year. 

“You can still do a traditional pathway and go to a shelter, but now we have new pathways for those unsheltered homeless, where we build rapport, get them document-ready, and it’s very streamlined and aggressive to get those things done in four to five weeks so we can move them directly into housing,” said Caves. “I think it’s a positive solution that makes economic sense and is also the dignified answer to those who are experiencing homelessness.” 

Clutch Consulting won’t work with communities that aren’t sufficiently bought into its theory of change. Last year leaders in St. Louis hired Semple to conduct a needs assessment to gauge a potential partnership and ultimately she concluded it would not be a good fit. 

St. Louis, which has cold winters and hot summers, has long been focused on emergency shelters as a harm-reduction approach, and Semple determined the city’s service providers were too invested in increasing the number of emergency shelter beds in the city.

Samantha Stangl, the executive director of House Everyone STL, has been trying to push back on her community’s reliance on congregate shelters. “What if the real problem were not an inadequate supply of shelters but rather a bottleneck of demand caused by a lack of exits from shelters?” she asked in a January op-ed. 

In an interview with Vox, Stangl went further. “What a lot of communities that have found success have done is come to the realization that shelter should actually be the absolute last resort because it is kind of a crisis environment,” she said. “I’m not interested in the status quo in St. Louis. We need more rapid rehousing and more permanent supportive housing to do things like that.” 

Owczarek, the social worker from New Orleans, says more skepticism should be brought to bear when interpreting Clutch’s reported results on offering housing to everyone in encampments. 

“The idea that everyone is offered housing needs an asterisk after ‘everyone,’” Owczarek said, noting that anyone who arrives at a camp after the city establishes its list of residents to house is not given the same housing opportunities. (Semple told me their approach is to house everyone eventually but designed in a way to discourage people from moving to encampments to get housing faster. “These are high-risk encampments deemed public health hazards,” she said. “We don’t want to encourage folks to come live at this site to get housed.”)

Owczarek also pointed out that “offering” someone housing does not mean there was always housing available for everyone by the time an encampment actually closed. Some residents had nowhere to go even after their encampment cleared. Semple said in those situations individuals are offered emergency shelter or in some cases motels.

Criminalization will make this housing work harder

Though Semple helps cities work with landlords to assuage their concerns, there are limits to how many people are willing to rent units to those with criminal records. Given that 1 in 3 US adults has a criminal record, this creates a significant barrier to the street-to-housing encampment response model.

Arresting, fining, and ticketing unhoused people — which local governments will be more easily able to do if Grants Pass is overturned — makes it harder for those people, who already struggle to afford shelter, to obtain permanent housing. 

Owing fines can exacerbate an unhoused person’s already poor financial situation and prolong their homelessness. One study of people experiencing homelessness in Seattle found those with outstanding legal debt spent roughly two more years without stable housing than those without such debt.

“Every time we’re pushing someone needlessly through the criminal justice system it affects their ability to get housed because every landlord is running a criminal background check,” said Semple. “These nuisance charges create the perception that they’re a criminal and not a good tenant and it’s just a tremendous waste of law enforcement capacity too.”

Cities are asking the Supreme Court for more power to clear homeless encampments

Originally published at Vox on October 10, 2023.
—-

In 2018, a federal court issued a consequential decision about homelessness in America: People without housing can’t be punished for sleeping or camping outside on public property if there are no adequate shelter alternatives available.

The Ninth Circuit’s decision, Martin v. Boise, said that punishing homeless people with no other place to go would violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Ever since, cities and states have struggled to comply with it, crafting convoluted policies like a new camping ban in Portland, Oregon that prohibits homeless camping during the hours of 8 am to 8 pm.

As municipal backlash to Martin grew, so has the nation’s homelessness crisis, especially in the nine Western states under the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction, where some 42 percent of the country’s homeless population now lives.

The Supreme Court declined to hear Martin in 2019. But they now could reconsider the decision. A petition was filed in late August concerning a similar case in Grants Pass, Oregon, a city of 38,000 people. In 2022, the Ninth Circuit decided it would be unconstitutional for Grants Pass to fine homeless people sleeping on public property if there was nowhere else for them to go. The city is challenging that decision.

The Supreme Court hasn’t indicated whether it will hear this significant case, a step it will likely take at the end of this year or early next. Supporters of the Martin decision say there’s no reason the high court should take up the request, as there’s no clear disagreement among circuit courts to resolve. In the half-decade since Martin came down, there have been dozens of cases affirming it, including in the Fourth Circuit in Virginia, and federal lower courts in Ohio, Missouri, Florida, Texas, New York, and Hawaii.

But a bipartisan coalition of cities and states is pressuring the Supreme Court to intervene. In the last month, dozens of local governments have filed briefs pleading with the court to reconsider Martin, including liberal cities like Los Angeles, Honolulu, and Seattle.

Some in the court system have also signaled they’d like to see the case overruled. This summer, when the full Ninth Circuit declined to review the Grants Pass v. Johnson decision issued by a three-judge panel in 2022, 16 judges dissented, arguing both cases were incorrectly decided. “Martin handcuffed local jurisdictions as they tried to respond to the homelessness crisis; Grants Pass now places them in a straitjacket,” one dissent read. A state judge in Arizona also recently urged the Supreme Court to take up the matter, arguing Martin and Grants Pass both “tie the hands of cities that seek in good faith to address the growing homeless encampment epidemic.”

California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom also filed a brief in August urging the Supreme Court to reconsider the cases. While Newsom insisted he is not objecting to the “narrow” Martin decision that people experiencing homelessness should not be criminalized for sleeping outside when they have nowhere else to go, the governor argued cities need more clarity on implementation, and that lower courts have interpreted Martin too broadly.

Despite Newsom saying that he’s not seeking to overturn Martin wholesale, homeless advocates say this is naive at best, since that’s what the lawyers representing Grant Pass are asking to do.

“Newsom and the other briefs that aren’t asking for a full overturn of Martin — just clarity around some of these restrictions — are fooling themselves, perhaps willfully so, and are being willfully ignorant of the consequences of their involvement,” Eric Tars, the legal director for the National Homelessness Law Center, told Vox. “The petitioners in this case are asking for a full overturn, that’s the question they have presented to the Court and that’s what they’ll be arguing for.”

Theane Evangelis, a Gibson Dunn attorney and lead counsel for the city of Grants Pass, told Vox they do believe Martin and Grants Pass are “legally wrong” and “are hopeful the Supreme Court will grant review and undo these harmful decisions.”

The Grants Pass v. Johnson case is about whether it violates the Eighth Amendment to fine or arrest unhoused people

Five years ago, about six weeks after the Martin decision was decided, three homeless individuals filed a federal class-action lawsuit against Grants Pass, Oregon, arguing that the city’s laws and customs — like its anti-camping ordinance — punished them for their status of being involuntarily homeless.

The lead plaintiff was Debra Blake, who had been experiencing homelessness for about a decade and was continually racking up hundreds of dollars in fines and fees for sleeping outside and allegedly trespassing. By 2020, Blake owed over $5,000 in penalties for living outside. In their lawsuit, attorneys representing the plaintiffs noted the dearth of affordable housing and homeless shelters in the city, and blasted Grants Pass’s arguments that unhoused people could simply leave and go elsewhere. Blake died a year later at 62, and so the case was renamed for another homeless plaintiff, Gloria Johnson.

In 2022, a three-judge panel from the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of the homeless plaintiffs.

Opponents of the decision argued Grants Pass marked a radical expansion of Martin, since the Oregon city had issued civil penalties to unhoused people, not criminal ones. Some also alleged that Grants Pass created even further confusion for local governments, since the Ninth Circuit held that a Christian homeless shelter that had strict rules like mandatory church attendance could not be counted as available shelter in Grants Pass due to potential violations of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Many cities have only religious shelters or rely heavily on them.

Supporters of the Grants Pass ruling say it neither expanded Martin nor created confusion. “I see it as a clarification of Martin,” said Tars, of the National Homelessness Law Center, saying that Grants Pass clarifies “that you have to look at the collective impact of all these different ordinances — including anti-sleeping bans or rules barring being in parks after dark — that can make it illegal to exist basically anywhere in public even if they have no other place to do so.”

Ed Johnson, the director of litigation at the Oregon Law Center and the lead attorney representing the homeless plaintiffs in Grant Pass, told Vox that the decision is being greatly mischaracterized by opponents. “The opinion is exceedingly narrow and puts no limits whatsoever on a city’s ability to prevent permanent or even established encampments,” he said.

So is it a violation of the Eighth Amendment to issue tickets and fines against people experiencing homelessness?

Lawyers representing Grant Pass say no, emphasizing that enforcing local regulations should not be considered cruel and unusual punishments.

“I think the entire idea that it could constitute cruel and unusual punishment to arrest someone for sleeping on the street is incorrect,” added Timothy Sandefur, the vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute, a conservative legal advocacy group that filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to take the case. Sandefur told Vox that “it’s true” that arresting someone for a status like being homeless is wrong, but he argued it would be at most a violation of due process, not of the Eighth Amendment.

Homeless advocates in support of Martin and Grants Pass say ticketing, fining, and arresting unhoused people if they have nowhere else to go is indeed a violation of the Eighth Amendment. In a brief filed to the Ninth Circuit in support of the unhoused plaintiffs, lawyers with the Fines and Fees Justice Center argued that civil penalties frequently trap unhoused people in cycles of poverty and homelessness, ensnaring them in debt that prevents them from securing housing at all.

And given the insufficient number of shelter beds, the practical outcome of rules barring rest under a blanket on any publicly owned property or rest in a car overnight in a public park parking lot “effectively function[s] as a city-wide prohibition of homelessness” that “punish[es] their very existence.”

Overturning Martin and Grants Pass could have implications for forced treatment

As public frustration with tent encampments has grown, a movement urging a “get tough” approach has emerged, arguing that the costs of allowing tent cities to proliferate are too steep and that waiting for cities to build enough new housing before acting is unacceptable. Some argue that public officials have grown complacent with the homelessness crisis, and rely on Martin as an excuse to maintain the status quo.

In efforts to both crack down on encampments but comply with the Ninth Circuit decisions, some cities and states have pushed more punitive legislation, like bills to make camping a felony, or criminalize sleeping outdoors on public property except within designated areas. The question of whether these laws are constitutional under Martin remains an open question. Leaders recognize they probably can’t ban camping everywhere given the court rulings, but they’ve been looking to see if they can ban it in most places instead. If Martin was overturned by the Supreme Court, however, officials would likely feel much more empowered to resume city-wide anti-camping bans and prosecute those who violate them.

Tars, of the National Homelessness Law Center, said the major difference between now and five years ago is the emergence of a “concrete, well-funded movement” to criminalize homelessness, rather than a patchwork of local regulations decided by individual cities and towns. “Today there are groups actively working together, producing media, going on Fox News, to proactively push criminalization,” he told Vox. “That didn’t exist prior to Martin v. Boise.”

In a Supreme Court brief filed by the California State Sheriffs’ Association and the California Police Chiefs Association, the groups wrote “they, by no means, argue for the criminalization of the homeless” and are committed to “improving the outcomes” for unhoused people. Still, they said the “disastrous” decisions “impermissibly intrude” on their policing duties, and make it “all but impossible” to curb dangers associated with encampments.

If Martin and Grants Pass are overturned, it will not only have implications for clearing tents, but likely also for sending homeless people to substance use or psychiatric treatment programs.

In several of the briefs submitted by local governments, cities reported examples of homeless people “refusing help,” and as Vox has previously reported, the question of what to do with those who turn down offers of shelter has gotten entangled with broader, ongoing debates about involuntary treatment. As pressure to clear encampments mounts, many homeless advocates fear that new laws mandating treatment will be indiscriminately applied to those sleeping outside, and even more so if Martin and Grants Pass no longer provide a check on local governments’ behavior.

Some of the briefs filed to the Supreme Court in support of reconsidering Martin have already raised this issue. “Allowing people to live on the streets or in tents in a park is not a compassionate response to the problem,” wrote Sandefur in the Goldwater Institute’s amicus filing. “A compassionate response would consist of providing people with the care they need — including taking them into custody against their will if they are incapable of managing themselves.”

Asked about the connection between encampments and involuntary care, Sandefur told Vox these cases show that cities “are going to have to find a better solution than what they’ve been doing, which is largely ignoring the problem and hoping it goes away.”