December 27, 2023

The big bet on “tiny homes” to fix homelessness

Originally published at Vox on November 29, 2023.
—

Before she moved into the first shelter village of “tiny houses” in San Francisco, Sharon Sandelin — a 66-year-old who goes by “Mama T” — had been sleeping on the streets.

Now she lives in a 64-square-foot unit with heat, electricity, a twin bed, desk, and chair. There is a combination lock on the outside. The gated community where some 70 other people now live is clean and cheerful-looking, painted teal and sea-foam green. Residents are connected with supportive services like health care and served three meals daily.

Sandelin detests traditional homeless shelters, and appreciates the privacy of her locked room on Gough Street, knowing she can rest undisturbed. But she still considers herself homeless. Though she likes her tiny cabin more than she liked being unsheltered, residents must use porta-potties, they are not allowed to have outside visitors, they can’t shower after 2 pm, and they can’t cook anything that requires more than a microwave or toaster.

“I want to eat my own cooking,” she told me. “My daughter can’t visit me, and there shouldn’t be no set time for a person to take a shower.”

Sandelin has a place to sleep in large part because of Elizabeth Funk, who spent three decades working at investment firms and tech giants like Yahoo and Microsoft, while serving on boards of various homeless nonprofits. Since 2020, Funk, now the CEO of Dignity Moves, which fundraised and developed the San Francisco village, has brought her experience and Rolodex to bear on a singular goal: to, as Silicon Valley puts it, disrupt the problem of homelessness in America.

Since 2016, unsheltered homelessness — meaning those sleeping somewhere not designed for human residence, like a car, a park, or a train station — has been going up. Particularly on the West Coast where housing costs are often prohibitive, local governments have struggled to curb sprawling and politically unpopular tent encampments, and many unhoused people prefer sleeping outside to crowded shelters with bunk beds. The challenge has been exacerbated by Martin v. Boise, a 2018 court ruling that said people can’t be punished for sleeping outside on public property if there are no adequate alternatives available.

To Funk and other tiny house proponents, villages like the one where Sandelin now lives offer creative solutions to all these issues. The small, relocatable cabins provide leaders new ways to bypass restrictive zoning rules, by leveraging emergency building codes and “borrowing” rather than purchasing land. They also offer, at least for some, a more dignified shelter option, providing an affordable answer to the difficult reality that many people prefer to sleep outside rather than endure the rules and conditions of typical shelters.

Advocates of “tiny homes” as a solution to the homeless crisis say the units should be understood as a key tool to preventing chronic homelessness amid a brutal housing shortage. If people lose their homes but can get quickly off the streets into a temporary private dwelling, then they’re in a much better position to get back on their feet, and avoid the tumble into longer-term homelessness that can transpire from even just a few weeks without shelter.

For elected officials, the villages also mean that fewer people have to see — or think about — homeless people on a daily basis. Tiny homes provide leaders with a faster and cheaper alternative to building permanent housing or congregate shelters, and may provide cities with the legal authority to then clear out any remaining tent encampments: Funk told me she can determine “exactly how many units you need in order to make it illegal to sleep on the streets within the city limits in San Francisco.” All this has thrilled leaders eager to reclaim their cities from what they see as spiraling chaos and disorder.

Advocates for the homeless, meanwhile, worry that the tiny shelter boom will divert funds that could otherwise go to new permanent housing, preventing people from moving into a real home for even longer. The rush of private industry into the space also gives advocates pause, and they worry that cities will buy bare-bones, cheaper models, place them in remote parts of town, and criminalize those who refuse to go.

At the heart of the tiny houses debate is a question about the meaning of housing and shelter itself. As more companies rush to manufacture models with varying features — some out of plastic, some out of repurposed shipping containers, some built on factory assembly lines, others on-site or on wheels, some with in-suite bathrooms, kitchenettes, and storage space, others lacking plumbing and electricity and with virtually no amenities at all — there is little consensus on what a “tiny home” is, or what standards it must meet.

Tiny house shelter units are typically between 60 and 150 square feet, but the sharp variety of products within the industry creates confusion. How spartan is acceptable? Is anything better than sleeping outside?

Lots of arrangements can be tolerated if they’re understood as emergency solutions — but some communities have also started to explore the idea of treating the units less as temporary shelters and more as something approaching new housing options.

“Harnessing NIMBY” to expand tiny houses

America has a housing shortage in part because it’s become so expensive and difficult to build new housing. The cost to purchase new land has skyrocketed, byzantine zoning rules make residential construction hard, and people living in communities often protest new development — wary of decreased property values, new neighbors, noise, traffic, or general change. This barrier is so common it goes by NIMBY, short for “not in my backyard.”

Yet over the last few years, “tiny home” shelters have been built in communities through what you could call creative hacks of the zoning code. In some places, structures smaller than 120 square feet are not classified as permanent dwellings, and therefore not subject to the same regulations applicable to residential buildings. Other groups have capitalized on cities that declared local states of emergency, which give governments more flexibility to build units with faster permitting.

A photo of Dignity Moves tiny homes. They are small structures that open onto a patio with potted plants and outdoor furniture. — Dignity Moves is a transitional housing program in San Francisco. These 70 modular units are set at 33 Gough Street, right in the middle of San Francisco. They offer the unhoused a non-congregate shelter option.

Dignity Moves formed in 2020 as a task force within the Young Presidents Organization, a global networking group of chief executives. The group wanted to “apply private sector approaches and Silicon Valley-style ‘disruptive thinking’” to America’s homelessness crisis, as they describe it.

Funk could hardly hold back her grin as she outlined Dignity Moves’ theory of change. Instead of buying expensive land for tiny houses, she told me, they “borrow” it from developers who aren’t yet ready to use it.

Leveraging emergency building codes and word-of-mouth networking, “we take advantage of under-utilized assets,” she said. Maybe the shelters will go on a plot of land for two or three years, and then get transferred via forklift to another location when the developer needs their property back. (There are certain tax breaks available for landowners interested in making this deal.) The San Francisco village I visited on Gough Street rests on such borrowed land.

Sometimes Dignity Moves encourages faith-based groups or local governments to pony up their vacant property — like parking lots or land reserved for future infrastructure projects. In Santa Barbara, leaders countywide have jointly committed to finding locations for tiny houses in their neighborhoods and giving shelter priority to those sleeping outside in the surrounding areas. Funk’s group is spearheading this, and envisions the future playing out similarly in cities all over the country. By erecting many villages at the same time, Funk thinks it’ll be possible to get people off the street at once, a strong incentive for housed residents who are tired of seeing individuals living on sidewalks. “Then we can harness NIMBYism, which is a very powerful force,” she said.

There are at least some encouraging signs that local opposition to tiny house shelters wanes. When researchers at Portland State University surveyed housed neighbors who lived around various Portland “tiny homes” villages, they found the neighbors’ concerns about crime and decreased property values significantly diminished over time. “Some of the biggest initial opponents became some of the biggest champions,” Todd Ferry, a lead researcher of the study, told me. “I genuinely think it became beloved to many people in the neighborhood.”

Perhaps no politician has been more enthusiastic about the potential of tiny house shelters than San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who proposed this past summer to divert more than a third of his city’s housing funds to increase village production. Up for reelection in March, Mahan has made moving unhoused people quickly off the street a major part of his pitch.

San Jose started opening “tiny home” shelters about four years ago, originally to reduce the risk of contagion during the pandemic. About 500 units currently exist now in the city across six locations, and hundreds more are in the pipeline. Mahan credits their growth with reducing San Jose’s unsheltered homeless population by 11 percent in the last year, though he laments that new units seem to be taking longer to build than they did during Covid-19 and coming with new requirements.

“We were standing these up in six months at a cost of $80,000 or less all-in, including the utility hookup and common space, and now it’s taking progressively longer and costing more,” he told me, pointing to a new village project that cost the city $250,000 a door. Another San Jose village that took a year and a half to build saw costs go from originally $100,000 per unit to more than $175,000.

In September, Mahan urged his colleagues to quit making excuses for why they couldn’t build more units faster, and led a successful push to adopt a shelter crisis emergency declaration so San Jose could bypass certain building rules. Mahan says he’s motivated not only by a desire to help the homeless but to improve local neighborhoods generally. Calls for crime, fire, and blight in the immediate areas of the villages went down a year after they were built, according to a city analysis.

Each tiny house village in San Jose costs about $15 million to launch, and $3-4 million annually thereafter to operate. In June, the city’s budget director said funding roughly 1,400 of these shelter units will cost upward of $60 million by 2030, a “difficult” figure for San Jose to manage. The mayor, for his part, remains optimistic that external funding sources will come through.

Out of sight, out of mind?

Another reason some have grown excited about “tiny home” shelters is often left unsaid: to no longer have to witness homeless people outside on a daily basis.

Tiny houses provide elected officials with faster and cheaper alternatives to building permanent housing or congregate shelters, and may provide cities with the legal authority to then clear out any remaining tent encampments. This has roused city elites anxious about their increasingly visible homeless crisis.

A federal lawsuit led by Los Angeles business leaders frustrated with their city’s lack of action around tent encampments resulted in LA pledging to construct up to 16,000 new shelter beds by 2027, to house 60 percent of the homeless population in each of the fifteen council districts. These can include “tiny home” shelters, and in exchange, LA officials can sweep remaining tents and resume enforcing anti-camping bans.

“We are now getting much more excited about this 60 percent thing,” Funk, of Dignity Moves, told me. “I’m going to be working privately, quietly, but [to] give you a little preview, [we’re] thinking about doing this for San Francisco specifically as well in San Jose.” If San Francisco has about 4,500 people sleeping outside, according to the last Point In Time count, then Funk believes leaders can confidently estimate how many shelter beds will be necessary to build to start enforcing anti-camping laws again. “Let’s be clear,” she said, “one of the big motives here is Martin v. Boise, and people being concerned about getting sued.”

Funk’s legislative partner in the California state Senate, Josh Becker, plans to reintroduce a bill that would make it easier for cities to build tiny house shelters, and potentially even allow cities to count them toward their state-mandated housing production goals. Given that the tiny structures are much cheaper to build than both traditional housing and permanent supportive housing, a state green-light to include them in production targets could prove to be a major incentive. But that’s worrying news for those concerned the units may be less of a temporary, emergency solution after all.

Outside a tiny home, a painter works on a project. — Bryant Akers works on repairs at 33 Gough Street.

“We’re definitely seeing some cities focusing on this model as more than what I would call an interim solution and a gap solution,” said Amy King, the CEO of Pallet Shelter, a Washington-based company that produces tiny houses between $7,500 to $12,000 apiece.

When Becker’s bill was first introduced earlier this year and included the possibility that shelter units, including those produced by Pallet Shelter, could one day be considered permanent housing and even accept rent or housing vouchers, King’s company came out against it. “There’s just so much opportunity for people to take advantage,” King said of the idea.

Homeless advocates worry about a scenario where cities start to invest in lower-quality shelters that aren’t suitable for everyone, reduce investments in permanent housing, and grow more aggressive about fining or arresting those resistant to shelter offers. “We see sweeps and tiny homes going hand-in-hand,” said Alex Visotzky, with the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

A senior official with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told me the agency has no hard-and-fast policy yet on tiny houses, but is currently “evaluating whether there’s a place for them” in their efforts to end homelessness. As part of that the federal housing agency is investigating whether communities have been abiding by fair housing and civil rights laws as they expand the units.

“Not just segregation, but are people put there by choice?” the official asked. “Are there potential consequences if you don’t go there — like subject to arrest or other penalties? We’re considering all of that.”

The line between housing and shelter

In 2020 a fire broke out within a Pallet Shelter community in Banning, California — destroying 19 prefabricated homes, and displacing 38 people. Two years later another fire broke out within a Pallet Shelter community in Oakland, California, burning down three of the structures. One resident told Curbed she barely made it out as “the walls were melting” around her.

Pallet has denied responsibility for these fires, though the company did make changes to the building materials it uses. The two incidents loom large as leaders debate how cheaply they can build these structures and how tightly together they can pack them together on high-priced land.

Some housing advocates say the challenges cities are running into with building tiny shelters now mirror the same issues that often derail producing more housing at all. Proponents fear that as more pandemic-era emergency codes expire, and if more accidents like those in Banning and Oakland occur, such “quick-build bridge housing” will be built far less quickly.

“Our biggest challenge is the regulations, the code compliance to make sure everything meets all the parameters of the building code,” said Viken Ohanesian, CEO of Boss Cubez, which manufactured the prefabricated units used at the San Francisco shelter village. “It’s kind of like you can never have too much insurance, you can never be too safe in this world that we live in because it’s a litigious world.”

One option is to try and convince state lawmakers to pre-empt cities from tacking on new regulatory requirements. California lawmakers already took this step last year in banning mandates for fire sprinklers in “temporary sleeping cabins.” Funk says she’s “really, quite frankly, tempted to take the 10 other things that cities are starting to ask for, take them up to Daddy and say, ‘Can you break this rule?’” The costly rules and regulations, she believes, are a big part of how we got the housing crisis in the first place.

“I think our definition of housing with a capital ‘H’ is causing homelessness,” she said. “So we can either solve it or we can be stuck to our like, you know, our principles.”

Beyond worrying about building requirements and the practical longevity of tiny shelters, a broader, more existential set of criticisms have emerged around the policy idea.

One major concern is that investments in “tiny home” structures actually sustain homelessness, by diverting needed investments from permanent housing. Many people living in temporary shelters of all kinds end up returning to the streets after their allotted time to stay ends, not having anywhere else to go.

“Until there is more affordable housing, this ‘solution’ leads nowhere,” argued Josh Kruger, a formerly homeless journalist in Philadelphia. “Instead, these are just feel-good boondoggles so middle and upper class people can feel like they’re doing something … They’re storage sheds for human beings who otherwise remind us all of our society’s failure to care.”

In 2021 the Washington state’s Lived Experience Coalition — a group of current and formerly homeless individuals — issued a statement lambasting the “dehumanizing conditions and lack of services” some experience in tiny house villages, and warned of lawmakers who avert focus from more permanent solutions. In Seattle, for example, some residents lived in tiny wood huts that lacked heat and electricity, where school children had to do their homework with flashlights.

Barbara Poppe, the former executive director of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness during the Obama administration, said while some models are better than existing congregate homeless shelters, some are “far worse.” What really alarms her, she told me, is the “corporate investor model, for-profit industry” that’s cropped up, naming companies like Tuff Shed and Pallet Shelter as examples.

“Some of these are quite inhumane, and some of those cost studies — Pallet will say it costs $12,000 [per door], but that’s a sleight of hand, it’s very deceiving, because there’s all the site preparation cost on top,” she said. “It seems like what the public wants and by extension what the elected officials say they want is an easy answer and a cheaper answer to the fact that we have an extreme affordable housing crisis that sits on top of growing inequality.”

For advocates like Visotzky with the National Alliance to End Homelessness, conceptualizing housing and shelter as distinct categories remains important. “If we start calling [tiny homes] housing then folks are going to potentially lose eligibility for a lot of key services and resources,” he said. “We need to make commitments and not shortcuts.”

Supporters of building more tiny houses say their critics are stuck in the status quo, implicitly accepting that thousands of people will remain outside. They say it’s a false choice that cities can’t invest in both permanent and interim solutions at once, and that the crisis demands vision and urgency.

“One of the biggest hurdles that’s blocking us from ending unsheltered homelessness is lost optimism,” said Funk. “Dignity Moves’ value-add can be to come in and say, ‘Oh, no, it’s very possible, here’s exactly the paint-by-color map of how.”

What does a real dignified investment look like?

The Connect Homes factory in San Bernardino, California, located about an hour outside Los Angeles, had homeless shelters on the assembly line the day I visited in mid-October. The company was working to fulfill a contract for Long Beach, California, which plans to open its first village of tiny house shelters in early 2025.

Originally founded in 2012 to produce factory-built houses, Connect Homes leaders realized during the pandemic they could use virtually their same industrial tools to develop shelters, too. The company now wants to build shelters nationwide.

A worker talks next to a partly finished wooden tiny house being built inside a factory.

A bearded man in a black shirt and glasses points at architectural plans on a large monitor screen.

Gordon Stott, co-founder of Connect Homes, explains new homes in various stages of production. These will be used as interim housing in Long Beach, California.

“Is it housing, or is it shelter? Well I think what we’re seeing is it can be both,” said co-founder Gordon Stott. While at a higher price point than some of his competitors — units can be sold to cities at $80,000 per door — Stott believes his products are more durable investments, and prove homeless shelters don’t have to be ugly or stigmatized.

The shelter units set for Long Beach will be between 110 and 185 square feet (the larger ones will be ADA-accessible) and the city specifically looked for vendors who could build units with en suite bathrooms. The city used part of a $25 million state grant to finance the construction and expects to spend about $930,000 per year annually in operating costs.

Three doorways lead to three rooms as tiny homes are being made.

“We’re in a moment where cities are having to step up and do things they haven’t done before,” Rex Richardson, Long Beach’s mayor, told me. “We’ve had a big history of dealing with homelessness and providing housing but we weren’t prepared for the crisis — the way it manifested — with a 62 percent increase between 2020 and 2022.”

Models with private bathrooms might deter some local governments, tempted to spend as little as possible. But if the structures are likely to stick around for years in a city, and if people are likely to live in them for extended periods of time, then investing in nicer units with higher standards makes more sense. Ferry, with Portland State University, said he tells municipalities considering tiny house villages “to think really carefully about” their request for proposals, or RFPs. If you put out a contract for a non-congregate shelter between 70 and 150 square feet with no other specifications, then you’re generally obligated to go with the cheapest bidder.

For now though, most leaders have been drawn to companies that offer cheaper upfront products. While most players on the market say their relocatable shelters can last at least a decade if not more, none have been operating long enough to really put their claims to the test, to truly see if “tiny home” units can last, bouncing around from plot of land to plot of land.

Patrick Monahan, a 42-year-old resident of the shelter village in San Francisco, had been sleeping outside off and on for almost 10 years before he moved into his tiny cabin on Gough Street.

Wooden garden boxes are filled with black soil and a variety of green growing plants. — Volunteers plant gardens for the residents at 33 Gough Street.

A man with long dark hair, a cap, and glasses, stands in the doorway of a tiny house. — Patrick Monahan is a resident at 33 Gough Street.

Monahan never wanted to stay in traditional homeless shelters, and he’s appreciative of what the village offers him: a “fairly safe” environment that’s “very pretty and clean” and where the “food’s not great, but it’s free.” He doesn’t love using a porta-potty but thinks it’s better than going on the street.

Still, Monahan holds out hope that one day he’ll have something more. “I can’t have visitors here,” he said. “I rather have my own place, that’s mine.”

Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged homeless crisis, Homelessness, housing, San Francisco, tent encampment, tiny houses, unhoused
Leave a comment

December 27, 2023

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.”

Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged encampment, grants pass, homeless, Homelessness, martin v boise, supreme court, tent encampment, unhoused
Leave a comment

December 27, 2023

Some homeless people won’t go to shelters. Should they be left outside?

Originally published in Vox on September 14, 2023.
—

PORTLAND, Maine — All summer, the tent city grew.

Along a popular walking path, the Fore River Parkway Trail, more than 60 people had pitched tents. They brought with them piles of wood, drugs, abandoned furniture, bikes, and shopping carts. They were a visible sign of a growing crisis: The number of people experiencing homelessness in Maine has more than tripled since 2020, and the arrival of more than 1,500 asylum seekers in 2023 alone had put unprecedented strain on Portland’s shelter system. Over 240 tents were spread across the city, but the Fore River Parkway encampment was the biggest.

On a Thursday morning in mid-August, 13 community leaders gathered to decide what to do next. The city’s plan was to clear the encampment on September 6, cleaning the grounds and forcing anyone left to leave permanently. Before clearing began, the group that organized the meeting — the Encampment Crisis Response Team — was supposed to work closely with residents, using “empathy, innovation, and a coordinated approach.” All summer, nonprofit workers had delivered daily meals and tried engaging residents on finding housing.

But it was no secret that their efforts would likely fail and that most of the more than 50 people who remained in the encampment would not move into housing or shelter by the September 6 deadline.

So far, nearly all of the Fore River residents who had been offered shelter spots had turned them down — saying they didn’t like the options or preferred to stay outside. In the weeks leading up to the clearing deadline, few residents living in the Fore River Parkway encampment said they expected they would have to actually leave.

This left Portland with a dilemma, one shared with political leaders in much bigger cities grappling with the growing challenge of homeless encampments: what to do when people staying in tents tell volunteers offering shelter that they’d prefer to stay outside.

As encampments grew in size and number over the last eight years, research into unsheltered homelessness — meaning those sleeping somewhere at night that’s not primarily designed for human residence — has revealed why some people might prefer tents to shelters. Some people experiencing homelessness have had traumatic past experiences at shelters, or object to requirements in many shelters to relinquish their pets and personal belongings. Others do not want to be separated from a partner at a gender-segregated facility or to comply with strict curfews and rules around substance use. I heard several of these reasons from people staying at the Fore River encampment.

Studies estimate that roughly one-third of people experiencing homelessness in the US have problems with drugs or alcohol. Complicating matters is the fact that between one-quarter and one-third of those experiencing homelessness in the US have severe mental illness, with even higher rates for those experiencing unsheltered homelessness.

As public pressure to clear homeless encampments has intensified, a growing number of advocates have argued that if a city is unable to provide an unhoused person with the kind of shelter they need or want (like an apartment or a private hotel room), then the most ethical and compassionate thing to do is to leave them be. “Respect autonomy and self-governance for encampment residents,” advises the National Homelessness Law Center. “Homeless people are the experts of their own condition.”

Some of this positioning comes from a deep concern for civil liberties and a fear of returning to the ghoulish days of mass institutionalization. Some of it is about resource constraints: Most cities don’t actually have available housing to help everyone who might want it, and so advocates sometimes end up defending situations that, while far less than ideal, seem preferable to forcing unhoused people into living situations they don’t want.

In the windowless conference room where the Portland crisis response team had gathered, these debates were playing out. One outreach worker argued that some people were now in shelters because the deadline had provided a sense of urgency. The choice, he said, was either to continue the team’s approach, “or decide that it jives with us morally to support the concept of, like, forever encampments and forever outdoors.” For people like him, he stressed, “that is a far greater sort of moral surrender.”

A few advocates in the room worried that new pink flyers posted up at the encampment the day before, warning that everyone must leave by September 6, would further traumatize the homeless people living there. Many had moved to the Fore River Parkway trail after they were abruptly forced out from a different Portland encampment back in May.

City officials, meanwhile, were unwilling to acknowledge that an encampment sweep was surely coming or to discuss how it might harm those living there. To talk about the risk of scattering unsheltered people was seen as being unduly negative and insufficiently committed to the original plan.

“I would focus on, you know, the fact that we have 21 days, we have three weeks, let’s try to get as many folks housed as we can and then see where we are,” said Aaron Geyer, the director of Portland’s social services. It was too premature, Geyer told me, to even discuss what a sweep would look like, suggesting — rather improbably — that by September 6, there might be no unhoused people left to clear out.

Homelessness advocates have been organizing hard against these new civil commitment laws, stressing that only noncoercive treatment and “housing first” — an approach focused on getting people housing and services, rather than requiring them to address health or behavioral issues first — can provide the aid that struggling people need. They are rightly concerned about how new laws mandating treatment could cast a wide, indiscriminate net on those sleeping outside. But other leaders have argued it’s naive at best to suggest that everyone who needs help will ever voluntarily accept it.

Cullen Ryan, who leads the supportive housing nonprofit Community Housing of Maine, said many of his fellow advocates are too quick to back off from encouraging people into accepting help or housing. It’s a dodge, he said, to take people at their word about sleeping outside.

“I hope that wiser minds will prevail, that we as a society will truly care about one another enough to insist that people all deserve to be inside,” he said. “But, you know, to just say, ‘Okay, well, I feel good, because this person’s at least making their own decisions and they want to be outside.’ … I don’t think that’s right. It’s a cop-out, and it’s very easy for all of us to join the cop-out.”

Some lawmakers argue forcing people into treatment is compassionate

Should people be forced to accept housing or treatment if it’s for their own good? The specter of old state psychiatric hospitals looms over the question. Originally meant to provide quality care to people with acute mental illness, these places became known in the 20th century as nightmarish jails not only for those with mental disorders but also for senior citizens, rowdy teenagers, gay men, those with drug or alcohol addiction, and those in poverty.

They were characterized by gruesome forced treatments: lobotomies administered without anesthesia and aggressive electroconvulsive therapies with severe side effects. A political movement to empty out these asylums gathered momentum in the 1970s. Deinstitutionalization was seen as a necessary corrective to decades of cruel state paternalism. The hope was that people with mental illness would be able to get care in their communities. Instead, many people who were released ended up on the streets.

Today, as politicians face pressure to act on homelessness and drugs, more elected officials have started to ask if leaders swung the pendulum too far in their turn away from involuntary care. In Oregon, Portland’s Democratic mayor, Ted Wheeler, told a group of business leaders last winter that he wants state laws changed to make it easier to force people into hospitals. “When I see people walking through the elements without appropriate attire, often naked, they are freezing to death … I don’t even know if they know where they are or who they are,” Wheeler said. “They need help and they need compassion.” Republicans in Oregon’s legislature pushed bills to expand criteria for involuntary commitment, though their efforts failed this year.

The state that’s gone arguably the furthest so far is California, where lawmakers have spent several years debating whether to amend a nearly 60-year-old law to expand involuntary psychiatric treatment.

The law, the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act of 1967, is regarded as a bill of rights for Californians with mental illness, but it’s been blamed for enabling the abandonment of sick people experiencing homelessness, among other problems. Lawmakers in favor of changing the law say they see it as a moral obligation to make it easier to get individuals into treatment before they die or end up in jail.

One of those lawmakers is state Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat from San Francisco, who has pushed bills since 2018 to expand access to state conservatorship — a court-ordered status whereby a family member, friend, or public guardian controls another’s treatment plan. “Clearly we went too far,” Wiener told Vox. “We had these terrible institutions where people who did not need to be institutionalized were, but we went way too far in the opposite direction and I think it was an overcorrection.”

San Francisco Mayor London Breed has also framed forced treatment as the more compassionate course of action, saying of people experiencing homelessness, “Allowing them to deteriorate on our streets when they are incapable of caring for themselves is not humane.”

In 2022, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a controversial new law creating “CARE courts” — ostensibly aimed at helping up to 12,000 people with psychotic disorders statewide who are not voluntarily seeking treatment. Individuals could be referred to a CARE court for an evaluation, and if deemed eligible, they could be ordered to a treatment plan for up to two years. Newsom framed the effort as California finally “tak[ing] some damn responsibility for implementing our ideals.”

And now California lawmakers are pushing two more controversial bills to further expand access to conservatorships, including one co-authored by Wiener that would make it easier to subject someone to involuntary treatment if they had a mental health or substance use issue. Wiener insisted his legislation — which is backed by the California State Association of Psychiatrists and the California chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness — would be a “very focused and targeted” effort. Supporters point to statistics like the overdose death rate among people experiencing homelessness, which has soared in recent years.

CARE courts and bills to expand conservatorships have been fiercely opposed by civil rights groups, which argue these policies are dangerous distractions from real solutions like permanent affordable housing and may even siphon funds away from voluntary programs. They also worry that forced treatment pushes poor people out of sight, and note that California has long failed to keep track of how many people are subject to such coercive plans.

“Conservatorship is the most extreme deprivation of civil liberties, aside from the death penalty,” said Susan Mizner, the director of the disability rights program for the American Civil Liberties Union, in 2019. Activists also warn that loosening the laws will affect far more people than California lawmakers claim now, widening the path to criminalize or isolate the state’s sick, poor, and disabled.

For now, California officials have largely dismissed these objections, arguing the need to expand other support services is no reason to not move forward with psychiatric care reform, too.

“This is setting the basic ground rules, and changing the standard doesn’t mean everything is going to get immediately implemented in a perfect way overnight,” Wiener told Vox. “Absolutely we need more resources in this area and in mental health. We need more beds, supportive housing, mental health workers, guardians, but step one is let’s at least set up modernized rules that make sense, and then hopefully as soon as possible we can really ramp up the resources.”

The heated debate over whether involuntary treatment “works”

As states move to expand laws for involuntary treatment, the debate about them has grown louder and more urgent.

Opponents of forced treatment argue there’s little empirical evidence to justify the practice and plenty to suggest it can backfire, partly by traumatizing patients and fueling long-term distrust in medical professionals. Many forced rehab programs take place in prisons, and too many addiction programs in America are low-quality, humiliating, and brutal. One review from 2016 found some involuntary treatment programs even increased the likelihood of criminal recidivism.

But the existing evidence is more unsatisfying and murky than some critics of forced treatment acknowledge. Some studies have found involuntary interventions have led to improved outcomes, like being less likely to be hospitalized or staying fewer days in the hospital. The opinions of those forced to seek treatment vary: In surveys, 34 percent to 81 percent of involuntarily hospitalized patients have described their treatment as justified or beneficial. Patients are more likely to perceive forced care as fair and effective if they consider themselves ill, though people with psychotic disorders who report encountering barriers to health care are more likely to see forced care as unfair, even if they think it’s effective.

Researchers lack clear data on how many involuntary psychiatric holds there are in the United States, though estimates suggest they’re in the hundreds of thousands annually. Experts admit there’s a lot we still don’t know, partly due to poor reporting systems within and across states. There are few randomized controlled trials — often considered the gold standard for social science research, largely due to practical and ethical concerns.

Alex Barnard, a sociologist who has studied the push to expand conservatorships in California, writes, “there’s almost no recent evidence showing the efficacy of longer-term institutionalization or conservatorship.”

Barnard, who ultimately concluded that more people need psychiatric conservatorships in California than are receiving them, told Vox that he thinks opponents are sometimes willing to sacrifice lives in order to defend the principles of voluntary care and the “housing first” approach, which holds that housing should never be conditioned on getting treatment.

“There is a denial and unwillingness to figure out how to help some people who are never going to accept voluntary treatment,” he said. “I support ‘housing first,’ there’s a lot of evidence for it, but we have to figure out how to address the subset of those who just aren’t served by it.”

In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams instituted a new controversial plan last November to hospitalize unhoused people with serious mental illness and urged broader use of a state law that authorizes court-ordered outpatient treatment. Adams argued his plan would tackle a hard social problem that “everyone else punted on.”

Critics of Adams’s new approach said that without significant new spending on psychiatric beds, mental health crisis centers, and permanent supportive housing, vulnerable people will invariably end up back on the streets. Giving police discretion to decide who might be a danger to themselves or others, advocates also warned, was a civil liberties disaster waiting to happen.

Earlier this summer the New York Times reported on the first few people subjected to Adams’s involuntary care directive, including Mazou Mounkaila, who was handcuffed and transported to a hospital, where he spent the next 104 days treated for schizophrenia. The city’s care contractor, BronxWorks, argued the new forced treatment policy was working, and that most of their clients have since either moved into permanent housing or are on track to do so.

Mounkaila told the Times he liked his new life and even some aspects of his involuntary care. But he had been medicated against his will and said he continues to take antipsychotic drugs so as to not upset BronxWorks staff.

Portland opened shelter beds — but had almost no housing

As Portland’s encampments grew over the summer, complaints from residents and businesses began flooding government lines, Reddit, op-ed pages, and other civic forums. Some argued for a more forceful response, saying it was the status quo that was cruel. Others expressed frustration that unhoused people were turning down shelter beds.

Local advocates describe homelessness in the state as a “perfect storm” — new asylum seekers have arrived as federal pandemic money has run out, remote workers have relocated to Maine, and the affordable housing crisis statewide has worsened. In all but one Maine county, “the average house price is unaffordable to the average income household,” said the state housing authority last year.

An annual census taken in January found 4,258 people statewide, up from 1,297 in 2020. Until recently, Portland, the state’s most populous city, never had large tent encampments, but unsheltered homelessness increased over the last half-decade as rents went up, and as property owners realized they could capitalize on the city’s tourism industry by converting existing apartments into Airbnbs.

Aaron Geyer, the director of Portland’s social services, said city officials wanted to find a “middle ground” between advocates who didn’t necessarily want the encampment cleared at all and the daily complaints they receive from business owners and the public. “Our job, which is never an easy task, is to try to thread the needle and make sure both sides may not be happy but amenable to it,” he told Vox.

Homelessness experts said they don’t want people to draw the wrong conclusions about encampment residents who turned down shelter offers. Though Portland opened a new modernized facility in late March, it’s located in a more remote part of the city, is gender segregated, and bars pets that are not service animals. Other unsheltered individuals are worried about traveling too far away from the substances they’re addicted to. Some people I spoke with cited past bad experiences at shelters.

“When they say they don’t want to go into X shelter or X motel, it’s often because of some prior trauma that has resulted,” said Nichole Fiore, a national researcher on tent encampments with Abt Associates. “If the goal is to close down the encampment and get people indoors, I think we need to be asking, ‘What would it take to get you indoors?’ And really open up that conversation.”

Jessica Grondin, a city spokesperson, cited “health and safety” concerns as the main reason to clear out the encampment, though it was clear to anyone who walked through that there would be fewer sanitation issues if the city had dedicated resources to maintaining it. It was hard to escape the conclusion that the city, by keeping the encampment at a certain level of disorder and disarray, had made it easier to justify clearing.

“They blame things on it being dirty, but then they don’t provide resources to be clean,” said William Higgins Jr., the executive director of the Portland-based Homeless Advocacy for All.

In the weeks leading up to the September 6 clearing deadline, both residents living in the Fore River Parkway encampment and local business owners said they doubted the city would actually make unhoused people leave.

“If 21 of us just go to the courthouse on September 5 and protest, that’s how many people you need to stop something — at least temporarily,” Nate, a man living at the encampment, who’s being referred to by first name only to protect his privacy, told me in mid-August. “Whether that’s an official written rule or not, I don’t know, but that’s the number I heard and that’s what I like and it’s gonna work — guaranteed. Everybody knows it will.”

No mass protests happened, but on September 5, three Portland city councilors issued a statement, asking for a month delay at minimum. Leaders with Preble Street, a local nonprofit focused on homelessness, also asked the city to postpone its clearing.

But early in the morning on September 6, dozens of police officers, nonprofit staff, and city workers arrived for the clearing. Despite the city’s hopeful prediction that the people in the encampment might leave before the deadline, there were more than 65 tents and roughly 50 people still there on clearing day.

Portland’s parks director described the clearing as an “all hands on deck” situation. Kristen Dow, Portland’s director of health and human services, insisted their approach allowed them to employ “best practices.” But she and other city officials all declined to comment on the impact of displacing residents and the harms to people experiencing homelessness that research suggests such sweeps bring.

Over the summer, a total of 180 shelter beds had opened up — but just 18 people from the encampment had ultimately moved to shelter or housing. The residents’ remaining belongings were hauled to a local incinerator. Leaders were not sure where the people who had lived there would go.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Homelessness, housing, maine, tent encampments, unhoused
Leave a comment

July 5, 2023

Oregon’s Gov. Tina Kotek opens up about the state’s housing crisis

Originally published in Vox.com on June 15, 2023.
—-

The challenges of homelessness and a lack of affordable housing are particularly acute in Oregon.

The state has seen a 63 percent increase in unsheltered homelessness over the last six years. While roughly 18,000 people are currently unhoused in the state, there are only about 5,200 year-round shelter beds to serve them. One cause of homelessness nationwide is that, for years, the US has been building fewer homes than necessary to house a growing population. Oregon has among the largest housing supply gaps: statewide, 140,000 housing units are needed, and, without serious action, there’s a projected shortage of 443,556 units in the next 20 years.

Voters, in turn, have grown upset. Frustrations around homelessness played a pivotal role in the 2022 election. Tina Kotek, a Democrat who had served as Oregon’s House speaker for the previous nine years, eked out a win in the gubernatorial election, but her tight margins (she earned 47 percent in a three-way race) spoke volumes in a state that’s typically safely blue.

Kotek, in turn, has made housing and homelessness among her top priorities in her first six months in office — issues that leaders don’t often stake their capital on.

Since taking office, she has declared a state of emergency on homelessness, directed state agencies to prioritize reducing unsheltered homelessness, and established a statewide housing production target of 36,000 new homes per year. She also lobbied for and signed a $200 million legislative package to help address Oregon’s housing and homelessness crisis.

Her plans though, hinge on other community leaders taking action, and it’s too soon to say whether her ideas and policy prescriptions will succeed.

I talked with Gov. Kotek about making housing policy the center of her agenda, about dealing with NIMBYs, and lessons other states might learn from Oregon. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Rachel Cohen

Oregon’s governorship almost flipped red last year for the first time in more than three decades, and voter surveys indicate frustration with homelessness was one of the top reasons why. What has changed about homelessness, in your view, to make it rise to become a such salient political issue?

Gov. Tina Kotek

That’s a great question because I’ve been doing public policy for 20+ years and the public has long perceived housing and homelessness as this second-tier issue. The change is really related to the pandemic, when we had to move people out of shelters because you couldn’t have the crowding. And people came out on the streets in tents, and then were there for more than two years. So in that sense, the most extreme example of our housing crisis — experiencing unsheltered homelessness— is just in everybody’s face now on a daily basis in a way that we didn’t have before.

You have both an empathy, because people don’t want to see folks living like that, and a frustration, because they want their communities back to what they were, which includes not having tents on the streets.

Rachel Cohen

Beyond Covid-19, what do you see as the root cause of Oregon’s high levels of unsheltered homelessness?

Gov. Kotek

From the housing side of this, I definitely go back to the Great Recession, when housing construction literally stopped. But people continued to move to Oregon. So we’ve been behind with housing construction and keeping up with the influx of folks going on 15 years now. This has really driven the affordability issues. And what had been getting built since the Great Recession was very high-end housing, not what I would call workforce or affordable housing.

Then for homelessness, you have a lot of different populations who are out there who’ve lost their housing. And because they’re on the street they start to develop significant illnesses. Maybe you started your unsheltered homelessness because you lost your job, and you’re traumatized by this experience. So you’re starting to develop a mental health issue, you’re probably medicating with a substance to stay awake — for example, meth. Then you develop a substance issue. It’s this accumulation of illness that comes with being on the street that has led to the level of chronic unsheltered homelessness. It’s not the start of the issue, but the length of the issue that we’re now dealing with, and the depth of the illness on the street because of that.

Rachel Cohen

How do you plan to measure the success of your housing initiatives over time?

Gov. Kotek

We’ve been very specific that by the end of the calendar year, we want to have a minimum of 600 new shelter beds, 1,200 people rehoused, and a minimum of 8,750 people being supported through rental assistance that we’re preventing from becoming homeless.

So the key there is making sure that the problem doesn’t get any worse. And we wanted to be very clear with local communities: You get state money based on a plan to hit your portion of that target. The public really needs us to show that the money is connected to outcomes.

Rachel Cohen

Elected officials in other states have been reticent to tackle housing and homelessness. What’s your case for why they should anyway?

Gov. Kotek

It’s certainly daunting, right? It’s easier to pick something less complex when you’re in elected office. But what I like to tell people is that housing is the core problem. If you don’t have stable housing, you’re going to be unhealthy, and those are health care costs. If you’re trying to recruit people to your community and there’s literally no workforce housing, that’s an economic issue. It’s a safety issue because when people are stable in their housing it reduces crime and disruption. And it matters for educational outcomes — when a child moves school districts within the same year, they fall months behind.

I think things are particularly severe in Oregon for a whole variety of reasons, but everybody has the same issue. We just haven’t built enough housing. Every governor has to take up housing, you cannot ignore it.

Rachel Cohen

How do you deal with NIMBYism in Oregon? There’s also a lot of cynicism about the power of individuals to block needed housing production.

Gov. Kotek

There’s a lot of fear when people see that their world is changing. In the 2019 legislative session, we had House Bill 2001, which was the “middle housing” bill. It was a reset of how we approached what it means to have a home, meaning they don’t have to be big apartments or single-family housing. And there was a lot of fear from people that we were going to change the aesthetics, the feel, the nature of their neighborhoods. And I said, “No, we’re going to make them more livable so people can stay in the communities they want. So they can have the ADU or the duplex or the townhome that in some places was actually not allowed to be built.” There was pushback, and now everyone’s accepting it because they understand that we have to have different types of housing options.

I always go back to personal stories with folks. They tend to help people understand that we can all have prosperity if we just let go of our fears that change is going to hurt us. And it takes a lot of conversations to do that.

I think you also have to involve the people who are doing the work early on. For example, my Housing Production Advisory Council — it would have been easier if I said, “This is the stuff we’re going to do.” But I wanted to make sure that the folks who are doing the work have buy-in to the solutions, and are willing to push for those solutions. It takes longer, but you’re going to have more success when everyone’s bought in.

Rachel Cohen

I recently wrote about how the Ninth Circuit’s Martin v. Boise decision — which says people can’t be punished for sleeping outside on public property if there are no alternatives available — is shaping cities’ response to tent encampments.

Oregon is no exception, and earlier this year I know you raised concerns that Portland’s plan for unsheltered homelessness might amount to just shuffling people around. I wanted to ask you about some of the proposed solutions — like sanctioned encampment sites. What do you think about these as interim measures, and the fact that some advocates worry they’ll become more permanent fixtures?

Gov. Kotek

We have to be okay with some level of transitional shelter until we build more housing.

After the Boise decision, I helped pass legislation here to be very clear with our local governments of what they needed to do to be in compliance with that court ruling. It’s not enough to say you can’t criminalize people who are living outside, you have to also provide them a pathway to permanent housing.

And it’s also important to set some parameters about where people can be. I think it’s appropriate to have time, place, and manner guidelines for where people can camp, particularly in places that are very unsafe, like on the sides of highways and things like that.

My frustration has been that while that’s something cities have to do, they also have to provide the resources. In Portland, when their daytime camping ban takes effect in July, they have to be serious about providing more daytime shelters for people who can no longer camp on the streets during 8 am to 8 pm. We can do both, we just have to plan for it.

I’ve learned a lot in this process by listening to people who were actually on the streets. We need to lean into new ideas like Project Turnkey, which enables someone experiencing homelessness to walk into a converted hotel or motel, where they can then have a room with a locked door, services on site. And little villages, where people have their pod and their safety but they’re also living in community. Those things take a bit longer to set up but they are much more effective than what we’ve done in the past, where you just say here’s a big building with a bunch of beds in it. And you wonder why people don’t want to do that.

Rachel Cohen

I want to turn back to the 2019 “middle housing” law you helped pass, which ordered larger cities and the Portland metro area to legalize duplexes on all residential lots, and fourplexes, triplexes, townhomes, and cottage clusters on more than half of lots.

This was the first law of its kind in the nation, and as the Sightline Institute put it, “proved that it’s possible for state legislatures to take groundbreaking action against local bans on lower-cost housing types.”

You are credited with playing a major role in getting the bill passed, and on a bipartisan basis. Can you talk about any lessons you learned from that?

Gov. Kotek

My general take from the beginning was that legalizing these housing types needed to be statewide and it’s important for everybody to do it. I think other states have approached it as something you can opt into, or just for certain locales, and I really recommend against that.

The success came from building the right coalition of folks. Everyone from the land-use folks, to AARP, the real estate community, the development community, the climate activists. That level of support helped us push back on the NIMBYs.

Rachel Cohen

I want to zoom out for the last question. I’ve been writing about housing and homelessness for a long time, and it’s clear that many people see these issues as separate. I know your administration sees housing and homelessness as connected, and I wondered, why do you think there is this disconnect in people’s minds? And how do we fight that misperception?

Gov. Kotek

I think it’s important for folks who work on these issues to not get rigid in either space. You will have some advocates who work for the unsheltered who think it’s all about housing — like if we just had more housing, then everything would be fine. That’s missing the point of the acuity of the individuals on the streets.

And then you go to the other extreme where people say, “We don’t have a housing supply problem, this is a personal responsibility issue. These are folks who are just on drugs, they have mental health issues.” And that perspective — which puts the blame on them — is also wrong. Because even if those folks got all the resources they need to be healthy today, there aren’t enough places for them to live.

We had an issue recently out in Clackamas County, which is one of our metro area counties, where they had approved a hotel to convert to a homeless shelter. I was told this was one of the best assets they had ever seen for one of these conversions, it was in a good location, good shape. And then around two weeks later they reversed approval for it because they thought it didn’t focus enough on people’s mental health and drug addiction issues. This is very short-sighted.

So I like to tell people, both are true. It’s true there are individuals who have significant health issues that are helping to keep them on the streets, and it’s true they have nowhere to live. So for us, it’s the short term of helping people get into transitional shelter, continue to get people rehoused, and keep them there. We’re also trying to say we have to provide some level of ongoing rent assistance for a time, so people can stay stable and still get services. Nothing is worse than spending money and having someone come back on the streets. It’s bad for them. It’s not cost-effective.

My message to everyone is, see the entire spectrum of the issue. Deal with the complexities and have a short-term and a long-term plan. But we have to help people right now who are suffering. So every day, it’s just like, gotta do both. You gotta do it all and they are interrelated.

Correction, June 15, 5:30 pm: A previous version of this story said Oregon’s goal for the minimum number of people supported by rental assistance was 3,600. After publication, the Oregon governor’s office amended that number to 8,750.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Homelessness, housing, oregon, tina kotek
Leave a comment

June 14, 2023

The little-noticed court decision that changed homelessness in America

Originally published in Vox on June 12, 2023.
—-

Five years ago, a federal court issued a crucial ruling. People experiencing homelessness, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said, can’t be punished for sleeping outside on public property if there are no adequate alternatives available.

The 2018 decision in Martin v. Boise did not create the homelessness crisis, which researchers attribute primarily to the lack of affordable housing. The number of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness — meaning those sleeping on the streets, in parks, in abandoned buildings or train stations, or anywhere not meant for humans to live — was rising before the decision.

But as the number of unsheltered homeless people continued to grow over the past half-decade, the Martin decision has become a pivotal factor in shaping how cities respond to the very visible problem of tent encampments, particularly on the West Coast. While the case never gained huge name recognition, it undergirds the policy and politics of homelessness in 2023. So much of the fight about how to address homelessness today is, at this point, a fight about Martin.

The case dates back to 2009, when Robert Martin and a group of fellow homeless residents in Boise, Idaho, sued, arguing that police citations they received for breaking local camping bans violated their constitutional rights. In 2018, the Ninth Circuit agreed that prosecuting people for sleeping or camping on public property when they have no home or shelter to go to violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

“The government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors, on public property, on the false premise they had a choice in the matter,” the court declared.

States, cities, and counties urged the US Supreme Court to take up the case, arguing the Ninth Circuit had created “a de facto” right to live on sidewalks and in parks that would “cripple” local leaders’ ability to safely govern their communities. But in 2019, the court declined, baffling some experts, though others suspect it’s because there were no conflicting circuit decisions at the time. Since then, Martin has shaped cities’ response — or lack thereof — to the growing challenge of homeless tent encampments.

While the decision only formally applies in areas under the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction, the ruling has reverberated nationally, as local governments consider how to address unsheltered homelessness in ways that could avoid costly constitutional legal battles. There have already been dozens of court cases citing Martin, including in the Fourth Circuit in Virginia, and federal lower courts in Ohio, Missouri, Florida, Texas, New York, and Hawaii.

For now, though, Martin’s impact can be seen most clearly out West. Just before Christmas 2022, for example, a district judge cited Martin when she ruled that San Francisco can no longer enforce encampment sweeps — meaning clear out homeless individuals and their property from an outdoor area — since the city lacks enough shelter beds for those experiencing homelessness to move into. San Francisco appealed the decision, arguing it’s “unnecessarily broad and has put the City in an impossible situation.”

In Phoenix, Arizona, residents and business owners filed a lawsuit last summer against the city for allowing a downtown homeless encampment to grow with nearly 1,000 people, but a federal judge — echoing Martin — barred Phoenix in December from conducting sweeps if there are more homeless people than shelter beds available. A competing decision issued in March by a state judge ordered Phoenix officials to clean up the “public nuisance” at the encampment by July 10, arguing the city has “erroneously” applied Martin to date.

In Portland, Oregon, meanwhile, officials have scrambled to revise their local camping ordinance to be a “daytime” camping ban from 8 am to 8 pm instead, in recognition that any total camping ban is likely illegal under Martin.

Supporters of a more “get tough” approach to encampments say the social and political costs of allowing tent cities to proliferate are too high, and that waiting for cities to build enough new housing before acting is untenable, both morally and politically. Some think officials are getting complacent in relying on Martin as an excuse to maintain the status quo.

Advocates for those experiencing homelessness say politicians are squandering an important opportunity by fighting for the right to conduct encampment sweeps — which can be both cruel and counterproductive to the larger goal of ending homelessness. Instead of looking for legal loopholes to Martin like daytime camping bans and sanctioned encampment sites, advocates say leaders should be investing more in solutions like affordable housing and shelter options that afford people more privacy.

“Our end goal is not to create a right for people to sleep on the streets. That’s the limited remedy we’ve been given under our Constitution,” said Eric Tars, the legal director for the National Homelessness Law Center. “They’re missing the point of Martin if they’re just trying to continue a criminalization approach in a more constitutional way.”

Cities are scrambling to comply with — and find loopholes in — Martin v. Boise

Unsheltered homelessness has risen sharply over the last seven years, and at a faster rate than homelessness overall. Unsheltered homeless people now account for 40 percent of all homeless people in the country, up from 31 percent in 2015.

Political pressure has mounted to respond to this growing problem of people sleeping in alleys, parks, and train stations. While it’s not clear this would be legal under Martin, a number of cities have turned to the idea of so-called sanctioned encampments, or legalized campsites. These are effectively designated areas where unhoused individuals can live outside, and some come with varying degrees of public services, like bathrooms, power outlets, medical care, and on-site case management.

In Portland, Oregon, lawmakers voted in November to create several large sanctioned campsites for homeless individuals, and ban the more than 700 other encampments spread across the city. Austin, Texas, has operated one sanctioned encampment of so-called “tiny homes” since 2019, on a seven-acre plot of asphalt near the airport. Denver, Colorado, is also moving to make its so-called “managed campsites” from the pandemic a permanent homelessness response tool.

The trade-off for legalized campsites, however, is that sleeping outside anywhere else in a city would then be illegal. This helps alleviate leaders’ political problem of having tents pitched all over a city, but activists worry it’s just a way to steer the sight of homelessness out of public view, and criminalize people who refuse to go. Some cities are considering sanctioned encampments with a six-month residency limit, even if there’s no permanent affordable housing option for those experiencing homelessness to go to after that point.

Some advocates have taken a firm stance against the idea; they see sanctioned encampments as a means to segregate and criminalize unhoused people and effectively kick the can down the road by not finding them permanent housing.

They’re not wrong that sanctioned encampments can require a great deal of money, staff time, and effort. In 2018, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness warned that “creating these environments may make it look and feel like the community is taking action to end homelessness on the surface — but, by themselves, they have little impact on reducing homelessness.”

For these reasons, some cities — like Houston — have rejected the idea. “We can do better as a society. We shouldn’t tolerate it and say that’s okay,” Marc Eichenbaum, the special assistant to Houston’s mayor on homeless initiatives, told NPR.

But other cities with fewer available housing options say sanctioned encampments represent a decent interim solution, and maybe even better for unhoused residents compared to scattered campsites if cities can more effectively target social services to those corralled together.

Legalized campsites can also have a lower barrier to entry than many existing shelters, so supporters are framing them as a harm-reduction approach to homelessness. Groups like the National Homelessness Law Center, which used to firmly oppose sanctioned encampments, have recently softened their stance to say they should be considered on a case-by-case basis.

“The only time that we would see a role for that approach is if you had an exit plan,” said Tars, who pointed to some models in Seattle and Gainesville, Florida, that he thought were more positive. “Otherwise you are just creating a permanent shanty town.”

Meanwhile, Republican-governed states are exploring more punitive models. In at least half a dozen states, lawmakers have pushed sanctioned encampment bills based on templates from the Cicero Institute, an Austin-based conservative think tank. The bills propose to penalize cities that permit tent encampments, to put time limits on sanctioned encampment sites, and to divert funding from permanent supportive housing into things like mandatory drug treatment.

In 2022, Tennessee became the first state to pass a bill that would make camping on local public land a felony. Missouri’s version will allow the state’s attorney general to sue local governments that don’t enforce encampment bans. Activists say Cicero’s aggressive opposition to housing-first will lead invariably to more homeless people in jail.

Looming ultimately above all these various sanctioned encampment models is the Martin decision, which says a city-wide camping ban would be unconstitutional if the city lacks sufficient shelter options. Leaders recognize they probably can’t ban camping everywhere under Martin, but they want to see if they can ban it in most places instead. Yet whether any bans could exist if a city lacks enough shelter beds remains an open Eighth Amendment question.

Tars, of the National Homelessness Law Center, thinks the answer is no. “Martin is very clear when it’s talking about ‘adequate’ [housing] alternatives it’s talking about indoor shelter beds, and legalized encampments are not shelter beds,” he said, pointing to a 2021 federal court decision that found a sanctioned encampment site in Chico, California, was inadequate “shelter” under Martin. A federal judge described Chico’s encampment as “open space with what amounts to a large umbrella for some shade” that “affords no real cover or protection to anyone.”

Tars acknowledged, though, there’s a “legal gray area” in the Martin decision, as one footnote suggests cities could create some “time/manner/place” restrictions for camping.

Earlier this year, when a Maricopa County Superior Court judge ordered Phoenix officials to clear its notoriously large downtown encampment, he urged the city to consider “the creation of controlled, outdoor camping spaces on vacant City property” if there were not enough shelter beds to move people into.

As in Houston, Phoenix officials have rejected the sanctioned encampment approach to date, saying resources should be invested into housing solutions with air conditioning: Over 80 percent of Maricopa County’s 425 heat-related deaths in 2022 occurred outside. Local officials estimate unsheltered homeless people are at “200 to 300 times higher risk” of heat-related deaths than the rest of the population.

Still, even if Phoenix leaders embraced sanctioned encampments, it’s not clear the idea would hold up under Martin. Resolving some of these questions will realistically require the Supreme Court, but that’s unlikely to happen until there’s competing circuit court decisions to pressure it to take the issue up.

Homelessness policy is at a crossroads

There are court rulings, and then there’s enforcement of those rulings. Homeless advocates say it seems as though too many cities are failing to comply with rulings that bar unconstitutional sweeps.

For example, lawyers say little has changed in San Francisco since a federal judge ruled against sweeps six months ago, and that homeless residents continue to be displaced under the guise of street cleaning.

“What we’ve seen has been a really aggressive media campaign led by the city to suggest we are pro-open-air drug markets and anti-accessibility for sidewalks,” said Zal Shroff, an attorney with Lawyer’s Committee For Civil Rights representing the homeless plaintiffs.

“You’re allowed to clear genuine public safety hazards, but when you do that and throw their laptops and cellphones into dumpsters, that’s not a cleaning — that’s a seizure of someone’s belongings without due process,” he added. In late May, Shroff’s team filed a court motion, calling for increased monitoring.

Jen Kwart, a spokesperson for San Francisco’s city attorney, told Vox they’re “complying with the preliminary injunction while simultaneously expending hundreds of millions of dollars annually to provide shelter and services to unhoused people.”

In Phoenix, while the city is working to clear out its large homeless encampment by July 10, per the Maricopa County Superior Court, the ACLU has been arguing the city’s clearings have violated the rights of unhoused people.

“Even if you’re unsheltered, you have due process rights to your belongings under the Fourth and 14th Amendments,” said Benjamin Rundall, an attorney with ACLU of Arizona. “You can’t violate someone’s constitutional rights in order to vindicate someone’s private property rights.”

It’s not clear at all where the estimated 700 unhoused people living in the downtown Phoenix encampment are supposed to go. There are not enough available shelter beds in the city; the four largest ones were at 97 percent capacity as of April.

A spokesperson for Phoenix’s Mayor Kate Gallego did not return requests for comment, but an April city press release said they were exploring hotel options and expected 800 new shelter beds to come online before the end of 2024.

Some conservative legal advocates see the Maricopa County Superior Court ruling as offering a blueprint for other cities and states to clear out their tent encampments. “For too long, liberal leaders have used the Martin ruling as an excuse to allow rampant crime and homelessness to take over neighborhoods,” argued Austin Vanderheyden, a liaison at the Goldwater Institute, in the Orange County Register. “But no longer.”

“Our lawsuit was never about solving homelessness,” wrote Ilan Wurman, who represented the Phoenix business and property owners. “It was about solving the humanitarian crisis that these encampments create.”

Meanwhile, as pandemic eviction aid dries up, homeless advocates are bracing for more people to lose their housing in the coming months. Washington, DC, recently reported an 11.6 percent increase in homelessness from 2022. While the nation has been increasing its shelter bed capacity over the last few years, fewer people are choosing to stay in them. Many have decided sleeping outdoors is preferable to the rules and conditions of congregate shelters.

Figuring out where cities go next will be shaped in no small part by how leaders and courts land on interpreting Martin.

“It really feels like we’re at a tipping point,” said Tars. “Things could either get much better or much worse.”

Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged 9th circuit, encampments, homeless encampments, Homelessness, martin v boise, tent encampments
Leave a comment

April 12, 2023

Homeless encampments — and the debate over what to do about them — explained

Originally published in Vox on March 8, 2023.
—-

In mid-February, a block from the White House, agents with the National Park Service cleared the largest homeless encampment in Washington, DC. More than 70 people had pitched tents in the downtown federal park known as McPherson Square, and all were forced to leave, with 60 days to claim any belongings left behind.

The encampment was long scheduled to be cleared in April, when the people living there would no longer be in danger of hypothermia. But in January, local DC officials requested it be cleared early, and the federal government agreed, citing increased complaints about trash and debris, sex work, and harassment of visitors. Over the past six months, three people had died due to exposure or drug overdoses.

One day after the clearing, roughly two-thirds of those evicted from the park were still believed to be sleeping on the street.

DC is just one of many cities across the country grappling with the rise of tent encampments and associated political pressure to address them: encampments have increased in prevalence since the pandemic, even as homelessness in the city has gone down. Last year a Washington Post poll found 75 percent of local DC residents backed shutting encampments down.

The federal government’s role in the McPherson Square clearing made the challenges and contradictions of these encampments especially sharp. Local and national homeless advocates were outraged: they had called on the Biden administration to wait until the city had identified permanent shelters. They say their offer to help city officials find housing was rebuffed. The clearing, they argue, also stood in direct conflict with the Biden administration’s recently released national strategic plan on homelessness, which said that closing encampments without providing adequate support and housing was an “out of sight, out of mind” approach that provided other cities with cover to do the same.

“If they don’t stick to their federal strategic plan, how do we expect any other community to abide by it?” said Ann Oliva, the CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

Unsheltered homelessness, meaning sleeping somewhere at night that’s not primarily designed for human residence — like a car, a park, an abandoned building, or a train station — has risen sharply over the last seven years, and at a faster rate than homelessness overall. The unsheltered homeless now account for 40 percent of all homeless people in the country, up from 31 percent in 2015.

While encampments are most common in big cities, on the West Coast, and in areas with high housing costs, tents have also sprung up in places where housing is broadly available and homelessness is going down — like Houston, which saw a 63 percent drop in homelessness since 2011 but still has hundreds of encampments throughout the region.

For decades, a promising strategy for dealing with homelessness has had bipartisan support: the “housing first” model, which prioritizes getting people into permanent housing without requiring them to first address mental health conditions or substance abuse. In recent years, the strategy has experienced unprecedented attacks and been blamed for exacerbating homelessness.

In Washington, Houston, and elsewhere, political leaders have argued that rising public discontent with encampments threatens their long-term ability to tackle homelessness. Due to a lack of affordable housing, and in some cities, available shelter beds, many homeless people have simply nowhere to go.

“Mayor [Sylvester] Turner believes addressing tent encampments is key to maintaining support for the housing-first model because the public didn’t believe with their own eyes that homelessness was actually decreasing in the city,” said Marc Eichenbaum, the special assistant to Houston’s mayor on homeless initiatives. In the past few years, Houston leaders have “decommissioned” 59 tent encampments, including the city’s largest last month. In Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser stressed that her support for encampment clearing was rooted in her commitment to the housing-first model.

“I could build half a million units of housing,” newly elected Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass told the Los Angeles Times, “and if there are still tents, people will not believe that you did anything except to steal their money.”

The McPherson Square clearing sat at the middle of a national tug-of-war over homeless encampments. On one side are homeless advocates who maintain that dismantling encampments without clear plans to move inhabitants into stable housing is both cruel and counterproductive. On the other side are conservatives calling to crack down on people sleeping outside, blasting what they describe as a too lenient approach to homelessness by Democrats. Liberals can’t use a lack of affordable housing as an excuse to avoid taking action on encampments, they say, given that it could take decades to build more housing units.

Left in the middle are city officials, struggling to balance their commitment to ending homelessness with the very visible signs of its continued existence — and so are the hundreds of thousands of people sleeping outside and in cars, whose lives will be deeply affected by their leaders’ decisions.

What we know about homeless tent encampments

Encampments refer to outdoor places people live for periods of time with built structures like tents, and personal belongings. They can be found in public areas and secluded corners of cities, and their populations range from just a handful of people to hundreds.

While most cities do not collect good data on encampments (they track instead the broader category of unsheltered homelessness) many have cited increases in the last several years. The federal government recently acknowledged gaps in its understanding of encampments, citing difficulties in collecting data on people who often “actively try to escape public notice.”

Still, experts broadly agree the problem is getting worse, and researchers say the primary cause is a lack of affordable housing, stemming from both a shortage of units, and from rents rising faster than wages. They say encampments have also increased because people can’t access shelter beds, or have objections to the requirements at local shelters, like the need to relinquish their pets and personal belongings. Other people see tent encampments as offering more opportunity for privacy and safety than shelters.

Some encampments have established governance procedures and residents take on day-to-day responsibilities, while others are more informal and more fractious. Though inhabitants have a diverse range of ages, races, and gender, research suggests most tend to be men with multiple barriers to housing like mental illness, a history of evictions, or a criminal record.

In recent years, court rulings have made it more difficult for cities, especially on the West Coast, to clear encampments. In 2018, the US Ninth Circuit Court found people experiencing homelessness can’t be punished for sleeping outside on public property if there are no adequate alternatives available.

The decision only formally applies across the West, in areas under the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction, but when the US Supreme Court declined to hear this case, Martin v. City of Boise, in 2019, cities nationally were left to debate how they can respond to encampments in ways that will avoid new constitutional challenges. Boise says that as long as sleeping indoors is not an option, “the government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors, on public property, on the false premise they had a choice in the matter.”

The impact of the Boise ruling is playing out every day. Just before Christmas, a district judge cited Boise when she ruled that San Francisco can no longer enforce encampment sweeps, since the city lacks enough shelter beds to move the homeless into. San Francisco Mayor London Breed decried the decision. “We already have too few tools to deal with the mental illness we see on our streets,” she said. “Now we are being told not to use another tool that helps bring people indoors and keeps our neighborhoods safe and clean for our residents.” The city appealed the ruling in January, arguing it’s “unnecessarily broad and has put the City in an impossible situation.”

https://4e511a775e3a3b16eca776638f80362e.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-40/html/container.html

In other cities, officials have concluded Boise means they can no longer enforce certain laws against people experiencing homelessness. In Phoenix, for example, citations for outdoor camping dropped dramatically since the ruling — from 283 in 2017 to just 9 in 2021. More than 1,000 people have moved to a downtown Phoenix encampment called “the Zone,” and local residents are currently suing officials for the situation. Meanwhile, a federal judge issued an injunction in December, barring Phoenix officials from conducting encampment sweeps if there are no shelter beds available.

Whether sanctioned outdoor camping sites would be legal under the Boise decision if a city lacked indoor shelter beds remains unclear, and some policy leaders are urging officials to test the legal boundaries and find out.

“The Boise reading was specifically against a city-wide [camping] ban, and it’s still open question on more specific parts,” said Stephen Eide, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a critic of housing-first. “These are all meaty questions that will probably have to be decided by the Supreme Court.”

How cities are responding to tent encampments so far

Because encampments at this scale are a relatively new problem for so many cities, elected officials and nonprofit partners have largely been experimenting on the fly with how to address them, balancing a mix of political, financial, and legal pressures, along with a practical shortage of affordable housing. Recommended practices continue to evolve as leaders pilot new models, as activists demand more compassionate standards, and as researchers study the consequences of past sweeps.

City responses have typically fallen into four broad categories, ranging from quickly “sweeping” the tents and providing no services to the unsheltered living there, to formally permitting people to camp out, and even providing bathrooms, areas to prepare food, and other social services. HUD research published in 2020 found the most common strategy cities have embraced was encampment “clearance and closure with support” — meaning deploying trained outreach workers to provide people with weeks of notice that their encampment would be shutting down, working to connect them with housing and services, and making longer-term storage of their belongings available.

This has worked fairly well in some communities, but caseworkers and housing are often unavailable, and new units or shelter beds cannot simply be erected quickly.

Earlier studies have suggested that clearance with no support, or a so-called “tough love” approach, does little to drive people to shelters or mitigate the broader problem of encampments. Typically the homeless often just pick up and relocate somewhere else nearby. “Clearance with little or no support may actually reduce the likelihood that people will seek shelter because it erodes trust and creates an adversarial relationship between people experiencing homelessness and law enforcement or outreach workers,” a HUD report published in 2019 concluded.

Individuals forced out of encampments often report losing their medication, walkers, and other items that affect their physical and mental health. Critics of sweeps point to the risks they pose to individuals’ health, as well as the cost to local city budgets. (Federal homeless dollars cannot be used on tent encampments.)

Amid growing community frustration, some leaders have started to pursue tougher measures on encampments, including ramping up criminal penalties on people pitching tents on public land. In at least half a dozen states, lawmakers have pushed bills based on templates from the Cicero Institute, an Austin-based think tank opposed to housing-first. The bills propose to permanently ban tent encampments and penalize cities that permit them.

Texas became the first state to pass a version of Cicero’s template legislation in 2021, and lawmakers say it was a direct response to Austin’s city council lifting its homeless encampment ban in 2019. (Austin’s encampment ban returned in 2021, after 57 percent of Austin residents voted for its reinstatement.)

In 2022, Tennessee became the first state to pass a bill that would make camping on local public land — like parks — a felony. Missouri likewise passed a Cicero-inspired law last year, that would criminalize sleeping on state-owned land. Missouri’s law allows the state’s attorney general to sue local governments that don’t enforce the ban.

This year lawmakers in Georgia and Arizona are debating passage of similar bills. Arizona’s was written by attorneys at the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank that has also filed a brief in support of the plaintiffs suing Phoenix officials for “the Zone” encampment.

While Republican lawmakers are advancing these bills on the state level, leaders in more liberal cities have also started to look for new tent-clearing solutions, including ones they previously would not have entertained.

In Portland, Oregon, for example, lawmakers voted in November to create several large sanctioned campsites for homeless individuals, and ban the more than 700 other encampments spread across the city. Sixty-eight percent of Portland voters support the idea, according to a poll commissioned by the Portland Business Alliance. In Sacramento, leaders recently approved new penalties for camping on sidewalks, and banned encampments near schools and daycares.

In San Francisco, leaders pioneered a model known as “navigation centers” — places unhoused people can go with fewer barriers to entry than traditional shelters. At the indoor navigation centers, individuals can connect with intensive case management and receive help with finding permanent housing. These centers have been deemed relatively successful even though the city hasn’t been able to stop the flow of more people into homelessness.

More than a dozen other liberal cities have since adopted San Francisco’s navigation center model, including Seattle and Houston. Supporters of these low-barrier spaces see them as very different from the sanctioned camping sites backed by the Cicero Institute, and a more welcoming option for many people wary of traditional shelters.

On her first day in office in December, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass declared a city emergency over homelessness, announcing a new plan to tackle encampments. The plan essentially consists of creating navigation centers to close encampments and connect homeless individuals with services and housing. But the challenge will be actually finding enough housing. Last year LA had nearly 42,000 people living on the streets, mixed with a growing housing affordability crisis.

Practically speaking, city officials recognize they are also fighting for their own careers. Homelessness, and how to handle it, has become one of the most salient political issues in recent elections in liberal cities like Portland, San Diego, Seattle, and Austin. Republicans have cast Democrats as incompetent and feckless when it comes to addressing the crisis. The public, across the political spectrum, wants elected officials to take some sort of action.

Marc Eichenbaum, the special assistant to Houston’s mayor on homeless initiatives, said when his city received its federal pandemic aid, they knew they wanted to launch a more proactive response to tent encampments. “We’re interested in solving it, not managing it,” he said. “There is an opportunity for homeless systems and providers to demonstrate to the public that housing-first is the answer to encampments.”

July 16, 2020

How The Largest Known Homeless Encampment in Minneapolis History Came To Be

Originally published in The Appeal on July 15, 2020.
—–

On June 7, less than a mile away from where a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, a veto-proof majority of the City Council gathered at Powderhorn Park and pledged to dismantle the police department and rethink public safety. A few days later, more than 200 homeless individuals were evicted from a hotel they had been using as an ad-hoc shelter, and about a dozen made their way to the closest park: Powderhorn. In the month since, many more have followed. City officials estimate more than 550 tents have been set up there, in what is the largest known homeless encampment in Minneapolis history.

Residents in the Powderhorn neighborhood initially jumped into action—determined to support their new, vulnerable neighbors, many of whom were Black and indigenous. But as the encampment grew, some housed residents’ became more exasperated, citing concerns about crime and safety. Their frustrations have gotten some national coverage. The conditions that led the encampment to form, however, and the government’s response or lack thereof, have gotten far less attention.

The homelessness crisis in Minneapolis, worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, is not new. In 2018, a Minnesota-based research group found over 4,000 people experienced homelessness in Hennepin County, an 11 percent increase from 2015. The researchers cited a lack of affordable units as the main driver, and found more than half of those experiencing homelessness were languishing on waiting lists for subsidized housing.

Back in the summer of 2018, an encampment cropped up alongside a Minneapolis highway sound wall, with roughly 300 people living there by the fall. “One thing that was very frustrating about the 2018 encampment was everyone talked about this great emergency, but the emergency had been going on for years,” said John Tribbett, a street outreach manager at St. Stephen’s Human Services, a Minneapolis homeless services group. “It was just a congregation of it that forced the public to actually see it.”

Nonprofit groups and city officials supported the primarily Native residents, who are disproportionately represented among Minnesota’s homeless. But by December those living in the encampment were moved into a so-called navigation center, a first-of-its-kind experiment in the state. The navigation center had on-site social services, lower barriers to entry than many homeless shelters, and no curfew. Within six months nearly half of its homeless population had moved into permanent housing or treatment programs, though others were kicked out, incarcerated, or back on the streets. The center shut down in June 2019.

“After it closed, what we really saw was the atomization of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness throughout the summer of 2019 and frankly up until COVID,” said Tribbett, emphasizing that displacement was routine, and homeless people were regularly “on the move all the time.”

As unsheltered people were dispersed across Minneapolis, the crisis of homelessness became easier for the city’s housed residents to ignore. The Powderhorn encampment has forced the public’s attention once again.

****

After the tents went up at Powderhorn, the community mobilized to support their unhoused neighbors. Volunteers began organizing funds and coordinating daily meal deliveries, setting up laundry shifts, and donating blankets, water, and toiletries. They also began organizing among themselves to put pressure on elected officials for help.

While the Minneapolis Park Police told those living in the encampment they would have to evacuate, dozens of housed residents protested, and pointed to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance and an executive order issued by Governor Tim Walz urging against homeless encampment sweeps during the pandemic. The Minneapolis Park Board relented and said the encampment could stay, and five days later, on June 17, the board approved a resolution to allow homeless people to seek “refuge space” in Minneapolis parks. By this time nearly 200 tents had been set up at Powderhorn.

As time went on, some residents felt abandoned by the government and frustrated that the bulk of care duties were falling on untrained volunteers. Encampment safety concerns grew too, with at least three incidents of sexual assault taking place between June 26 and July 5, one person threatened with a knife, and several overdoses.

“Things are very tense,” said Patrick Berry, a 41-year-old homeless individual who moved to Powderhorn in late June. “When your life is in the gutter, little things can set you off. People definitely freak out at the encampment over little things.”

“As white homeowners, I think we just assumed that the government was operating at a level of competence that it’s clearly not,” said Lily Lamb, a lifelong Powderhorn resident who has been volunteering. “I’ve called my elected officials from all levels of government and their response overwhelmingly has been, ‘What do you think we should do, what are your suggestions?’”

Alex Richardson, another Powderhorn resident who has been volunteering, said although he understands some of his neighbors are anxious about security concerns, he has tried to help them recognize that these are not new problems. “It’s just that we’re seeing it now, now it’s in our front yards,” he said. “Some people have been fearmongering, or there’s a lot of shock and disbelief since they’re used to not having to bear witness.”

On July 4, residents brought tents and camped outside the governor’s mansion in St. Paul, demanding a more organized state-led response to the homelessness crisis. “Walz just gave $6 million in relief aid to the Minnesota Zoo,” said Sheila Delaney, a Powderhorn volunteer. “I love animals, but Jesus Christ.”

****

Government officials have defended their crisis response, while noting that the pandemic has put unprecedented strain on their systems. “The most critical issue is that all of our staff and services have been stretched beyond anything we’ve ever known,” said David Hewitt, the director of the Office to End Homelessness for Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis.

Hewitt pointed out some things the government has done at the county level, including expanding shelter space, redeploying county staff to homeless services, and working to distribute $15 million in emergency rental assistance to prevent new homelessness. Between January and May, Hewitt added, the county moved more than 700 people from homelessness into permanent housing.

But he acknowledged their efforts “still fall woefully short of meeting the unprecedented need” and said at Powderhorn, they’ve been working to provide medical services and connect residents with housing options. “The daily increases in the number of people at Powderhorn Park are also not accompanied by any commensurate reductions in the numbers of people in other encampments or in shelter in Hennepin or Ramsey County,” Hewitt said.

Marion Greene, a Hennepin County commissioner, told The Appeal that the county has also been significantly scaling up funding for homelessness. “Normally we budget about $20 million per year, and now we’re spending an additional $2.5-to-3 million per month just on shelters,” she said. “I feel like there’s been really strong partnerships between the city, county, and state, and we’ve all been clear that permanent shelter is the goal.” The Minneapolis Park Board, for its part, said it has been providing portable toilets, trash cans, handwashing stations, and other onsite cleaning services. Today encampments are spread across 38 city parks, though Powderhorn remains the largest.

****

The current escalation of the homelessness crisis in Minneapolis is overlapping not just with the pandemic but also with intense protests around policing and racism.

Despite making up roughly 14 percent of Hennepin County’s population, Black people represent 65 percent of those living in its homeless shelters, and 49 percent of homeless adults living in the county overall.

While a dearth of affordable housing is certainly contributing to the crisis, the lack of wealth in Black and Native communities—the result of being shut out for centuries from wealth accumulation opportunities—is another main driver. Minneapolis has one of the largest racial income gaps in the country, and Black homeownership in the city stands at one-third the rate of white families. Some federal funds flow to tribal governments, but the majority gets spent on reservation life, despite the fact that most Natives now live in cities.

One resulting consequence is that in times of need, when Black and Native individuals turn to their family and friends for help, many of their social networks struggle to absorb the added financial pressure in ways white communities more easily can. Researchers found that people of color “are not unwilling to double up, take people in, or live in another person’s home—but they do not have the capacity to accommodate the additional consumption of resources” like food and household goods. “That, in turn, strains relationships.” Less wealth means less ability to weather unexpected financial emergencies.

The criminal legal system and decades of racist policing are also notorious drivers of homelessness. Formerly incarcerated people are almost 10 more times likely to be homeless than the general public, and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness reports roughly 48,000 people who enter shelters every year come directly from jails and prisons. Having a criminal record can then be a serious impediment to finding housing, which can then begin vicious cycles right back into prison. One study found that people returning from prison who lacked stable housing were more than twice as likely to end up back in prison than those with stable homes.

****

Looking ahead, even those most supportive of letting homeless people take sanctuary in public parks recognize an alternative solution must be developed, with the freezing Minneapolis winter just months away. Policymakers are also worrying about thousands of new people becoming homeless if lawmakers start lifting eviction moratoriums and unemployment rates stay high. “The economic impacts of COVID-19 are further threatening to exacerbate these challenges,” said Hewitt, the homelessness office director.

Earlier this month, Minneapolis Park Board members considered a resolution that would have limited homeless encampments to 10 parks, at a maximum of 10 tents per park, with all encampments having to be cleared by Sept. 1. After protests, the park board voted 5-4 to table the resolution.

“It felt pretty par for the course, where they wanted to do something that seemed like they were taking action, but it was really more for their housed constituents to get the homeless out of sight,” said Richardson, one of the Powderhorn volunteers.

“It was just another set of reactive strategies, similar to the governor saying you can’t clear the encampments but providing no further guidance on what you can do,” said Tribbett, the street outreach manager.

Jono Cowgill, the park board president, told the Star Tribune he brought the resolution forward to help set deadlines, which he hoped would push the state to act more quickly. Cowgill did not respond to a request for comment.

Some advocates are pushing the city to create a new navigation center, similar to the one that shut down last year. One possible location is in a South Minneapolis Kmart building the city recently purchased, though even that would not be a long-term solution.

“A lot of people called the navigation center a success but for many Native people it was just a revolving door to the streets,” said Autumn Dillie, an outreach worker with American Indian Community Development Corporation. Dillie said her group has been pressing the county to build a culturally specific shelter for Native people. Greene, the county commissioner, said the government is also exploring the purchase of hotels as a way to provide shelter.

Lamb, the lifelong Powderhorn resident, says the last few weeks have been exhausting, and she worries about people becoming desensitized to the crisis. “The ability of humans to adapt to circumstances is extremely powerful and is working against our favor,” she said.

Delaney, one of the Powderhorn volunteers, agreed. “I think we’ve become accustomed to seeing tents everywhere, but we should all be revolted,” she said. “Especially in an incredibly wealthy state.”

Berry, who is still camping at Powderhorn, wants help, but not too much of it. “All I really need is a safe place to live where I can close my door at night,” he said. “And where no one will harass me.”

Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged affordable housing, encampment, george floyd, homeless, Homelessness, housing, Minneapolis, powderhorn
Leave a comment

September 19, 2015

Welcome to the Courtroom That Is Every Renter’s Nightmare

Originally published in Next City (with illustrations by Sky Kalfus!) on September 14th, 2015.
——–
Deborah Jennings lives in a house in East Baltimore with her daughter and granddaughter. When she first moved in nearly five years ago, she was working as a nursing support technician, helping to draw blood. Hours were long, but she was able to pay her bills. That changed two years ago, when she became disabled and had to stop working. Without a steady paycheck, 57-year-old Jennings has struggled to pay her rent, and each month, that means a trip to rent court.

Each courtroom visit, the same complaints are made, the same issues described, and the same ultimatum given: Jennings must pay her rent or risk eviction. Although the conditions of her house are poor — the basement sink had water running for two months straight, paint hangs from her roof and water has settled in the ceilings — Jennings is in no position to negotiate. “You can start talking, but then the judges say, ‘I understand, but we’re here in reference to this rent, do you owe this rent?’ They don’t want to hear whether or not you have any issues,” Jennings says. “They don’t want none of that.”

“I’m not expecting to live here free,” she adds. “I said bear with me, you’re going to get your rent.”

Each year, Baltimore landlords file roughly 150,000 cases in rent court, which is housed in the District Court of Maryland. The city has 125,000 occupied rental units. Many tenants, like Jennings, are taken multiple times per year.

Despite its undeniable public impact, rent court remains one of city’s least transparent institutions. Any public records are hard to come by and in an era of metrics and open data, analysis of courtroom verdicts appears to be nonexistent.

“People know about it, but there’s no interest to understand why this keeps happening year after year,” says Zafar Shah, an attorney with the Baltimore-based Public Justice Center. “The whole system just does not function as it should.”

In the neighborhood of Oliver, where Jennings lives, nearly a third of families live below the poverty line, many of them on blighted blocks checkered with vacancy. Yet Oliver, along with other sections of Baltimore, is slowly beginning to see population trends reverse and new investment trickle in. With new residents and development come higher rents and more pressure for tenants like Jennings to pay up or get out.

“There is a lot of development in Oliver, a lot of new homeowners, but there are still a lot of people without a lot of money here,” says Darryl Dunaway, office manager and community organizer with the Oliver Community Association. “We hear about rent court all day. From 9 a.m. to 12, I am sending people down to 501 East Fayette Street for eviction prevention. I sent someone there this morning.”

Dunaway says that the community association and others like it around the city help as many people as they can each month, but there is only so much that can be done. “If you can’t pay one month, there is help. You come back next month and you are on your own,” he says.

Originally created to provide a nationwide model of justice for landlords and tenants, Baltimore’s housing court today serves as little more than a state-run rent collection agency, financed by taxpayers and the beleaguered renters themselves who pay court fees for each judgment ruled against them.

“The court system is not for the tenant,” says Jennings wearily. “It just becomes a money thing. It’s no longer about human beings.”

A Court Designed for Tenants

In 1936, the Baltimore Sun published a series of articles that illustrated some of the horrific conditions of Baltimore slums — where 40 percent of the city then lived. With the highest proportion of substandard housing among America’s big cities, local Baltimore officials moved to take action. But by 1941, unsatisfied with the city’s slow progress, some individuals formed the Citizens Planning and Housing Association to apply more pressure. What emerged in Baltimore — a campaign for new building and sanitation codes, and stronger mechanisms for enforcement — would eventually influence the wave of urban renewal across the country, as well as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Federal Housing Act of 1954.

The Baltimore Plan, as it came to be known, was based on a model of setting — and vigorously enforcing — minimum housing standards. The hope was to one day clean up all of Baltimore’s slums; if some delinquent properties had to be removed, so be it. Besides beefing up the number of housing inspections, reformers also wanted to create a special housing court designed to enforce the new standards. Even in the 1950s, regular courts were fairly overwhelmed, and disputes like rental issues were simply low-priority cases. The idea was to create a new space where both landlords and tenants could come in and expect a fair and thorough hearing. The courts would hold landlords accountable to health and sanitation standards, while landlords could expect the backing of the court if tenants were damaging their property or failing to pay rent. Baltimore’s rental housing court would become the first of its kind in the country. Today, most cities have similar systems in place.

“It was supposed to be about fundamentally changing the way property relations work,” says Daniel Pasciuti, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University who studies Baltimore’s rent court.

By the late 1960s and ’70s, widespread tenants’ rights changes were taking place all over the United States. In 1968, the Fair Housing Act became law, barring housing discrimination. Six years later, the federal government launched the Section 8 program, offering rental vouchers so eligible low-income tenants could live in private buildings, and in turn, requiring landlords to afford federally subsidized tenants a new set of rights. Perhaps the most notable reform, however, came from a federal ruling in 1970, Javins v. First National Realty Corp., where the D.C. Circuit ruled that if a living situation is deemed uninhabitable, the tenant is freed from his obligation to pay rent. This establishment of “the implied warrant of habitability” was widely seen as a revolution in landlord-tenant relations; it set the precedent for treating leases as contracts between landlords and tenants, a change considered to be more modern and fair. Tenants would now have the right to introduce evidence of housing code violations if they were sued for late rent, and if the living situation were found unacceptable, the tenant would not have to pay.

But in recent years, housing courts look less like the guardian against slum conditions imagined by New Deal-era advocates and far more like other municipal courts that target low-level offenders and focus disproportionately on the poor.

After visiting rent court in the 1990s, University of Maryland law professor Barbara Bezdek concluded that, beneath “the veneer of due process,” litigants “who are members of socially subordinated groups” are systematically excluded. Though rent court was originally meant to be an accessible space where tenants and landlords could speak directly to a judge without a lawyer, the reality is that the arrangement favors the landlords. Bezdek found that differences in speech, the effects of poverty and the unduly high hurdles tenants were asked to overcome to even raise a defense prevented them from being truly heard. All in all, Bezdek described the legal dynamics as “a charade.” In the two decades since, not much has changed.

A Judicial “Charade”

On a typical day in rent court, the average number of scheduled cases ranges from 800 to 1,000. Shah says the court’s “dirty little secret” is that it depends on the overwhelming majority of summoned tenants to not show up — meaning default wins for the landlord — because there’s no way judges could ever hear as many cases as they schedule. Mark Scurti, associate judge at Baltimore City’s District Court, agrees they would not be able to handle as many cases as they schedule if all tenants were to appear. “It would put a tremendous strain on our current staffing and judges,” he says.

For tenants who do show up to court, it’s not much better. “The court really operates like a giant black box. I have a friggin’ Ph.D. and I’m sitting there like, if this were me and I was actually there [for a case], I would have no idea what’s going on,” says Pasciuti. “There’s no direction, there’s nobody there to explain anything to you.” While some legal aid groups try to offer assistance, their availability is minimal, and most tenants go in without professional help. On days with full dockets, a case can easily receive less than 30 seconds of judicial review.

Rent court is one of the few courts in Maryland’s judiciary system for which no digitized records are available. Whereas all other court cases are filed online, no similar computer system has ever existed for these housing disputes; everything must be manually processed and gets filed away into a vault. Relatedly, no court records are available to determine things like the number of judgments ruled in the landlords’ favor, or how many times an individual tenant is brought to court annually. “I think those are critical numbers to know, and I’m all about watching statistics and watching trends,” says Scurti, who hopes the court will be included in a statewide electronic court filing initiative that is being rolled out over the next couple years. “Why we’ve never been electronic before, I don’t know,” he says. “I suspect it has to do with funding.”

Obtaining data on the number of evictions is similarly difficult. While the sheriff’s office tallies monthly eviction stats for rent court stakeholders to review, it does not make the data easily accessible to the public. It took several weeks for the city to agree to share with me that they had a total of 6,309 evictions in 2014. Housing advocates say the number has hovered around 7,000 evictions annually for the last 10 years. An Abell Foundation report published in 2003 found that the chances of eviction are greater if one rents in Baltimore than in comparable cities like Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and Cleveland.

Rent court is easily one of the state’s speediest judicial proceedings. Landlords can file for trial a mere one day after rent is late, no matter what the reason. In other states, like New York, landlords must serve tenants with a “rent demand” that gives them three or five days to pay overdue rent before an eviction case is started. New York tenants who do not receive these notices can raise that as a defense in court, says Jenny Laurie, executive director of Housing Court Answers. There is no similar pre-filing period required in Baltimore, leading to, what Shah describes as, “an enormous amount of unnecessary litigation.”

Such a rapid system also gives tenants little time to prepare their defenses, but from the landlord’s perspective, the process has to be quick. “On a large commercial scale [court speed] is not such an importance because they have an ability to withstand not getting rent, but when you’re not a commercial landlord and you have maybe just three, four units, or just one unit, plus a mortgage on the property, [not getting] your rent is a big deal,” says Dennis Hodge, a lawyer who has been representing landlords in the Baltimore area since the mid 1980s. “Most landlords do not want to do evictions, they prefer just to get their money,” he adds.

But when tenants are unable or unwilling to pass over that money, the courtroom’s speed comes into play again. With hundreds of cases to hear in a day, the judges have little time to hear the details of a tenant’s situation. And without professional legal assistance, tenants are generally unable to defend themselves against common chicanery like landlords tacking on additional charges veiled as rent.

Judges often ask tenants why they don’t just move if a rental is uninhabitable or too expensive. “People can’t afford to just pick up and move!” exclaims Detrese Dowridge, a 30-year-old single mother who has gone to rent court three time since May 2013. Dowridge’s Northwest Baltimore home had cracked walls and windows, scurrying mice and roaches, and a leaky ceiling. “And even if they can move,” she says, “then the person who comes in after them will still be stuck with the [same] landlord getting away with whatever.”

“There’s a lot of blaming and shaming the poor in the courtroom,” explains Shah. “I think the spirit with which the court operates is that you have to deserve your housing.”

Reforming Rent Court

Without a jury or many headline-making cases, civil courtroom proceedings have typically flown under the public’s radar. That is beginning to change. A Department of Justice report issued in the wake of police officer Darren Wilson’s deadly shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson singled out the Missouri municipal court for “constitutionally deficient” procedures that “undermine the court’s role as a fair and impartial judicial body.”

Now attorneys at the Public Justice Center have teamed up with the Right to Housing Alliance (RTHA), a Baltimore-based human rights organization, and Jews United for Justice (JUFJ), a local activist group, to try and change the frustrating realities of rent court. With $280,000 in grant funding from the Abell Foundation, they hope to lead a court reform initiative and promote greater awareness about housing evictions around the city.

“The bare minimum allowable for any human dignity in the rental housing system is for this court to be fixed,” says Jessica Lewis, an organizer with RTHA.

“Our members that go through rent court are just defeated,” she adds. “They feel there is no dignity. It’s just really, really dehumanizing for them.”

Pasciuti, with a team of Johns Hopkins students, has been helping the three organizations conduct surveys and analyze their quantitative data. The goal is to collect meaningful information about what actually happens in rent court. “Our theory is if the public narrative about low-income renters was articulated, presented with numbers, substantiated in a really sound way, and we got it out to the right people, then we can get to a point where there is the political will, and even maybe the business interest to fix this system,” says Shah. The groups hope to go public with a completed dataset of over 300 tenant surveys, augmented by information from the court proceedings and regulatory agencies, later this fall.

In addition to bringing tenant voices into the public discussion, the Public Justice Center also aims to launch a legal strategy, in order to get sufficient clarity about what “rent” means in a residential lease context. Shah says they are considering either a class-action lawsuit or litigating through the appeals process to investigate tricky lease clauses that landlords often use to get more money or to evict tenants.

The activists’ timing might be just right. Scurti, the Baltimore judge frustrated by the lack of good data collection in his court, says he also wants to move toward a formal evaluation of docket patterns to see how the court can operate better. “I want to understand the process and to reevaluate it,” he says. He is particularly interested in figuring out how technology might help the court function more smoothly.

Ultimately, all sides agree that the court today is a flawed and inefficient operation. “You’re not going to encounter a judge, or a landlord, or an advocate for tenants who will tell you things are going well,” says Shah. The problem, however, is that improvement means different things for everyone involved. Despite the relative speed at which these cases move, Baltimore landlords, for instance, still feel the whole legal process should be adjudicated much more quickly and with less bureaucracy. Tenant advocates, on the other hand, want increased procedural accessibility and due process.

A promising place to look may be Massachusetts, which has one of the best housing court models in the country. First established in the 1970s, housing court officials in Massachusetts have prioritized creating a system that is accessible to both landlords and tenants.

In addition to a robust legal services community, Massachusetts employs court staff to serve as mediators between landlords and tenants and help them solve disputes without going directly before a judge. According to Paul J. Burke, deputy court administrator, the majority of rental disputes are settled this way. The typical length of a mediation session is around 30 minutes, which can provide a greater sense of dignity than Baltimore’s hasty proceedings. In some cases, mediations can even last for several hours.

Ultimately it comes down to fairness. “From day one back in the early ’70s, it was anticipated that many people would be self-represented, would perhaps be lower-income, and perhaps not have the highest level of educational training,” says Burke. “The policies, the processes and the forms in our courts have always been set up with that in mind.”

Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged affordable housing, Baltimore, Baltimore Plan, courts, Darren Wilson, dockets, Dwight D. Eisenhower, evictions, Federal Housing Act of 1954, ferguson, Homelessness, homeowners, housing, housing eviction, implied warrant of habitability, Javins v. First National Realty Corp, Johns Hopkins, judges, judicial, judicial review, landlords, legal aid, Massachusetts, michael brown, poverty, renters, renting, section 8, slums, social justice, sociology, tenants
Leave a comment

February 7, 2015

Will Handing Public Housing Projects to Private Developers Hurt the Poor?

Originally published in Pacific Standard on February 6th 2015.
———–
On a Wednesday night in early January, 21-year-old Ronald Hunter Jr.—a homeless and mentally ill man living in Buffalo, New York—froze to death. The overnight temperature hit two degrees, but with the fierce wind that night, it felt more like 20 below zero. The medical examiner’s autopsy confirmed that hypothermia killed Hunter. His story is not atypical; homeless people from across the country died last winter from freezing temperatures.

Tragedies like these, especially in the dead of winter, bring the lack of decent and affordable housing into sharp relief. Walk through the streets of any major city (and, increasingly, many suburbs) and you’ll likely see clusters of homeless people huddled under blankets, under folded cardboard boxes, sleeping on sidewalks, on top of park benches. A report released this past fall by the National Center on Family Homelessness estimated that one in 30 American children are now homeless—a record phenomenon attributed to the rising number of families living in poverty, a dearth of affordable housing, and the consequences of widespread domestic violence.

But beyond homelessness, there are other serious, less visible, and less well-understood housing problems with which millions of Americans regularly struggle. The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard found that, in 2012, more than four-fifths of those earning $15,000 annually—roughly how much a full-time worker makes at the federal minimum wage—spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing; two-thirds paid more than 50 percent. With stagnant wages, the financial burden weighs heavily on the middle class too, and is trending upwards.

The housing policy world has a term it uses to refer to the millions of people living in precarious, overcrowded, and unsafe conditions: “housing insecure.” It’s an apt, yet nebulous way to characterize all those who worry about their long-term access to safe shelter. These people aren’t homeless, but they’re vulnerable—often one emergency or missed paycheck away from eviction. Their day-to-day plight, however, is less apparent to the public.

Most people do not get the help they need. Due to high demand, federal housing assistance serves just a quarter of all eligible households. With few vouchers and interminably long waiting lists, more than 2.2 million people rely on public housing to help them get by. But despite the growing need, the federal government has been moving further away from the idea of a state-run public housing system.

Through a new program known as Rental Assistance Demonstration, existing public housing units are slated to be “converted” into something that looks more like the Section 8 voucher program, under which tenants live in privately owned or managed units that are publicly subsidized. Congressional funding for public housing has declined over the years, as support for the program fell and the deteriorating units became more difficult to properly maintain. Consequently, more than 260,000 affordable units have been demolished or removed from the public housing program since the mid-1990s and 10,000 additional units are lost each year because they fail to meet acceptable health and safety standards. Many of these people are forced to double up with family or take to shelters and the streets.

Now with the potential to bring in copious amounts of new funding from private companies, Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro has dubbed RAD “the answer” to housing issues in many struggling communities.

But the long-term consequences of RAD are not yet known. When Congress authorized the demonstration program in 2012, 60,000 public housing units were approved for transfer to private developers—just five percent of the nation’s public housing stock. These developers are incentivized to rehab and manage the units in exchange for tax credits and subsidies, codified within contracts that last for 15-20 years. Yet since its original passage, HUD and a coalition of public housing authorities, developers, and other stakeholders have been lobbying the government to lift the demonstration cap beyond the 60,000 units so that any and all public housing authorities can access these new private funding streams.

Their efforts are succeeding. Included in the $1.1 trillion spending bill that Congress passed in December was a provision to raise the RAD cap from 60,000 units to 185,000 units, or essentially every project sitting on the waiting list.

Not everyone is thrilled about how fast things are moving. Many housing advocates and civil rights lawyers worry that the program will fail to ensure long-term affordability and safeguard tenant protections. Their concerns are warranted: In the past, when the government has relied on private capital to fund low-income housing, many affordable units were turned into market-rate rentals once the developers paid off their 30-year mortgages. And in earlier efforts to rehab buildings through public-private partnerships, thousands of public housing units were destroyed without ever being replaced.

California Democratic Representative Maxine Waters, the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, sent a letter to President Obama asking him to reconsider RAD. She urged him to allocate more direct federal subsidies to public housing authorities, rather than relying on private developers to salvage the program. “Put simply,” she wrote, “if the price of accessing private capital is to put public ownership at risk, then that price is too high.”

James Hanlon, the director of the Institute for Urban Research at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville and a longtime public housing researcher, has been poring through HUD data to try and figure out if there’s any pattern in the line-up of specific housing projects selected for conversion, or if there are any shared characteristics among the housing authorities that have opted to participate. Hanlon notes that although the private sector has been used to fund affordable housing since the 1970s, RAD is unique in its aim to actually preserve the original units. Previous experiments have promoted demolishing aging housing rather than repairing the old units.

Private financing strategies for public housing are also spreading to cities not formally associated with RAD. New York City’s public housing authority, which lacks billions of dollars in needed capital funds, recently finalized a deal to grant private developers a 50 percent stake in nearly 900 public housing apartments across the city. It also plans to create a non-profit to solicit hundreds of millions of dollars in tax-deductible donations from the private sector.

While experts and activists have mixed feelings about RAD, the new federal spending bill also included a significant policy win that everyone who works on affordable housing seems to be excited about. The government finally voted to authorize dedicated funding for the National Housing Trust Fund—an entity established in 2008 to provide annual dollars for building and preserving affordable housing.

However, in its current form, this is unlikely to help revive the flailing public housing program; HUD’s working rule stipulates that Housing Trust Fund revenue can only be used to fund affordable housing that is not considered traditional public housing, unless it’s through the RAD program.

But for those who hope to see Congress allocate more funds to traditional public housing, the most likely way is through the passage of Representative Keith Ellison’s Common Sense Housing Investment Act. This bill would raise a lot of new money by reforming the mortgage interest deduction—a tax break that primarily benefits wealthy homeowners. By changing the deduction into a tax credit, more low- and middle-income homeowners would be eligible for tax relief, and high-income homeowners would pay more. The plan is estimated to raise about $200 billion over 10 years. Importantly, some of this new revenue would be directed into the public housing capital fund; the legislation would also revise HUD’s rule to make traditional public housing eligible to receive Housing Trust Fund dollars.

With Congressional deadlock however, this reality is a long way off. For now, one can expect developers and housing authorities to continue striking private-public deals, with variable levels of transparency and oversight.

It wouldn’t be the first time the government, in a rush to do something, expanded a housing program rather hastily. “Hope VI, a public housing redevelopment program in the 1990s and 2000s, began as a demonstration project that had terrible oversight, assessments, and evaluations early on,” Hanlon says. “I think that there needs to be much more judicious forward movement for RAD because many of its implications are not well understood and won’t be felt for a long time.”

Perhaps RAD will turn out to be the housing panacea millions of people have been waiting for. Or maybe it will lead, once again, to the loss of affordable housing units and tenant displacement.

In this moment of doubt, hope, and desperation, “housing insecurity” just about sums it up.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged homeless, Homelessness, HOPE VI, housing, HUD, public housing, RAD, Rental Assistance Demonstration, shelter, tenants
Leave a comment

January 28, 2015

‘Housing First’ Policy for Addressing Homelessness Hamstrung By Funding Issues

Originally published in The American Prospect on January 27, 2015.
_________

In an era of shrinking financial resources, policymakers, providers, and activists who work on homelessness prevention and care in the United States have been forced to develop new strategies. There was a time when officials at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) saw it as their responsibility to provide both housing and supportive services for homeless individuals, but now HUD now is refocusing its budget predominately on rent and housing—with the hope that other local, state, and federal agencies will play a greater role in providing supportive care. However, whether other organizations will actually be able to pick up those costs and responsibilities remains unclear.

The first major federal legislative response to homelessness was the McKinney-Vento Act of 1987, which passed both the House and Senate with large bipartisan majorities. The McKinney Act—which Bill Clinton later renamed the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act—provided funds not only for emergency shelter, transitional housing, and permanent housing, but also for job training, primary health care, mental health care, drug and alcohol treatment, education programs, and other supportive services. The consensus was that homelessness is a complex problem whose solution requires more than simply a roof and a bed.

The statutory goal of the McKinney Act was to gradually move homeless people toward stable housing and independence—a model that came to be known as “Housing Readiness.” Though this sprung from well-meaning intentions, it eventually became clear that this “gradual” approach frequently led to unwise and unfair ways of distributing welfare.

“We had this system that said homeless people essentially have to earn their way to permanent housing,” explained Ed Stellon, the senior director of the Midwest Harm Reduction Institute, and someone who has worked within the substance use and mental health treatment systems for more than 20 years. “Homeless people had to earn their way into transitional housing, make progress on certain goals, and finally when they were deemed well enough, they would earn their spot in permanent housing.”

A different model, known as “Housing First”, has been gaining steam over the past decade. What at first sounded revolutionary now feels fairly obvious: The Housing First approach posits that the only requirement for housing should be homelessness—that shelter is a right, not a privilege. “Plus, if you have conditions like out-of-control diabetes, congestive heart failure, or schizophrenia, housing is actually part of the solution,” adds Stellon. “It’s hard to make any meaningful progress on these chronic conditions without stable housing.”

Though exact estimates are hard to come by, HUD recently reported that as of January 2014, the chronically homeless numbered some 84,291, with 63 percent of those individuals living on the streets. HUD says this number has declined by 21 percent, or 22,937 persons, since 2010—in large part because of the embrace of Housing First. (Some, however, have accused the federal government of using data gimmicks to paint a more cheery picture of progress than has actually been made.)

Nevertheless, the reality is that at the same time policymakers are embracing the idea of Housing First, fewer affordable housing units exist than ever before. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, federal support for low-income housing has fallen 49 percent between 1980 and 2003, and the Joint Center for Housing Studies found about 200,000 rental units are destroyed annually. Research also suggests that a supply of 8.2 million more units would be needed to house extremely low-income households, up from a gap of 5.2 million a decade earlier. Though Congress recently authorized funding for the National Housing Trust Fund—an entity that was created in 2008 to fund affordable housing proects—its budget is nowhere near large enough to meet the demand.

“We’re not doing enough to expand housing availability, and HUD can’t expand its services unless Congress allocates it more funding,” says Barbara DiPietro, the director of policy for the National Health Care for the Homeless Council.

Given the fiscal climate, HUD is looking for new ways to spend its increasingly limited budget. Consequently, the agency is moving away from the supportive services that, through the McKinney-Vento Act, once accounted for most of its spending. In 1998, for instance, 55 percent of HUD’s budget was spent on supportive services, and 45 percent was awarded for housing. By 2013, just 26 percent of HUD’s competitive homeless assistance funds went to supportive services, and 66 percent was spent on housing. According to Ann Oliva, director of HUD’s Office of Special Needs Assistance Programs, the department’s goal now is to help local communities become more strategic with existing resources and available opportunities.

To do this, HUD has been working closely with other federal agencies, especially the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. In 2008, a joint program known as HUD-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing (HUD-VASH) launched, combining housing vouchers for homeless veterans provided by HUD, with case management and clinical services provided by the V.A. Experts agree that HUD-VASH has been quite successful in helping both vets and their families, and it’s typically held up as the poster child for future interagency collaborative efforts. However, the program came with additional appropriated dollars, and it is typically easier to convince Congress to fund programs for impoverished military veterans compared to other downtrodden groups.

One of the most significant recent changes to homelessness policy has come through the expansion of Medicaid—a key feature of the Affordable Care Act. Now that nearly all individuals with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level are eligible for health insurance in states that opt for the expansion, agencies are scrambling to enroll thousands of homeless people so that they may benefit from new streams of mandatory government spending.

But Medicaid is, at its heart, a program controlled by the states. And with some states still vigorously opposed to expanding Medicaid—despite the ACA’s mandate for the federal government to pick up nearly all of the tab for the expansion—let alone some of the flexible legislative adaptations that HHS is encouraging, consistent and widespread changes to supportive services seem unlikely in the near future.

Though Medicaid expansion presents great opportunities for providing services to the homeless, some are concerned that the more flexible federal dollars currently set aside to work with homeless people will eventually just be funneled into the larger health insurance pool, with little, if any, allocated to doing what it takes to bring those with no homes into the government support system, which is needed in order to provide preventive care.

“Going out four or five times to visit with a woman living alone under a bridge, just trying to form a relationship and build trust with her so she will feel comfortable coming in to get more help—those types of health encounters are not typically billable through health insurance,” adds Stellon, who says outreach can be one of the hardest things for him to fund. “In our current system, it’s easier to pay for someone’s amputated fingers than to build a human relationship.”

Ultimately, there is only so much the government can do to advance the goal of Housing First with a depleting stock of housing units and a shrinking budget for supportive services.

“It’s a big mistake to come up with a good solution like Housing First and then to hamstring it because we don’t actually have the money for it,” says Todd Stull, the clinical director at a JOURNEYS | The Road Home, an organization that provides services and shelter to families and individuals in Illinois’s North and Northwest suburban Cook County. “One of the worst things you can do is get someone into housing for a short period of time and then they lose it. Then they lose trust in the providers.”

“We have not done well as a nation taking on poverty and implementing policies needed to address homelessness,” says Dr. Sam Tsemberis, the founder and CEO of Pathways to Housing, a national organization that first pioneered the Housing First model in 1992. “So we end up taking care of homelessness out of desperation, but we’ll be taking care of homelessness forever if we don’t take care of poverty.”

“We need more money,” adds DiPietro. “Until then, we’re just rearranging the priority list.”

Posted in Housing
Tagged Affordable Care Act, Bill Clinton, health care, homeless, Homelessness, housing, Housing First, HUD, HUDVASH, Medicaid, poverty
Leave a comment