Tag Archives: unhoused

The big bet on “tiny homes” to fix homelessness

Originally published at Vox on November 29, 2023.
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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.”

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

Originally published at Vox on October 10, 2023.
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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.”

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

Originally published in Vox on September 14, 2023.
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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.