Removing Homeless Encampments Doesn’t End Homelessness

In Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court recently upheld cities’ rights to enforce ordinances against public camping, a euphemism for the homeless encampments that now litter many U.S. municipalities. Weeks later, toward the end of July, California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order instructing state agencies to remove encampments from state property and urging local officials to do likewise.

The Grants Pass ruling overturned a lower court decision in Martin v. Boise (2018), which held that clearing such encampments violated the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment. The arguments in the case, however, focused on whether or not living without shelter is “involuntary”—a question that undergirds virtually all homelessness policies in this country.

As of 2023, roughly 650,000 Americans were homeless, and more than 250,000 were living unsheltered. At face value, it seems obvious that their situation is involuntary. Who would choose to live on the streets?

Choosing to live without shelter is more common than you might think. Researchers studying “tent cities” found that “residents appear to have preferred to live in tents because it provided them with a sense of autonomy and normalcy that they could not find within the shelter system.”

This is especially true for those suffering from opioid addiction. As early as 1923, Nels Anderson, a Columbia University sociology professor who had been homeless in the past, observed that “users of heroin or morphine” chose to live on the streets of Chicago because they were “not able to separate themselves from the source of supply.” In 2019, the Department of Housing and Urban Development made similar observations about residents of encampments congregating around drug markets.

If we adopt the belief that homeless people are entirely victims of circumstances beyond their control, which appears to be the operative assumption of many homeless “advocates,” we are tacitly assuming there is nothing they can do to escape their situation. This fundamentally shapes our policy response.

For example, consider the activities of San Francisco’s Coalition on Homelessness and the Salvation Army.

The Coalition on Homelessness sees homeless people as victims of forces beyond their control. It understandably divides its energy and resources between political activism, making homeless people more comfortable in their squalor.

The Salvation Army, by contrast, believes that many homeless people are capable of making decisions regarding their well-being. Its programs center on recovery and helping people become self-sufficient.

Unfortunately, the federal government’s Housing First philosophy, which has shaped the national homelessness strategy since 2013, falls into the victimhood camp. It treats homeless people as lost causes who can be helped only by making them permanent wards of the state. Recovery and self-sufficiency are no longer even among the goals.

Even those who believe that most people without homes are responsible for the choices they make generally recognize that a significant minority are suffering from mental illness. In such cases—where we might consider homelessness wholly involuntary—intervention on their behalf is justified. In other contexts, when somebody is medically incapable of making decisions regarding their own well-being, we assign proxies to make decisions on their behalf.

This, then, is the crux of the issue: If life on the streets is genuinely involuntary because of mental illness or addiction, intervention should be considered both reasonable and necessary to get them the care they need and keep them off the streets. But for those who retain a reasonable amount of control over their lives, homelessness policy should be aimed at shepherding them toward independence.

This does not mean we have to callously disregard the external factors that contributed to their situation, such as high housing costs, which strongly correlate with higher rates of homelessness. But neither should we accept the faux compassion that treats fellow human beings as incapable of escaping homelessness and embraces “solutions” that merely make their destitution more tolerable.

Now that the Supreme Court has reinstated local governments’ authority to intervene on behalf of homeless people, officials should no longer tolerate encampments in public spaces.

But this authority comes with an obligation to ensure that encampment residents have viable alternatives. Give people a range of permissible options—such as recovery programs for homeless drug addicts who want to get clean and low-barrier shelters for those who don’t—and let them decide how they will stay off the streets.