Supreme Court Rules You Don’t Have to Have a Home, but You Can’t Stay Here

How Will Santa Barbara and Other Local Governments Respond to Majority Ruling Conflating Poverty with Criminality?

A homeless camp at the Garden Street off-ramp in Santa Barbara in 2021 | Credit: City of Santa Barbara

EAST OF THE DOG, WEST OF THE SUN: In Barcelona this past weekend, Spaniards by the thousands armed themselves with brightly colored plastic water pistols and then hit the streets, en masse, in search of tourists to shoot.

As an act of political protest, it was theatrical and whimsical, but it was also deadly serious. And for the tourists — “mass tourists,” as they are derisively known in Barcelona — it’s been more than a little scary. Understandably so. The point being made by the pistoleros del agua is that all the tourists flocking to Barcelona — about 23 million a year — have effectively driven real-life, honest-to-God Barcelonans out of their own hometown. By their sheer numbers — nothing exceeds like success — tourists have driven up the cost of housing well past the breaking point. Of particular ire to the protesters are all the housing units cannibalized by the vacation rental market.

I don’t know in what movie we are told, “Resistance is futile,” but clearly the Spanish protesters didn’t get the memo.

In other words, there is hope.

I say that as a quasi-onanistic act of self-reassurance given our Supreme Court’s recent ruling on homelessness, delivered as part of the high court’s massive brain vomit released a few days before the Fourth of July. I have now read the opinion — better known as City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson — three times. I have marked it up with various colored pens. I still hope I am reading it wrong.

But colored pens don’t lie.

Neither, I hope, do tutti-frutti-colored squirt pistols.

In a nutshell, the high court ruling gives the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval to a Grants Pass ordinance that criminalizes camping in public. What makes this one special: Camping in public is only illegal when committed by people who happen to be homeless. The same ordinance deems the exact same acts permissible if and when performed by someone who happens to dwell in what’s otherwise known as a legal domicile.

The ordinance as written defines an illegal campsite as any place where bedding or blankets are placed “for purposes of maintaining a temporary place to live.” If you are lucky enough to have your own place, you and your sweetie can camp in public with a blanket or sleeping bag. But if you don’t have a place, then that blanket or sleeping bag would be against the law. It doesn’t get more black-and-white than that.

In the United States, we like to hold certain delusions to be self-evident. One is that acts we commit as human beings can be construed as illegal or not. But who and what we are as people cannot be deemed illegal. It’s tied up in this whole no-one-is-above-the-law thing. Despite repeatedly insisting otherwise, the majority opinion — signed on to by six of the nine justices — constitutionally consecrated an ordinance that explicitly conflates poverty with criminality.

Have you checked your bank account recently?

I know I sound preachy and screechy. Last week, a reader notified me I was the journalistic equivalent of the “Black Death,” but also — and presumably much worse — I was also “a downer.”

I will try to keep things light.

Like Eleanor Rigby, I have no idea where all the homeless people come from. I do, however, know where they don’t belong.

On the streets.

I get why the Supremes took up the case. The eruption of homeless encampments throughout the nation, the western United States, and especially California — where roughly one-third of the total homeless population happens to live — has been profoundly disturbing and upsetting.

On a molecular level.

Since 2018, local governments in the western United States have been put on notice by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal that they could no longer issue citations to homeless people for illegal camping or sleeping in public if there was not also an adequate number of shelter beds for them to go inside. Cops could no longer simply roust people the way they always had.

Throw in the COVID nightmare and the post–George Floyd movement to decriminalize such things as mental illness, poverty, and Blackness, and it’s a brand-new day. Jail was no longer the default answer to all insoluble problems. Local governments could no longer just try to arrest their way out of it.

In Santa Barbara, city halls, county bureaucrats, philanthropists, activists, providers, and assorted do-gooders erupted with a frenzy of unprecedented creativity. Tapping into vast reserves of one-time federal funds, they built new tiny-home villages with hundreds of new tiny-home units where homeless people could take their pets, take their stuff, get help, and lock their doors. Old junkie motels were transformed into homeless housing. Not one, but two new day centers have been opened, creating spaces where homeless people could take a load off, connect with service providers, and figure out a pathway for getting housed. The county mental health department managed to just reopen its long-shuttered Crisis Stabilization Unit, creating eight “new” short-term bed spaces for people getting ready to flip the F out.

We still face some ridiculous gaps in service, and some of the experiments — like the Rose Garden Inn — flopped loudly, miserably, and in everybody’s faces.

As much as local governments complained they lost all control, they didn’t. The City of Santa Barbara, for example, managed to shut down 508 encampments in 2024. By any reckoning, that’s a big number. But so too are the 3,600 homeless people who got rehoused over the past three years, and the 4,000 people who got emergency federal support so they wouldn’t get evicted. Last year alone, 1,400 homeless people got housed in Santa Barbara County. In the same year, 4,333 other people applied for homeless services, half of them for the first time.

What happens now that local governments are emboldened to start issuing citations and arresting people again? I don’t pretend to know. I have been told everything and its opposite. I hope nothing.

Either way, bring your squirt gun. I am told it’s going to be a long, hot summer.