The Supreme Court may decide soon whether to take up an issue that would give cities the legal ability to arrest homeless individuals sleeping in public places, as nationwide homelessness reached all-time highs in 2023. 

The justices are meeting Friday to discuss the request of 20 states, Governor Newsom, and dozens of cities petitioning the court to take up appellate court decisions that ruled should there be no available shelter beds, being homeless is “involuntary,” and cities cannot legally arrest individuals sleeping or camping on public land. 

The latest Housing and Urban Development report indicates that homelessness is on the rise, jumping by more than 70,000 people since 2022, a 12 percent increase. On a single night in 2023, an estimated 653,100 people were without a home, with 60 percent of the individuals in shelters and 40 percent unsheltered.

Many cities and local authorities have cited two Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decisions — Martin v. Boise and Johnson v. City of Grants Pass — for tying their hands when it comes to enforcing public camping bans. The rulings, as the Sun has reported, have created altered law enforcement approaches in cities throughout the country and are cited by the Department of Justice as it directs authorities to “change policies that criminalize behaviors associated with homelessness.”

While states like California have cleared more than 5,600 encampments and allocated $300 million towards moving people out of encampments, Mr. Newsom has cited the appellate ruling as hampering efforts to crack down on enforcing public camping bans. 

“We should be finding out in the next few days,” the Goldwater Institute’s legal affairs vice president, Timothy Sandefur, told the Sun about the Supreme Court meeting. The Goldwater Institute, based in Arizona, is one of the groups that filed an amicus brief to the Court on the topic. Since the justices are meeting Friday and there is no particular reason to think the decision will be postponed, he said, “we could hear from them as soon as Monday.” 

As large cities receive much of the attention surrounding homelessness, there have been increases in rural towns and mid-size cities as well. 

“Unlike past years, when a single population drove changes in homelessness rates, the report finds increases across all populations,” the Housing and Urban Development report noted. 

Those increases are due to a variety of factors, the National Alliance to End Homelessness’s chief policy officer, Steve Berg, told the Sun, but are mainly attributable to a long-term shortage of affordable housing and incomes failing to keep up with higher prices. 

“The uptick has been pretty universal between rural areas and urban areas,” he said, noting that while some rural homeless individuals head to cities with more resources, those who live in smaller communities face unique challenges. 

“Most rural areas, they don’t have a lot of programs for homeless people. They don’t have shelters, they don’t have rehousing kind of programs, and the federal homeless money tends to go to the places where the most homeless people are, which is in the cities,” he said. “There tends to be not as much housing in rural areas, either.” 

Another issue is that since rural areas don’t have as many shelters, he said, people may live in run-down housing that isn’t safe for habitation. “People who are unsheltered tend to be less visible if they’re in a real rural area,” he said. “They can find places where nobody will see them.”

When it comes to cities and the upcoming Supreme Court discussion as to whether to take up the encampment issue, Mr. Berg said there could be constitutional issues at play. 

“My feeling is that if you have a country with a Constitution that’s based on due process, the idea that people who have no money to afford housing can get arrested and put in jail for not having housing does not seem to be compliant with what I think of as due process,” he said. “But we’ll see if they even take the case.”