Cities from coast to coast overrun by homeless people are starting to enforce public camping bans by clearing long-standing tent city encampments despite protests from homeless advocates who say such actions are merely concealing, not solving, the problem.

As the country grapples with more than half a million homeless individuals on a given night — a crisis exacerbated by the pandemic — national debate has ensued over the rights of homeless individuals versus property owners affected by crime, open drug use, and public health issues that can be tied to the encampments. 

As cities such as Boston and Portland begin enforcing anti-camping ordinances, questions are emerging about how to ethically address homelessness. While advocates for clearing the tents argue that the camps are hotbeds of public defecation, indecent exposure, and harassment, homeless rights advocates say clearing the tents is criminalizing poverty and doesn’t address the root causes of the housing crisis. 

“Human beings need somewhere to rest their heads at night,” the Coalition for the Homeless’s executive director, David Giffen, tells the Sun. “If there’s no affordable housing available and no decent emergency shelter, they’re going to need to find somewhere to bed down and will set up tents, shanties, whatever they can.” 

Cities need to provide “rational alternatives” if they’re going to clear encampments, he adds. “Criminalizing poverty isn’t only inhumane and counterproductive, it’s also more expensive in the long run,” Mr. Giffen says. 

Yet, cities across the country are turning to harsher encampment sweeps as urban homelessness surges. Boston’s homeless population swelled to 5,202 in 2023, city data show, up 17 percent from 2022’s numbers.  

The city is in the process Wednesday of carrying out an order from the mayor, Michelle Wu, to clear more than 75 tents from an area known as “Mass and Cass,” as city officials say they’re rushing to clean it up because of drug use and human trafficking that can be disguised in the tents. 

“They treat us like we are disgusting,” one homeless woman told NBC Boston of the city employees who are clearing the camps. 

More than 3,000 miles away, at Portland, Oregon, the city is set to begin enforcing a daytime homeless camping ban on November 13. The mayor offered a “two-week notice” to the campers that the city will begin enforcing an anti-camping ordinance passed in June.

Portland will no longer tolerate camping near schools, busy areas, and in city parks, and the city has increased restrictions on overnight camping as well. Campers who violate the new ordinance will receive warnings and then could face penalties of $100 or a month in jail for continued violations. 

Yet some cities are less inclined to clear the encampments and have only done so after being forced. Phoenix city employees told the Sun in September they were “disappointed” with a court-imposed order to clear a sprawling encampment known as “The Zone.” Phoenix city employees said Wednesday they’re trying to find shelter for 70 homeless individuals — more than 1,000 unhoused people were once living in the area — as the judge’s November 4 deadline approaches.

In recent months, city governments and advocacy groups have been frustrated over legal murkiness in a city’s ability to clear tent encampments because of two Ninth Circuit rulings that seemingly tie cities’ hands — or are used by city leaders to justify inaction — on homelessness. 

The circuit court cases, which ruled that being homeless is “involuntary” if there aren’t enough shelter beds, have been expanded to make it difficult to arrest homeless people sleeping in tents on public property. Frustration over the rulings has resulted in a bipartisan effort to ask the Supreme Court to weigh in on the topic, as the Sun has reported.

“The unsheltered crisis is unacceptable, and no one is happy to see that people are forced to live outdoors,” a spokesman for the National Alliance to End Homelessness, Tom Murphy, tells the Sun. “But our communities need strategic and effective responses to unsheltered homelessness, and encampment raids are neither.”

Breaking up encampments can cause homeless individuals to flee to more isolated areas where they won’t be disrupted, which can endanger them, Mr. Murphy says. The raids are “politically expedient,” he says, but don’t help populations that are suffering.

“This is not a solution to homelessness, it is a solution to visible homelessness,” he says. “Those are two very different things.”