Like most big cities across the country, Oklahoma City is grappling with homeless encampments that some consider eyesores and crime magnets in need of elimination either through programs that reduce homelessness or law enforcement sweeps that can send homeless people to jail. Thanks to a new U.S. Supreme Court ruling, local municipalities have more options than ever, and some believe that will only exacerbate the problem.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson stems from a case originally filed in 2018. Grants Pass, Oregon, is a city of about 40,000 people in the southwest part of the state. The Oregon Law Center filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of Debra Blake, who had been issued citations for violating municipal ordinances against sleeping outside, and others who had faced criminal trespassing penalties. In the case’s path to the U.S. Supreme Court, judges found that arresting or citing homeless people violated the cruel and unusual punishment clause of theEighth Amendment since the City of Grants Pass lacked a homeless shelter.
But the 6-3 SCOTUS decision released June 28 affirms that municipal governments have broad authority to craft laws that can sometimes make homeless people face criminal punishment in the form of citations and jail time. In the majority opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that, “TheConstitution’s Eighth Amendment serves many important functions, but it does not authorize federal judges to wrest those rights and responsibilities from the American people and in their place dictate this nation’s homelessness policy.”
“Homelessness is complex. Its causes are many,” Gorsuch wrote. “So may be the public policy responses required to address it. At bottom, the question this case presents is whether the Eighth Amendment grants federal judges primary responsibility for assessing those causes and devising those responses. It does not.”
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote that the ruling would almost certainly worsen America’s unhoused problem by causing a “destabilizing cascade of harm.” Sotomayor quoted a “heartbreaking message” from Blake, who died while the case was pending.
“I have been repeatedly told by Grants Pass police that I must ‘move along’ and that there is nowhere in Grants Pass that I can legally sit or rest,” Blake was quoted as saying. “I have been repeatedly awakened by Grants Pass police while sleeping and told that I need to get up and move. I have been told by Grants Pass police that I should leave town. Because I have no choice but to live outside and have no place else to go, I have gotten tickets, fines and have been criminally prosecuted for being homeless.”
‘It’s a tough conversation’
In some cases, fallout from the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson has been swift. Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newson ordered local governments in his state to clean up homeless encampments or risk losing state funding for other projects and programs.
“No more excuses,” Newsom tweeted July 25 about his controversial order. “We’ve provided the time. We’ve provided the funds. Now it’s time for locals to do their job.”
But even before the SCOTUS made its ruling, local municipalities in Oklahoma had been willing to test the limits of the U.S. Constitution. In January, a new Shawnee ordinance made it illegal tosit or lie on sidewalks in a downtown portion of the city. Violations can result in a ticket.
Like many cities its size, Shawnee has a shortage of affordable housing, and capacity concerns at the 30-bed limited-access shelter operated by The Salvation Army has left local leaders surveying available properties for another emergency shelter. But even that limited shelter in Shawnee provides more resources than are available in communities like Edmond, which has no homeless shelter and has seen some unhoused people arrested repeatedly like the plaintiffs in the Oregon lawsuit.
On the state level, Oklahoma housing advocates have seen a mixed bag of policies pass over the last two years. In 2023, the Legislature created the state’s new Housing Stability Program, which is aimed at providing development funding for affordable single and multi-unit family housing. The statewide program is now taking applications from builders, who can receive zero-interest loans to develop projects and increase the state’s housing supply. The loans must be repaid within two years to avoid interest charges.
But this year, lawmakers passed and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signedSenate Bill 1854, which made unauthorized camping on public lands a misdemeanor if repeat offenders who are camping do not accept services offered to them. Violators could face fines or jail time.
Following the bill’s signing,Stitt said Oklahoma would not become a place where homeless encampments are allowed to flourish.
“We’re not going to allow tent cities, and we’re not going to allow the homeless to camp out like we’re seeing in other states,” Stitt said.
Stitt did acknowledge the complexities of the problem, however.
“It’s a tough conversation,” Stitt said. “It’s a big conversation. There’s substance abuse. There’s mental illness. There’s people in certain situations that need help. We also have to look at the rights of businesses and private property owners and community safety.”
Some organizations fighting headwinds
In OKC, the city is in the middle of a two-year project to house 500 of its most chronically homeless residents through its Key to Home program.
In its latest point-in-time count earlier this year, the city had 1,838 unhoused residents. And in many places, the encampments that serve as their homes are hard to miss.
For organizations that serve as resource centers for those on the streets, there is fear the latest Supreme Court ruling could encourage further municipal or state punishments for transient people, ultimately making the work of social service groups more difficult, said Meghan Mueller, the new executive director of the Homeless Alliance.
“I think we have a lot of people who are working cohesively and in a collaborative way to do what we’ve been doing, which is to connect people with affordable housing. Supreme Court ruling or no Supreme Court ruling, that’s what we do,” Mueller said. “I think any time there could be additional barriers rulings like this could pose, whether that’s criminal charges or citations, that is a huge concern.”
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The OKC City Council has tried to curb some aspects of homelessness in recent years, including a panhandling rule that was struck down by the federal 10th Circuit of Appeals in 2020 because the city failed to prove that panhandling created a danger to the public. Even when in place, the ordinance was mostly unenforced.
More recently, three OKC City Council members, Ward 1’s Bradley Carter, Ward 4’s Todd Stone and Ward 8’s Mark Stonecipher, introduced an ordinance in 2022 that would have banned homeless encampments on public property, including city, county, state and federal land. The ordinance was deferred indefinitely when it met with opposition from other council members.
Stone said that, in the wake of the new Supreme Court decision, it is not his intent to punish those who are unhoused.
“I don’t want to make homelessness a crime,” Stone said. “But what we need to figure out is, I’ve got tons of areas where businesses are contacting me nonstop trying to get help with issues they are facing. I’ve seen businesses have to close down because of some of the issues of people hanging out there doing bad things like harassing clients and customers, different things like that. And it’s like, OK, somehow we’ve got to be able to hold people accountable for when they’re creating big issues for other people.”
Stone said the city’s Key to Home program has been a good start.
“I think it’s definitely getting there,” Stone said. “I think everyone wants things fixed the next day, and that can’t happen, but that’s still what people want. But it does look like it has been successful, so I’m glad to see that. I would like to see a continuation and expansion of it. But I don’t think homeless people need to be locked up in jail, and I’m sure the people who run jails don’t want them there either. It just adds to the problems they have.”
That’s what groups like the Homeless Alliance and Mental Health Association Oklahoma fear in the long term. Both have homeless outreach teams that feed into the Key to Home program. MHAO director of OKC operations Kelly Dyer Fry said in a statement that organizations working to curb homelessness do not need added problems through municipal ordinances that criminalize the existence of the unhoused.
“Communities across the country are sorely lacking in low-barrier shelters and program funding to assist the hundreds of thousands of vulnerable individuals who do not have a safe place to call home,” Dyer Fry said. “We are in the throes of an affordable housing crisis, especially for individuals who have limited income, and criminal justice charges too often disqualify individuals from options that are available. Punitive regulations are not the answer to homelessness, housing is. Introducing more fines on our unhoused individuals only perpetuates poverty and pushes them further away from stability, and it ultimately costs taxpayers more money to arrest and jail people than to provide strategic, humane and long-term solutions.”
Rep. Forrest Bennett (D-OKC) serves on the House Municipal Government Committee. He said he understands why there is a desire to remove homeless encampments from cities, but he encouraged people to look at the issue more broadly.
“I think there is probably merit on both sides of the argument, but I see this issue from a wider lens. I mean, the fact that we’re having a discussion about whether a city government can (enforce criminal penalties to remove the unhoused), which is what that case was all about, and the recent legislation passed here in Oklahoma was about whether it should be legal. I think it does a disservice to our constituents because we know that when people are unhoused in a community, it’s costly. The bottom line in a literal sense is that it costs more money to just pass laws to criminalize those who experience homelessness than it would to solve the underlying causes of it.”
Rising rent, home prices make housing harder to obtain
Oklahoma finds itself in the early stages of what some fear will become a housing crisis similar in scale to those faced by other cities. The average rent in OKC for a 700 square-foot apartment is about $900, according to apartments.com. That remains below the national average of about $1,500, but the city’s average rental rate experienced a significant increase in 2023.
Similarly, home prices have risen in recent years in line with national trends. Homes in OKC cost an average of $237,000, according to Zillow.
As the Housing Sustainability Program has moved forward over the last year to spur construction of individual and multi-family housing, Bennett said he and other legislators have also been examining what they can do to grease the wheels and make affordable developments easier.
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“We want to look at how zoning is impacting the development of affordable housing and what effects that some of the exclusionary zoning laws that we have now impact the construction of affordable housing,” Bennett said. “I think the bottom line is that good housing policy can have a positive impact on issues like those who are experiencing homelessness face. But I think housing is just one piece of the pie. If we’re orienting ourselves to optimizing everything, then we need to look at housing, but also education, health care and workforce development.”
Still, to some, the public policy struggle seems like two steps forward and one step back, or worse. Mueller said there are a lot of things that groups like the Homeless Alliance must overcome to serve their clients. The SCOTUS decision and the fear of new, stricter municipal laws can be demoralizing.
“It’s disappointing and disheartening that the SCOTUS decision came shortly after Oklahoma passed a ban on camping on state property,” she said. “I think that’s what it means that nonprofits are facing an uphill battle. I think the last few years most people have seen it as a human issue, and it was losing some of the stigma it faced.
“But I feel like the SCOTUS decision is a step back.”
‘There will be something happening to address it’
In many cases, Bennett said it’s easier to criminalize issues connected to homelessness than to focus on underlying causes, something he fears will be more common after Grants Pass vs. Johnson.
“In some cases, there may be existing municipal statutes that, because of the clarity this Supreme Court case brings, will make law enforcement officials say, ‘OK, yeah, we can be a little more aggressive with this’ and start clearing camps by arresting people,” Bennett said. “That may make people feel better about what they see on the streets, but it’s just moving people around. It doesn’t address any of the causes.”
In the future, Stone said it’s likely the OKC City Council will revisit how to address encampments again following the SCOTUS ruling. He said those who complain about encampments are generally compassionate toward those experiencing homelessness, but he said they also fear for their safety and in, some cases, their businesses.
“I think probably, eventually, yes, there will be something happening to address it,” Stone said. “For me, it’s important that we have some way of dealing with these super problematic areas. As I said, I get calls on this on almost a daily basis. There are businesses that have people destroying their places of work or they have people defecating on their front door. They have to go out and clean all of that up. We have to make sure we have the tools to handle those cases. And if those people need help, then we need to get them help.”
