California leaders asked for a Supreme Court homelessness decision. Will it backfire?

Local officials said the ruling was a disaster that expanded encampments, with homeless advocates arguing that people have a right to all sorts of materials in cold and inhospitable public spaces, including tents and fires.

Before the Supreme Court on Monday, attorney Kelsi Corkran — representing homeless litigants in Grants Pass — argued that letting the city's anti-camping ordinances stand would simply turn that city's "homelessness problem into someone else's problem by forcing its homeless residents into other jurisdictions."

Deputy U.S. Solicitor Gen. Ed Kneedler, arguing for the U.S. government, said laws that in effect "banish" homeless people from certain jurisdictions are unjust and unworkable — in part because "if Grants Pass can do this, so could every other city. So could a state do it statewide. And, eventually, a homeless person would have no place to be."

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who led the court's liberal flank in attacking the criminalization of homeless people, struck a similar note.

"Where do we put them if every city, every village, every town lacks compassion and passes a law identical to this? Where are they supposed to sleep? Are they supposed to kill themselves not sleeping?" Sotomayor said.

For outside observers — including a slew of local municipalities, legal scholars and other stakeholders who submitted their own independent briefs to the court — the case touches on philosophical differences about how to help homeless people.

Timothy Sandefur of the conservative think tank Goldwater Institute argued in favor of Grants Pass and camping bans.

In an interview, Sandefur said camping bans don't just bounce homeless people from town to town, but often lead them to return to staying with family or friends or get connected to temporary housing or other resources — which is exactly what local governments want.

"When we talk about 'moving along,' we sort of have this mental image that people stay in their status forever — that they're just homeless people, and they just get moved from one place to another their entire lives. And I don't think that's true," he said. "People get filtered into services."

Donovan and other progressive advocates for the homeless take a different view.

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