In the United States, homelessness is often treated like something to control rather than something to solve. When someone does not have a stable place to sleep, rest, keep their belongings, or simply exist without being moved along, those basic needs become public. People sleep in parks, cars, transit stations, sidewalks, and encampments because they do not have a safe private space to go to. Too often, the response is punishment.
That is what criminalization means in this context. It is the use of laws, fines, police enforcement, and displacement to regulate the daily survival of people experiencing homelessness. These laws can target sleeping outside, camping, panhandling, sitting, lying down, or keeping personal belongings in public spaces. On paper, they may sound like neutral rules about public order. In reality, they fall hardest on people who have nowhere else to be.
This is important because homelessness is already a crisis shaped by policy choices. According to HUD’s 2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, more than 770,000 people were experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2024, which was an 18 percent increase from the year before. HUD connected that rise to broader pressures like the affordable housing crisis, inflation, and other economic conditions. (archives.hud.gov)
So when communities respond to homelessness with tickets, arrests, sweeps, and bans, they are often punishing people for surviving the conditions those same systems helped create.
The criminalization of homelessness did not begin with Johnson v. Grants Pass. It is part of a much longer history of treating poverty and public survival as threats. Earlier vagrancy laws targeted people who were poor, unemployed, or moving from place to place. Over time, some of those laws were challenged, but the mindset behind them remained. Instead of calling someone a vagrant, cities could ticket them for sleeping outside. Instead of openly criminalizing poverty, cities could regulate public space in ways that mostly impact poor and unhoused people.
The language changed. The harm continued.
Criminalization can look small from the outside. A warning. A citation. A park ban. A sweep. But for someone experiencing homelessness, these moments can disrupt everything. When an encampment is cleared, people can lose medication, identification, family photos, clothing, documents, or the phone they use to stay in contact with outreach workers. When someone gets a fine they cannot pay, that fine can grow into debt or a warrant. When someone has a record, it can become even harder to get housing, employment, or benefits.
The American Bar Association has described how criminalization can trap people deeper in poverty through fines, fees, debt, and records that make housing harder to secure. (New York State Bar Association – NYSBA) That is the contradiction at the center of this issue. The policies are often justified as a response to homelessness, but they can make homelessness harder to exit.
Before Johnson v. Grants Pass, one of the most important legal cases on this issue was Martin v. City of Boise. In 2018, the Ninth Circuit said cities could not punish people for sleeping outside when there was no adequate shelter available. The logic was straightforward. If someone has nowhere else to go, it is cruel to punish them for sleeping outside.
Then came Johnson v. Grants Pass. Grants Pass, Oregon had ordinances that restricted camping and sleeping in public places. According to Oyez, the city had between 50 and 600 unhoused residents, which exceeded the number of available shelter beds. The city’s rules included anti-sleeping and anti-camping ordinances, and violations could lead to fines and eventually criminal penalties. (Oyez)
Unhoused residents challenged those ordinances under the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. Lower courts sided with the residents. But in June 2024, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that enforcing generally applicable camping laws on public property does not violate the Eighth Amendment. The Court said the Eighth Amendment focuses on the type of punishment imposed after conviction and treated the ordinances as laws regulating conduct, such as camping, rather than laws punishing a person’s status as unhoused. (Supreme Court)
In practice, this gave cities more legal permission to enforce camping bans and similar laws, even when shelter is limited.
That does not mean cities are required to criminalize homelessness. It means they have more room to do so. That distinction matters because this moment is about choices. Cities can choose more sweeps, more citations, and more displacement. Or they can choose housing, outreach, services, prevention, and real engagement with people who have lived through homelessness themselves.
The danger is that enforcement can look like action. It can make homelessness less visible in one location. It can respond to public pressure quickly. But moving people from one place to another does not create housing. A ticket does not create a bed. A sweep does not create safety. The National Alliance to End Homelessness has argued that criminalization does not reduce homelessness and can make it harder for people to access housing, jobs, services, and benefits. (National Alliance to End Homelessness)
The housing crisis has to stay at the center of the conversation. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the widespread lack of affordable housing remains a major driver of homelessness, with median rent in 2024 remaining much higher than in 2020 and a national shortage of millions of affordable and available rental homes. (National Alliance to End Homelessness) If people do not have access to housing they can afford, communities cannot enforce their way out of homelessness.
This is also why lived experience matters so much. People who have experienced homelessness know what these policies feel like on the ground. They know what it means to be told to move with nowhere to go. They know what it means to lose belongings during a sweep, to carry fines they cannot pay, or to be treated as a problem before being treated as a person.
A policy can sound reasonable in a meeting room and still cause harm in real life. That gap is exactly why people with lived experience need to be included when communities are making decisions about encampments, public space, outreach, budgets, and housing strategies. They can help communities understand what actually builds trust, what causes harm, and what makes it possible for someone to move toward stability.
The impact of Johnson v. Grants Pass will depend on what communities do next. The ruling gives cities more authority to punish life-sustaining behavior in public space. But communities still have a choice. They can continue a long history of pushing people out of sight, or they can invest in solutions that actually respond to the crisis.
If the goal is to end homelessness, the answer cannot be making it illegal to exist while unhoused. The answer has to be housing, dignity, support, and systems that listen to the people most impacted.
