Unhoused people, activists, service providers and mutual aid volunteers convened on the front steps at the William Kenzo Nakamura Courthouse on April 22 to express concern about the Supreme Court case Grants Pass v. Johnson. The high-profile case has received a lot of attention as it has the potential to determine whether local governments throughout the country have the authority to criminalize homelessness.
The rally in Seattle was a part of a nationwide call to action from organizations such as the National Low Income Housing Coalition and National Homelessness Law Center. On the same day as the rally, the Supreme Court heard oral argument for Grants Pass v. Johnson.
Grants Pass’ camping ban makes it possible for an unhoused person to be arrested or fined for sleeping on public property and is the cornerstone of the case. The Oregon city is estimated to have a population of at least 600 unhoused individuals but only 100 shelter beds available on average. Grants Pass’ ordinance is among a rising national trend of anti-homeless policies, like those passed recently in Burien.
However, local advocates and homeless people at Seattle’s rally emphasized that criminalizing homelessness will not solve the issue.
“This widespread pervasive thought that gets codified into legislation in various places in the region are all meant to be hostile to homeless people, increase cities’ and municipalities’ ability to criminalize people and kick them out of their jurisdictions,” said Jay Jones, media liaison for Services Not Sweeps Coalition and member of Stop The Sweeps. “People want homeless people to die or go away. There’s this insane and intense dehumanization that’s feeding this.
“They have this belief that is reinforced by capitalism where they’re saying, ‘These poor people are why you can’t have nice things.’ They don’t actually care about [these] communities.”
Seattle’s day of action was organized by multiple homelessness and low-income advocacy organizations like SHARE, Be: Seattle, Stop The Sweeps and WHEEL, along with Real Change’s advocacy department. All these organizations are a part of the Services Not Sweeps Coalition, which has the central objective of permanently banning encampment sweeps in Seattle and challenging the city to fund affordable housing services.
Hosting demonstrations locally is vital, according to Jones, as they say they have noticed the rise of anti-homeless policies similar to that in Grants Pass in our own backyard.
“They’re all cut from the same cloth and Grant Pass institutes some heinous measures. Burien just passed a full camping ban, and you’ve got some sort of anti-homeless legislation happening in Vashon Island, Mercer Island, Bellingham and in Bellevue,” Jones said.
In Burien, ordinance 827 went into effect on Nov. 1, making it legal for the city to charge an unhoused person with a misdemeanor for sleeping on public property during all hours.
Three unhoused Burien residents, Elizabeth Hale, Alex Hale and Carlo Paz, are currently suing the city, claiming the ordinance violates their Eighth Amendment rights. The King County Sheriff’s Department, which was contracted by the city, has also filed a lawsuit against Burien claiming its officers could be in violation of the Eighth Amendment for enforcing the ordinance.
“You would see an increase in criminalization, harassment and displacement,” Jones said. “Seattle [wouldn’t] have to provide any sort of outreach to folks living in these camps. If the Supreme Court says, ‘Oh you can just criminalize people for sleeping outside, you can just fine and arrest them.’ If you just want to lay down while you’re homeless it has been considered something that you can be ticketed for and that's wild.”
Despite the national week of action by advocates, the city of Grant Pass is shaping up to receive support from city councils throughout the country that have passed similar anti-homeless legislation. Locally, Seattle’s city attorney Ann Davison submitted an amicus brief in September 2023 to the Supreme Court siding with Grant Pass' decision in wanting to overturn the Ninth Circuit Court decision on the case.
In the four hours that individuals gathered at the entrance of the courthouse, many speakers expressed their fear of how detrimental it would be if the court were ruled in favor of Grants Pass. One of these speakers was Real Change Vendor Gina Owens (badge 14792), who shared how she was a nurse who ended up homeless because of circumstances out of her control, like Johnson. Owens was in a car crash that resulted in severe damage and left her disabled. Unable to return to the workforce, she was left without income to sustain her housing and was evicted from her apartment. Owens says she was moved to speak at the rally to dispel much of the biased perception that a majority of the justices who sit on the Supreme Court have toward the unhoused.
“It really tells a story about how so many people, not just here in Seattle, are living the same kind of circumstances,” Owens said. “Just because people are homeless does not make them a criminal. But that’s how they’ve labeled people in the homeless community — as criminals and trespassers when they’re sleeping on the streets except for their own given name. And that’s wrong. I want the Supreme Court to understand that they need to hear from the people who are actually living the situation, because until they know, they can’t make a good sound decision.”
For the past two decades, Owens has shared her story with the public by speaking at local rallies and demonstrations like this one. Her hope is that telling her experience will help people understand the complexities of homelessness. Owens says that over the years she’s noticed a lack of empathy in Seattle for homeless people. The city’s conduct, she says, drives people away from working together to create reliable resources to support unhoused people.
In fact, municipalities all over the country rely on the criminal system where resources are lacking or nonexistent, explained Cat Munsen, Real Change’s policy and campaigns associate. Munsen says police shouldn’t be the primary crisis responders at encampment sweeps because it’s evident they aren’t equipped with the necessary skills. Instead, she believes resources should be allocated to affordable housing through existing policy campaigns like I-137. The social housing initiative, spearheaded by House Our Neighbors (HON), would require employers to pay a 5% marginal tax if their workforce earns above a million dollars.
“Social housing is a brilliant model that’s working in cities all over the world like Vienna, Singapore and even here in the states,” Munsen said. “The implementation comes down to getting the funding source and then ensuring that it goes to the right elements to make it operational and sustainable. If we’re relying on city budgets that are already tightly constrained, then that’s a key way for it to fail. The most important thing that we have to focus on now is how are we going to make this financially feasible?”
HON is collecting signatures to have I-137 appear on the November 2024 ballot. Munsen said I-137’s goal of providing financial revenue for affordable housing is just one part of the puzzle. If this new system were to pass, then it would directly push away discriminatory policies aimed at punishing and driving homelesss people out of their communities within the city. She said her main priority is to continue engaging Real Change vendors with local policy campaigns. A main focus will be future actions initiated by other grassroots advocacy organizations around Johnson v. Grants Pass, since the court won’t publicly announce its decision until June.
“What’s very difficult to think about now is, what if the ruling goes the wrong way and what does that look like? It was very clear this morning, listening to the arguments, the politics of the Supreme Court are very clear,” Munsen said. “When we lean on folks with lived experience to advocate, we’re asking them to do even more labor around the issue. We want to elevate their voices certainly but what we don’t want is having them do more work to help solve a problem that shouldn’t be theirs to solve as the most vulnerable among us.”
Anitra Freeman, a Real Change volunteer, vendor (badge 7982) and rally speaker, criticized Seattle’s treatment toward unhoused people, specifically pointing to recent encampment sweeps conducted by the city. She expressed that the amount of money spent on sweeps but not on real solutions is baffling. In 2023, the Unified Care Team (UCT), which oversees encampment sweeps in Seattle, received $37 million in funding.
Freeman said that there should be more focus on the funding to conduct sweeps versus on what should be allocated to shelter and housing services as it’s become an alarming problem that organizations are calling out.
In her speech, Freeman said she dreads the thought of the Court siding with Grants Pass, because it would encourage those in power within Seattle to continue pushing unhoused people out of the city.
“When the law treats homeless people as criminals over sleeping outside, that fuels the hate and violence,” Freeman said. “There are a lot of people out here who go out and talk to homeless people and help them out. What would happen if all the housed people in Seattle decided not to depend on the police to solve their homeless crisis?”
The Supreme Court will publicly announce its decision on the case by June of this year. In the mean time, community members will continue to make their voices heard.
Marian Mohamed is the associate editor of Real Change. She oversees our weekly features. Contact her at [email protected].
Read more of the May 1–7, 2024 issue.