Tangle - SCOTUS allows laws against homeless encampments.

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Starting point is 00:00:35 a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. From Searchlight Pictures comes A Real Pain, one of the most moving and funny films of the year. Written and directed by Oscar-nominated Jesse Eisenberg and starring Eisenberg and Emmy Award winner Kieran Culkin, Thank you. this year, garnering rave reviews and acclaim from both critics and audiences alike. See A Real Pain only in theaters November 15th. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum,

Starting point is 00:01:57 some independent thinking, and a little bit of Isaac's take. I'm your host, John Law, and today we're going to be talking about the Supreme Court ruling on the City of Grants Pass v. Johnson case. Before we get started, just a quick note that we will be off tomorrow and Friday in observance of the July 4th holiday. We'll be back on Monday, July 8th, but we do have a little bit of content for you. We posted a trailer for the Tangle Live event that we held in New York City earlier this year. We are going to be releasing that full video very soon, and the trailer has been posted on YouTube. There is a link in today's episode description. Click it, check it out, let us know what you think. All right, with that out

Starting point is 00:02:36 of the way, let's jump into today's quick hits. First up, the Food and Drug Administration approved a new Alzheimer's treatment from drugmaker Eli Lilly that aims to slow the progression of the disease in its early stages. Number two, Representative Lloyd Doggett became the first House Democrat to publicly call on President Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 presidential race following last week's debate. Number three, the Supreme Court declined to hear challenges to an Illinois ban on certain types of semi-automatic weapons, attachments, and magazines while lower courts decide the cases. Number four, Moderna won a $176 million contract with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to develop an mRNA

Starting point is 00:03:25 vaccine for pandemic influenza as bird flu continues to spread through dairy farms. And number five, at least 121 people were Supreme Court where the latest round of opinions are in this morning. It was the case involving homelessness and loitering laws. The Supreme Court is permitting cities to enforce bans on homeless people sleeping outside, even if shelter space is lacking. A landmark decision from the U.S. Supreme Court on the issue of homelessness. In a 6-3 vote, the high court cleared the way for cities to enforce bans on homeless people sleeping outdoors when there's no shelter space. This week's Supreme Court decision granting cities more power to police people who are unhoused

Starting point is 00:04:24 is getting mixed reviews in California, the state where half of the country's unsheltered population can be found on any given night. On Friday, the Supreme Court voted six to three along ideological lines to uphold ordinances in the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, that outlaws sleeping and camping in public places while using materials like blankets, pillows, or cardboard boxes for warmth or shelter. The decision overturns a lower court's determination that such laws are unconstitutional and grants greater authority to local governments to address homelessness in their communities. The Supreme Court's decision returns the case to the lower courts, which will consider separate arguments about Grants Pass's laws. A quick reminder, in 2018, homeless residents of Grants Pass challenged the constitutionality of the city's

Starting point is 00:05:10 public camping laws and won their case before a federal district court. The city appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which upheld the district court's ruling by citing Martin v. City of Boise, its 2018 decision that determined laws penalizing people who have nowhere else to stay for sleeping in public violate the Constitution's Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments. The city appealed to the Supreme Court, which took the case and heard arguments in April.

Starting point is 00:05:38 We covered the Ninth Circuit's ruling and recapped oral arguments, and there are links in today's episode description. The challengers centered their arguments on the Supreme Court's 1962 decision in Robinson v. California, which found that the government could not punish a narcotics addict solely because of his status as an addict. The challengers argued that bans on public camping effectively punished the involuntary status of being homeless, noting that Grants Pass has no public homeless shelter, though a private religious organization does operate one. The court's majority disagreed, ruling that Grants

Starting point is 00:06:10 Pass's ordinances target the act of camping on public property rather than the individual's status. Rating for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch reasoned that the ban on public sleeping did not unfairly target the city's homeless as it applied to all residents of Grants Pass. He also rejected the Ninth Circuit's conclusion that the ban constituted cruel and unusual punishment, countering that the Eighth Amendment typically applies only to methods of punishment rather than the types of criminalized conduct. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Katonji Brown Jackson dissented. Sotomayor framed the case as a question of whether basic human needs can be criminalized. Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime, she wrote. For some people, sleeping outside is their only option.

Starting point is 00:06:55 She acknowledged that the United States' homelessness crisis has created immense challenges for local governments, but argued the Constitution does not permit punishing homeless people with no access to shelter for sleeping in public with as little as a blanket to keep warm. Leaders in West Coast states where homelessness is particularly acute were mixed in their reaction to the ruling. Governor Gavin Newsom, the Democrat from California, said the court's decision removes the legal ambiguities that have tied the hands of local officials for years, while Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called it disappointing. Grant's past expressed gratitude to the court for helping guide our next steps regarding unhoused members of the community. Today, we'll examine arguments about the ruling from the left and the right, and then Isaac's take.

Starting point is 00:07:51 We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. Got a mortgage? Chances are you're thinking about your payments right now. Need help? Ask your bank about relief measures that may be available to you. Learn more at Canada.ca slash it pays to know. A message from the Government of Canada. From Searchlight Pictures comes A Real Pain, one of the most moving and funny films of the year. Written and directed by Oscar-nominated Jesse Eisenberg and starring Eisenberg and Emmy Award winner Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain is a comedy about mismatched cousins who reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the pair's old

Starting point is 00:08:29 tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history. A Real Pain was one of the buzziest titles at Sundance Film Festival this year, garnering rave reviews and acclaim from both critics and audiences alike. See A Real Pain only in theaters November 15th. All right, first up, let's start with what the left is saying. The left is dismayed by the court's decision suggesting it allows cities to sidestep their homelessness problems. Some say the case underscores the failures of U.S. housing policy. Others support the ruling, arguing that it provides a helpful tool for local officials to aid the homeless. The Los Angeles Times editorial board said the ruling will do nothing to end homelessness. The decision raises the grim question of whether cities and counties

Starting point is 00:09:16 will rely more on anti-camping ordinances to deal with homeless people and encampments rather than doing the hard work of creating interim housing, such as motel and hotel rooms, and permanent affordable housing, often with services. Those are the solutions, the only humane solutions, to homelessness, and they require hard work, funding, and patience, the board wrote. This decision cruelly allows cities to deal with homeless people by fining, jailing, and ultimately shooing them away from sidewalks and parks, leaving them to search out other sidewalks and parks.

Starting point is 00:09:49 Impoverished people cannot pay fines, so the penalties accumulate. Anti-camping laws are not tools in the toolbox that fix homelessness, and citing people for living outside has nothing to do with creating housing, the board said. Yes, it is difficult to grapple with homelessness, but the problem is not solved by jailing and fining people and pushing them from one sidewalk to another. Only adequate housing services, including treatment for mental illness and substance abuse, will solve homelessness. It takes time and it takes money. In the Atlantic, Jerusalem Demsos wrote about what the Supreme Court doesn't get about homelessness.

Starting point is 00:10:26 The ruling epitomizes why housing has become a crisis in so much of the country. It does nothing to make communities confront their role in causing a housing shortage, and it upholds their ability to inflict pain upon the shortage's victims, Demsos wrote. In prosperous American cities, homelessness abounds. It's not because drugs were invented in the past several decades, nor is it because mental illness was invented by millennials. Rather, it's because local governments have sought to rid their housing markets of low-income people by getting rid of low-income housing options, while ensuring that the rest of the market would become prohibitively expensive. become prohibitively expensive. And now, after policy choices have created a nationwide housing crisis, cities have successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to allow them to ignore a problem of their own making. If they're not willing to allow more housing, they certainly are willing

Starting point is 00:11:14 to house the indigent in jail, Demsys wrote. When cities turn to punitive measures without offering options more suitable than camping outside, they're at best simply moving homeless people around in an endless dystopian game. At worst, they're imposing fines and other legal costs on people already defined by their lack of resources and increasing the likelihood that they'll remain transient and unhoused. In the Idaho Press, David H. Beder argued the Supreme Court is right in Grant's past ruling. I'm no fan of this court, but I agree with their decision. Homelessness is by far the toughest city issue. I was the mayor of Boise for 16 years. In 2004, we got a crash course on how tough it is when a 200-bed, city-owned, non-profit-run

Starting point is 00:11:58 homelessness facility failed. Boise was sued for enforcing our anti-camping ordinance. Because of a misunderstanding, the Boise police stopped issuing citations for camping on public property. Within a matter of days, a camp formed on a public right-of-way off the connector. It grew to over 120 people, Beder said. Camps are the opposite of compassion. They foster unsanitary, drug-infested, dangerous lodgings where people prey on the least fortunate. Advocates say you are criminalizing homelessness. No, you are criminalizing appropriating public property

Starting point is 00:12:30 for private use, and life will go on. Homelessness will still be the most difficult issue for cities, but a vital tool to help bring people in—how can you help someone if they won't come into the system— will be available. Homelessness is a societal problem, a problem of substance abuse, unbridled capitalism, social isolation, and low wages. Our nation needs to solve it. But as we struggle to do so, cities need to keep order and disrupt camps so we can collectively help those All right, that's it for what the left is saying, which brings us to what the right is saying. The right mostly supports the ruling, with many saying it gives local governments the appropriate authority to address homelessness. Some argue progressives' view on government regulation of public spaces are illogical. Others agree with

Starting point is 00:13:25 the court's reasoning but oppose the practical outcome of the decision. In City Journal, Judge Glock said the ruling returns homeless policy to state and local governments where it belongs. Gorsuch's opinion overturning the Grants Pass ruling lays waste to the Ninth Circuit's arguments. First, he shows that the claim that the Eighth Amendment prevents camping laws is absurd on its face. The Eighth Amendment is about preventing types of punishments such as beatings, not about banning whole categories of laws prescribing certain behaviors. The punishments authorized by the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, such as civil fines and a ban on camping in public parks, were both restrained and common, Glock wrote. Gorsuch's opinion also points out a fact many

Starting point is 00:14:05 activists like to deny. Homeless encampments are dangerous and violent. Rulings that prevent the clearing of those camps can lead to more violence. Despite valiant efforts by the left to portray the attacks on the Ninth Circuit as a right-wing effort, the court's rulings on the homeless united a broad spectrum of opponents. The National League of Cities, representing more than 19,000 American municipalities and individual cities from San Francisco to Colorado Springs, asked the Supreme Court to review the Grants Pass ruling, Glock said. Local governance is a formidable challenge that involves weighing diverse preferences and enforcing rules across the vast panoply of human behavior. While the Grants Pass ruling does not guarantee that

Starting point is 00:14:45 Western states and cities will handle homelessness well, it at least gives them a chance. In National Review, Dominic Pino argued, progressives think government can regulate only private, not public spaces. The dissent makes clear the emerging progressive view. Government can regulate only private, not public spaces. This is basically the opposite view that common sense would suggest. One of the fundamental reasons government exists is to provide public works, which entails the regulation of the spaces in which they exist. The maintenance of public order, too, is a fundamental purpose of the government that requires regulation of public spaces, Pino wrote. Progressives have essentially inverted the order of things.

Starting point is 00:15:25 Public spaces are the domain of individual rights where nobody can tell anybody else what to do, but there is hardly any limit to what progressives believe governments should be able to regulate in private spaces. Progressives are perfectly fine with government telling you which appliances you're allowed to put in your home, which cars you're allowed to buy, what your health insurance is required to cover, and which school your children are allowed to attend, Pino said. But yeah, by all means, camp on public property. That is an individual right. Let the relatively small number of criminals who are responsible for the most violent crime

Starting point is 00:15:56 out on bail and just keep catching and releasing them as they commit more crimes in public. Enforcing traffic laws on public roads is racist. Let anyone cross the border and receive public money and accommodations. In reason, Christian Burtzkegi wrote, NIMBY governments win at the Supreme Court. Local governments love to blame Martin for rising homelessness because it relieves them of any real responsibility for the problem. Homelessness is something that happened to them, and here comes the Ninth Circuit preventing them from doing anything about it, Ritskeke said. It's an incredible act of blame-shifting.

Starting point is 00:16:34 In fact, local and state governments bear a considerable share of the blame for the rising homeless population by making housing so hard to build in the first place. population by making housing so hard to build in the first place. Nothing correlates more with homelessness rates than high housing costs, and nothing drives up housing costs like government restrictions on building houses. Giving police greater powers to ticket and arrest anyone sleeping on a park bench isn't going to fix homelessness when you're in San Francisco and 4,000 people in your city are sleeping outside, the median apartment rents are $3,300 a month, and the number of new homes being permitted per month is in the single digits. Nor, frankly, will Housing First's strategies fix homelessness in high-cost cities with the highest homeless rates, Britskigi wrote.

Starting point is 00:17:16 Until local and state governments adopt policies that would significantly reduce the costs of housing, it is unfair, unhelpful, and illiberal to fine people for sleeping on a park bench with a blanket, even if doing so is constitutional. Alright, that's it for what the left and the right are saying, which brings us to Isaac's take. As a reminder, this is Isaac's opinion, and I'm just reading it in the first person. So, at the end of a short but intense week of Supreme Court coverage, I'm pleased to say that I'm pretty satisfied with this ruling. The court didn't invent a new standard for interpreting law, and it didn't opine on

Starting point is 00:17:59 sweeping legal doctrine. Instead, this court, which has recently been accused of putting the judiciary above the other two branches of government and putting the president above the other two branches of government, mostly saw itself out. The Constitution'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, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in his majority opinion. I couldn't agree more. Courts shouldn't stop small towns or cities from enforcing laws those communities want, as long as those laws don't flagrantly violate the

Starting point is 00:18:34 Constitution. And regardless of how you feel about this court and what you think about homelessness policy, I think you can see the reason in that stance. So, as we always do, let's go through the legal arguments and practical implications separately. At the risk of oversimplifying, the fundamentals of this case boil down to two questions. First, does jailing people for camping in public places go against the Eighth Amendment's protections against cruel or unusual punishment? Gorsuch's answer was pretty simply, no, citing 1967's Powell v. Texas, where the court found, rather obviously, that the clause about punishments applies to punishments, not laws. The primary purpose of the cruel and unusual punishments clause has always been

Starting point is 00:19:17 considered, and properly so, to be directed at the method or kind of punishment imposed for the violation of criminal statutes, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote for the majority of the time, and jailing people is not cruel or unusual punishment. Additionally, the counter-arguments to Gorsuch's reasoning don't really hold much water to me. As we got into the first time we covered this case, the basic needs argument is pretty silly. Justice Sotomayor argued that the city restricting sleeping in public was criminalizing a basic bodily function like eating or breathing, which Justice Barrett soundly countered by saying that cities restrict defecating, another basic function, all the time. Further, Grants Pass is not criminalizing just nodding off in public,

Starting point is 00:19:57 but saying that you can't set up an encampment with blankets or tents or cardboard in a public space. Sotomayor's argument is like saying a new law against grilling on the sidewalk is making it illegal to eat in public. The second question is a little more complicated. Does the Grants Pass law unconstitutionally target a person's status as homeless? Here, again, I thought Gorsuch's argument was mostly sound. The law didn't target homeless people in general, but prevented all persons from setting up encampments. But since homeless people by definition don't have homes, does this law definitionally target their status? Gorsuch again referenced Powell, which found that being

Starting point is 00:20:35 an alcoholic may be out of a person's control, but it doesn't give that person the right to be drunk in public. In other words, just as laws against public intoxication don't explicitly target alcoholics, laws against public public intoxication don't explicitly target alcoholics, laws against public encampments don't specifically target the homeless. That may seem like hair-splitting, but I think Gorsuch is right to make the distinction. However, homeless people will certainly be the ones most impacted by encampment laws, and on their own, these policies fall well short of an effective strategy to combat homelessness. Which brings us to the

Starting point is 00:21:05 practical effects, where I'm more torn. Obviously, this ruling will encourage more laws against public encampments. Homelessness may be a national issue, but it's especially acute in progressive western cities like Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. Most of those cities have shelter spaces, but many simply aren't being used. Seattle reported that 60% of its offers for shelter were rejected, while officials in Portland said that over 70% of their offers were rejected between April 2022 and January 2024. That said, laws against public encampments will do absolutely nothing if cities don't also have the option of shelters. That approach only substitutes what would be low-cost shelters for high-cost prisons. Cities facing acute homelessness simply will not solve their

Starting point is 00:21:49 problems by fining people or putting them in jail, and will need to address homelessness through other means. Here, I was pleased to see some agreement across the political spectrum on the root cause of homelessness—housing. We frequently reference Jerusalem Demsas's piece about how the obviousness of that issue somehow breaks people's brains. We quoted her in what the left is saying, and Christian Britskigi, who more or less concurred under what the right is saying. This is a point worth driving home. The main reason people are homeless or unsheltered is that there aren't enough homes. Rental rates are a good proxy for availability, and they correlate with homelessness.

Starting point is 00:22:23 High housing costs drive homelessness. Cities not building new housing drives homelessness. Even traditionally anti-developer progressives are jumping on board to say that the best homelessness policy is just to create more housing. I'm in favor of enforcing laws to promote public safety, and I'm definitely in favor of this court making a narrow and reasonable decision in this case. But if we want to hear fewer stories about public drug use, a crammed prison system, and strains on law enforcement, the communities that will now enforce public encampment laws have to address the root causes of homelessness. We'll be right back after this quick break. and Emmy Award winner Kieran Culkin. A Real Pain is a comedy about mismatched cousins who reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother.

Starting point is 00:23:28 The adventure takes a turn when the pair's old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history. A Real Pain was one of the buzziest titles at Sundance Film Festival this year, garnering rave reviews and acclaim from both critics and audiences alike. See A Real Pain only in theaters November 15th. Whether renting, renewing a mortgage,

Starting point is 00:23:47 or considering buying a home, everybody has housing costs on their minds. For free tools and resources to help you manage your home finances, visit Canada.ca slash ItPaysToKnow. A message from the Government of Canada. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu,

Starting point is 00:24:05 a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. All right, that's it for Isaac's take, which brings us to Your Questions Answered.

Starting point is 00:24:36 This one comes from Daniel in Alameda, California. Daniel writes, I'm not understanding something. You often omit the reader question to leave more space for the main article. Now, I'm not saying that leaving it out when the main article runs long is bad. Obviously, it's more work for you guys. But leave more space seems a bit odd, given that you have an unlimited supply of pixels and no paper or printing costs. Okay, so Isaac says, you're right, our space is not limited by physical real estate, and the cost of storing an extra 2,000 characters worth of data is negligible. But simply put, we're limited by the reader's attention span. Now, that's not meant to be a slight or an underestimate of our subscribers at Tangle,

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Starting point is 00:25:42 Then I started adding an under-the-radar story. Then a numbers section. Then I started adding an under the radar story, then a numbers section, then an extra section. At that point, I was getting concerned about feature creep and wanted to set a hard, somewhat arbitrary limit on what we write to maintain the newsletter's balance between focus and nuance. So long story short, we give ourselves a daily 4,000 word cap. There are some days when we allow ourselves a little room to go over if we feel like the extra detail is important, but we want to stay within that self-imposed limit as much as we can. I think it not only makes it more sustainable for our readers to keep up with us,

Starting point is 00:26:15 but it also makes our coverage more focused and better overall. All right, that's it for your questions answered, which brings us to our Under the Radar story. A new report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies is raising concerns over the deepening defense and intelligence relationship between China and Cuba. CSIS-reviewed satellite imagery shows an increasing number of eavesdropping stations across the island nation, suggesting a growing capacity to monitor sensitive electronic communications from American military bases, space launch facilities, and military and commercial shipping. The report comes as the U.S. and its rivals vie for military and economic advantages in the Caribbean and Latin America. The Wall Street Journal has this story,

Starting point is 00:27:00 and there's a link in today's episode description. and there's a link in today's episode description. All right, next up is our numbers section. The fine for a first-time violation of Grants Pass's prohibition on public camping is $295. That fine increases to $537.60 if it is not paid. The maximum number of days in jail that someone can serve after repeat violations of the city's ordinance is 30 in addition to a $1,250 fine. The median family income in Grants Pass in 2022 was $49,335, roughly $25,000 below the 2022 U.S. median family income

Starting point is 00:27:42 of $74,580. The percentage of people experiencing homelessness in Oregon who were unsheltered in 2023 is 65%, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Annual Homelessness Assessment Report. The percentage increase in unsheltered homelessness in Oregon between 2007 and 2023 is 14.5%. The number of U.S. states where chronic homelessness increased between 2020 and 2023 is 41. The estimated increase in chronically homeless people in Oregon from 2020 to 2023 is 2,161. The overall increase in homelessness in the U.S. between 2022 and 2023 is 12%, according to HUD. And the overall increase in unsheltered homelessness in the U.S. between 2022 and 2023 is 9.7%.

Starting point is 00:28:32 All right, and last but not least, our Have a Nice Day story. Ross Cooper is a data and analytics strategist who has amassed an extensive Pokemon card collection. By creating a YouTube channel and participating in Pokemon card trading conventions, Cooper has become active in the broader Pokemon community. Instead of selling his valuable cards, Cooper often gives his cards away to younger Pokemon lovers. There's just something about spreading joy and spreading kindness that it's like getting paid tenfold, he said. NPR has the story, and there's a link in today's episode description.

Starting point is 00:29:16 All right, everybody, that is it for today's episode. As always, if you'd like to support our work, please go to readtangle.com and sign up for a membership. As we mentioned at the top, we are going to be taking this 4th of July weekend off. We'll be back here on Monday, July 8th. For Isaac and the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a fantastic weekend, y'all. Peace. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and engineered by John Law. The script is edited by our managing editor, Ari Weitzman, Will Kabak, Bailey Saul, and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bokova,

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Tangle - SCOTUS allows laws against homeless encampments.

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