Supreme Court to Hear Case Over Homelessness Rules in Oregon

The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to hear a challenge to cities using local ordinances to enforce bans on public camping, a case that could reshape policy on homelessness for years to come.

The case stems from a lawsuit challenging local laws in Oregon that restrict sleeping and camping in public spaces, including sidewalks, streets and city parks. A ruling could have broad implications, particularly for Western states grappling with how to address a homelessness crisis.

It adds another high-profile case to a docket that includes abortion, the power of administrative agencies and a challenge to whether former President Donald J. Trump is eligible for Colorado’s Republican primary ballot.

In court filings, lawyers for the plaintiffs argue that in 2013, Grants Pass, a city of about 40,000 people in southwestern Oregon, “began aggressively enforcing a set of ordinances that make it unlawful to sleep anywhere on public property with so much as a blanket to survive cold nights, even if shelter is unavailable.” They described it as an “effort to push its homeless residents into neighboring jurisdictions.”

They argue that because there are no homeless shelters in Grants Pass and that the only housing programs “serve only a small fraction of the city’s homeless population,” local homeless residents are left with “nowhere to sleep but outside.”

The plaintiffs say that these rules violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, “effectively punishing the city’s involuntarily homeless residents for their existence” in the city.

In an amicus brief, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California urged the court to take on the case, writing that he had “witnessed firsthand the challenges of the homelessness crisis,” including allocating more than $15 billion toward housing and homelessness during his time in office.

The crisis is particularly acute there. The state has an estimated 171,000 homeless people, nearly one-third of the country’s homeless population. Encampments in parks and other public spaces are common in cities across the state as the number of people without shelter rises. There are now 40,000 more people who are homeless in the state than the number six years ago.

Mr. Newsom said that while local governments “work on long-term approaches” to help address the dual crisis of housing and homelessness, they needed “the flexibility” of the laws to “address immediate threats to health and safety in public places — both to individuals living in unsafe encampments and other members of the public impacted by them.”

Encampments “foster dangerous and unhealthy conditions for those living in them and for communities around them,” he said, adding that local rules were “a vital tool for helping to move people off the streets, to connect them with resources, and to promote safety, health, and usable public spaces.”