Homeless Encampments

Tent encampments on sidewalks, in parks, and under freeways became the defining image of West Coast urban failure in the 2010s and 2020s. Conservatives argue that tolerating them serves no one: not the housed residents who lose safe streets, and least of all the people in the tents, most of whom struggle with addiction or untreated mental illness and are left to deteriorate in public under a policy that calls itself compassion.¹

The conservative alternative is enforcement paired with treatment: clear the camps, offer shelter and services, and require people to use them. The 2024 Supreme Court decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson restored cities’ legal authority to do exactly that.

Key Takeaways

• Encampments grew fastest in cities that combined high housing costs with judicial and political limits on enforcement.
• Martin v. Boise (9th Cir. 2019) barred West Coast cities from enforcing camping bans when shelter beds were unavailable; Grants Pass v. Johnson (2024) overruled that approach.
• Conservatives locate the crisis’s roots in addiction, deinstitutionalization, and permissive public policy, not housing costs alone.
• The conservative prescription is shelter and treatment as an obligation on both sides: the city must offer it, and the individual must accept it.

History And Context

Encampments are not new—the Hoovervilles of the 1930s housed the Depression’s displaced—but the modern crisis has different roots. The emptying of state psychiatric hospitals from the 1960s onward released hundreds of thousands of patients into communities that never built the promised outpatient care. Los Angeles’s Skid Row, where the city concentrated shelters and services across roughly fifty blocks, became the country’s most visible open-air catastrophe. From the 2000s, federal policy embraced Housing First, which places the chronically homeless in permanent housing without requiring sobriety or treatment.

The legal turn came in 2018-2019, when the Ninth Circuit held in Martin v. Boise that punishing people for sleeping on public property when no shelter bed was available violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.² Across the circuit’s nine western states, injunctions and settlements followed, and unsheltered homelessness climbed while cities argued about what the ruling permitted. Oregon’s Grants Pass, a town of 38,000 fined for enforcing its anti-camping ordinances, carried the question back up. In June 2024 the Supreme Court held in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that generally applicable camping bans are not cruel and unusual punishment, returning the issue to legislatures and city councils.³

The Conservative Position

Conservatives reject the premise that encampments are simply housing shortage made visible. The unsheltered population is not a cross-section of people priced out of apartments; it is dominated by severe addiction—methamphetamine and fentanyl above all—and serious mental illness. Michael Shellenberger’s study of San Francisco argued that the city’s ideology of unconditional tolerance, combined with open drug scenes, produced more suffering and death, not less.¹ Theodore Dalrymple, drawing on years of medical practice among the British underclass, made the older conservative point: policy that removes consequences from self-destructive behaviour will get more of it.⁴

The prescription follows. Cities should ban camping and enforce the ban, as Grants Pass now permits; build cheap congregate shelter rather than waiting decades for subsidized apartments at premium cost; fund treatment beds and require their use through drug courts and, where warranted, civil commitment for the gravely disabled; and dismantle open drug markets. Public spaces belong to everyone, and a compassion that leaves a psychotic man to die slowly on a sidewalk is not compassion. Order and treatment are not the alternative to helping the homeless—they are what helping them requires.

Differing Positions

Housing-First advocates and most academic researchers counter that the strongest predictor of a region’s homelessness rate is its housing market: cities with high rents and low vacancy have large homeless populations regardless of local drug use or generosity of services, which is why Houston’s numbers differ from San Francisco’s. Randomized studies of Housing First show high housing-retention rates for the chronically homeless, and advocates argue that stability must precede recovery, since treatment rarely succeeds from a sidewalk. On this view, sweeps churn people between neighbourhoods and jails, destroy documents and medications, sever contact with caseworkers, and cost more than housing; Grants Pass merely licenses cities to hide the problem. The disagreement is over causation—markets versus behaviour—and over whether help can legitimately be made a condition of using public space.

References

1. Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities (Harper, 2021).
2. Martin v. City of Boise, 920 F.3d 584 (9th Cir. 2019).
3. City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, 603 U.S. 520 (2024).
4. Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (Ivan R. Dee, 2001).