Increasingly, cities across the nation are making it a crime to experience homelessness. As the Director of the new Homeless Rights Advocacy Project at the Seattle University School of Law (HRAP), I’m fortunate to work alongside amazing community advocates and SU law students to combat this trend and to advance the rights of homeless adults, youth, and children. One of HRAP’s core partners has been the UC Berkeley School of Law’s Policy Advocacy Clinic- an exceptional group of Berkeley law students working on under the supervision of Professor Jeff Selbin. This group recently released a bombshell of a report, detailing the scope and extent of the criminalization of homelessness throughout California. The Berkeley clinic’s damning findings have prompted much-needed legislative attention to this problem. (This May, SU’s HRAP students will release an analogous series of reports on criminalization of homelessness throughout Washington state). Today, the Legislation Law Prof Blog celebrates this important anti-criminalization work with a guest blog from Berkeley’s Policy Advocacy clinic.
Berkeley Law’s Policy Advocacy Clinic Professor Jeffrey Selbin, and students Marina Fisher, Nathaniel Miller, and Lindsay Walter are pictured above (left to right).
Lindsay Walter is a second year law student at the University of California, Berkeley School of law. She co-authored California’s New Vagrancy Laws: The Growing Enactment and Enforcement of Anti-Homeless Laws in the Golden State as a part of Berkeley Law’s Policy Advocacy Clinic with Marina Fisher, Nathaniel Miller, and Jeffrey Selbin. Professor Selbin, Marina, Nate, and Stephanie Campos, legal fellow at the Policy Advocacy Clinic, also contributed to this blog post.
Too Close To Home: California’s Anti-Homeless Laws
“Every city.” The three of us sat dumbfounded. Two words summed up all of the data we had collected in researching the criminalization of homelessness in California. After examining municipal codes for 58 California cities and categorizing relevant code sections based on restricted activity, we analyzed the number of anti-homeless laws in each city. These laws are more commonly referred to as “quality-of-life” laws. We rejected this misnomer because these laws do not enhance the lives of housed or homeless people. On average, California cities have nine such laws. Every city studied has at least one municipal code—a restriction on sitting and sleeping in public places, resting in legally parked vehicles, begging, or sharing food—that can be used to criminalize people simply because they do not have a home. More shockingly, cities are increasing the pace of enactment of such laws.
Under the supervision of Clinical Professor Jeffrey Selbin and on behalf of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law’s Policy Advocacy Clinic, I worked with Berkeley law student Nathaniel Miller and public policy student Marina Fisher to write a report about the criminalization of homelessness in California. We produced the report for the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP), a coalition of social justice organizations dedicated to exposing and eliminating the root causes of civil and human rights abuses that impoverished and homeless people experience.
In writing the report, we understood that our objective was to compile information and present our findings about the criminalization of homeless people at the local level. We recognized that such thorough research had not been consolidated before—and after navigating and streamlining inconsistent municipal city codes and puzzling through incomplete enforcement data, we understood why we were the first to do so.
But we did not know how close to “home” the issues in this report would hit. As native Californians, we were disheartened to discover how little progress our communities had made over time in terms of recognizing the basic human rights of all people. Learning that every city had at least one municipal code section in its arsenal to criminalize those without housing seemed cruel. The pervasiveness of these laws across our state indicated that some of the more infamous parts of our American history—laden with laws criminalizing people for no reason other than being “undesirable” in the eyes of their community—lived on.
As we learned more about city municipal codes and their enforcement against homeless people, we struggled to craft a solution to address the pervasiveness of anti-homeless laws across the state. Our legal training emphasizes assigning liability—who has the obligation to remedy the harm done? From a public policy perspective, we similarly ask: what is the root of the social problem? The answer to both, unsurprisingly, is complicated: we, as a community, have the obligation to ensure that people are not criminalized for their mere existence; and we, as policymakers, elected officials, educators, lawyers, students, neighbors, and members of shared geographic space, are the root from which change must emanate.
Given the entrenchment of discrimination in our communities and in our laws, change will be incremental. We need to recognize and celebrate every step made in the right direction. Oregon and Colorado recently introduced Right to Rest bills in their state legislatures. And after months of advocacy and weeks of lobbying efforts, State Senator Carol Liu agreed to author California’s Right to Rest Bill. This bill will prohibit cities from enacting and enforcing local laws that infringe on the human right to exist by denying individuals the right to rest, sleep, and share food in public. The legislation will force cities to find alternate ways of addressing the problem of homelessness without resorting to criminalization through citations and arrests.
Still, passing a Right to Rest Bill in California will not be enough. Enforcement patterns indicate that harassment and criminalization are the primary tools police agencies have to remove “unwanted” people from the streets. These practices reflect political agendas that respond to public sentiment, suggesting a larger cultural shift needs to happen. Collectively, we must find solutions to provide housing and social services to those in need. By doing this, we will make our communities, and California as a whole, places that we are proud to call home.