The Economic Consequences of Homelessness in The US

homeless individuals from performing activities that are ‘necessities of life,’ such as
sleeping, in any public place when they have nowhere else to go, effectively penalizes
migration.”
The Eighth Amendment
Cruel and Unusual Punishment: In 2006, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck
down Los Angeles’s city ordinance prohibiting sleeping, sitting, or lying on the street at
any time of the day. The court ruled that the ordinance unconstitutionally criminalized
unavoidable conduct. The city had a major housing shortage and an inadequate supply
of shelter beds. Homelessness, the court held, is “a chronic state that may have been
acquired ‘innocently or involuntarily.” Thus punishing people for sleeping on the
streets—an inevitable consequence—violated the Eighth Amendment.
The Fourteenth Amendment
Vagueness: Courts have struck down anti-loitering laws as unconstitutionally vague. For
example, in a 1972 Supreme Court decision, the court complained that, because of its
unspecific language, an ordinance in Jacksonville, Florida, placed “almost unfettered
discretion in the hands of the police.”
Attorneys are challenging San Diego’s encroachment laws, originally enacted to force
people to remove trash bins from sidewalks. However, police are using the law to force
the homeless to leave public places. Attorneys are arguing that the law is
unconstitutionally vague because it provides almost no notice for what is criminal —
making it potentially illegal to even place a bag on the sidewalk for just a moment.
Equal Protection: In response to an “emergency” homeless street sweep of
encampments, the ACLU of Indiana recently filed a lawsuit against the city of
Indianapolis. The lawsuit alleges that the city targets homeless people while exempting
others, raising due process and equal protection concerns.
8.Prosecutors and state legislators can choose to stop criminalizing
homelessness.
Prosecutors can refuse to charge for violations of laws that specifically target the
homeless population, like bans on camping and panhandling. In Spokane, Washington,
for example, the city and district attorneys have embraced initiatives to dismiss citations
for offenses that homeless people incur when engaging in life-sustaining activities in
exchange for commitments to utilize housing and social services.
Prosecutors can side with those challenging the constitutionality of laws criminalizing
homelessness. In 2015, the Department of Justice filed a “statement of interest” arguing
that Idaho’s laws criminalizing sleeping in public were unconstitutional. “It should be
uncontroversial that punishing conduct that is a universal and unavoidable consequence
of being human violates the Eighth Amendment. … If a person literally has nowhere
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