Local homeless sweep laws swiftly changing after supreme court decision

PIERCE COUNTY, Wash. — In June the United States Supreme Court gave cities and counties in the Western United States the green light to create more restrictive laws around homelessness and camping. In July, cities and states are already implementing updated laws.

Thursday California Governor Gavin Newsome issued an executive order encouraging cities to sweep homeless camps deemed dangerous, giving people who live in camps 48 hours’ notice that they have to move. It’s slightly less restrictive than what the SCOTUS ruling allowed when it ruled in favor of an ordinance crafted by leaders in Grants Pass, OR.

In Washington, Lakewood became one of the first cities to create new laws around camping, mimicking the Grants Pass ordinance.

In Lakewood, camps will be cleared from all public spaces after a 24-hour warning is given, expanding the prohibition from just the city’s park space. Any violators would be banned from the city’s public spaces for 30 days.

“This ordinance fills kind of the last void,” said City Councilor Ryan Pearson, “We’ve gotten the people help who are willing to take help, we’ve done a number of different things. [Others] are refusing to take help.”

For organizations that work with people experiencing homelessness, restrictions like what Gov. Newsome ordered and what Lakewood passed are exactly what they feared after the SCOTUS ruling.

“The policies tell them to go somewhere else, but they don’t provide any sort of guidance for where that place is. What frequently happens is people go down the block, go to the next town, but there’s no solution there.” said Rob Huff, with the Tacoma Pierce County Coalition to End Homelessness.

Huff says sweeps often mean people lose important documents like social security cards or identification that prolong the process of finding a job and getting out of homelessness. Under the old interpretation of the Grants Pass case, cities could only sweep camps when there were enough shelter beds were available.

Now that that standard is gone, shelter operators fear they’ll need to help more people without more space to do it.

Pastor Samara Jenkins helps operate a day center, shelter, and safe park site through the Spanaway United Methodist Church. She thinks she will need to find a way to make more room with all three low barrier locations.

“Whatever the situation is, it’s already hard so we didn’t want to make anything more difficult because there’s already so many barriers getting into housing.” Jenkins said.

In Pierce County’s 2024 Point-in-Time count, the county identified 2,661 people experiencing homelessness, 6,335 people have been connected through the County’s homeless crisis response system in the same time. Huff says, there are around 1,700 shelter beds throughout the county.

For Jenkins, she knows there are enough homes or apartments available for people needing one in the county, they’re just not attainable for the people she’s helping because of how expensive they are, the application process, and little wiggle room when requirements aren’t met.

She sees camping bans and ordinances allowing for camp-sweeps as a short-sighted band-aid to an issue in need of a long-term solution.

“What it seems like it is is it just makes things pretty,” Jenkins said, “If we can just clear the areas and put folks where they’re not visible, that satisfies something, but it doesn’t take care of what the core issues are.”

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