How Boise's Fight over Homelessness Is Rippling Along the West Coast
npr.org
npr.org
Even NPR summarized the decision inaccurately. The decision was that because sleep - not camping, but sleep - is a biological necessity, there must be a practical way for homeless people to obtain it.
If that method isn’t shelters (because they’re full or inaccessible), then there needs to be places and/or times when sleeping is allowed and practical. The justices explicitly noted that this doesn’t mean municipalities can’t enact and enforce significant restrictions on when, where, and how (for example, no multi-day camping or no erecting structures) this can happen, including when no shelter beds are available. There needs to be a viable way to obtain sleep, though, whatever that way is.
https://sccinsight.com/2019/04/08/what-the-9th-circuit-actua... has an excellent unbiased explanation, though the core part of the decision is not that long. Here’s the footnote which explicitly carved out this stuff:
> Naturally, our holding does not cover individuals who do have access to adequate temporary shelter, whether because they have the means to pay for it or because it is realistically available to them for free, but who choose not to use it. Nor do we suggest that a jurisdiction with insufficient shelter can never criminalize the act of sleeping outside. Even where shelter is unavailable, an ordinance prohibiting sitting, lying, or sleeping outside at particular times or in particular locations might well be constitutionally permissible. See Jones, 444 F.3d at 1123. So, too, might an ordinance barring the obstruction of public rights of way or the erection of certain structures. Whether some other ordinance is consistent with the Eighth Amendment will depend, as here, on whether it punishes a person for lacking the means to live out the “universal and unavoidable consequences of being human” in the way the ordinance prescribes.