> If it is truly de-jure illegal to be poor now, you'd be able to point at a law on the books which says that.

Boise recently had to deal with this.

Passed a law that said it was illegal to sleep on the streets or public property if a shelter bed was available.

Problem? No shelter beds were generally available but two religious shelters said they were "always available", even when they had no actual beds. Ergo, police made arrests because the shelters were available, even if, factually, there wasn't. That the shelters SAID there were was enough for the police to arrest.

Adding to the problem was both of those shelters required both attendance AND participation in multiple religious ceremonies per day as a requisite of you being there, even if there did happen to be a bed.

So now you had a situation where the police were able to arrest homeless for refusing to go to these shelters, which may not have beds available, and that forced religious participation to be there.

That was a law that made it onto the books, until it was rightfully challenged. But the fact it made it to legislation in the first place is problematic.

> the US spends trillions of dollars a year supporting homeless and otherwise

No it doesn't

In most cities, free shelter sucks. It's only available on a day by day basis (sometimes requiring waiting in line in a specific place as late as 7 or 8 pm to know if there will be any beds open), or it has weird hours that get in the way of working schedules, or it requires people to participate in religious activities, or it puts everyone in one big room with no safety measures, or it has no way to store even minimal possessions securely, or it has nowhere to plug in a phone charger, or it has all the spaces to plug in phone chargers in one heap where it's easy for someone to steal a phone as everyone's being made to rush out the door at 7 AM, or it doesn't allow even well-behaved animals, or...

And on top of that, there's almost always a drastic shortage in shelter beds, so even people who jump through all the hoops only have a small chance of getting a spot. For example, Portland here, which is considered pretty homeless-friendly by a lot of people, only has enough shelter beds for about 1/5th of the homeless population.

For a lot of people, even perfectly functional, non-mentally-ill people, this makes it a perfectly logical move to look at shelters as only a measure of last resort and otherwise sleep in a car or find somewhere out of the way that will let them put their energy into trying to improve their situation rather than into trying to satisfy a new shelter's rules every day.

> US spends trillions of dollars a year supporting homeless and otherwise disadvantaged people

Horseshit.

It's less than $50B, most of which goes to subsidized housing. The actual amount spent directly on homelessness is likely less than $20B.

> In most cities something like half the homeless refuse free shelter.

I guarantee you there aren't free shelter beds for half the US's homeless population.

These are just talking points.

Something can be illegal even if cops are not resting everyone who does it. That's the worse situation in fact, when it becomes the sole discretion of individual police officers who to punish.

Homeless people don't tend to have the mobility you imagine.

Article: "The homeless residents said those penalties violated the Eighth Amendment of the US constitution because the city did not have any public shelters."

What if just all municipalities forbid homeless encampments? The result of this will be a race to the bottom, as more and more municipalities ban homeless camps, the negative effects will concentrate on fewer and fewer municipalities, making the issue worse and worse. This will in turn drive them to forbid camps as well.

There aren't even nearly enough homeless shelters. That holds the same basically everywhere in the US with a significant homeless population, except for those specific locations with a right to shelter law, like NYC.

Before this case went to the supreme court, if a city offered someone on the street access to a homeless shelter then they were allowed to force the person to move. It was only when the city did not have shelter space that they were no longer allowed to criminalize the person for existing on public property.

Now the city doesn't even have to offer bed space.

The shelters are full and other areas are in the same situation. When you see people living on the street that means the system is overloaded. The "visible" homeless are the tip of an enormous iceberg.