The Supreme Court issued a ruling today in a case that will have a major impact on how cities can deal with homeless people and tent camps on the West Coast.
I wrote about this case last year under the headline “Progressive elected officials beg conservative Supreme Court for relief on homelessness” and that’s exactly what happened here. Cities up and down the coast have been prevented from doing much about homeless people settling on sidewalks or in public parks thanks to two different decisions by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers the western states including Hawaii and Alaska. In those decisions, the 9th Circuit had ruled that it was a violation of the 8th Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment for cities or arrest or interfere with homeless people who had no where else to go.
The result of these rulings was that cities like Portland, San…
