No Place To Go
Despite homelessness being on the rise, local governments keep cracking down on efforts to shelter those without permanent housing.
Since 2010 advocates and activists have claimed October 10 as World Homeless Day to raise awareness about the global problem of people living without shelter. That was last Thursday, so this week's Rent Free is a special homeless edition.
All types of housing are regulated too much in America and housing for the most vulnerable is the most regulated of all. This week's stories focus on a couple of recent examples of governments thwarting people's efforts to provide the homeless with shelter, or the homeless to provide shelter for themselves, including:
- The city of Kalispell, Montana, shutting down the local warming shelter just as it was preparing to open for its winter season.
- San Francisco's success at reducing the number of tents on the street by seizing homeless people's tents.
But first, our lead item is a quick overview of national homeless situation. The problem of people living on the streets is a big one and it's only growing bigger.
A Record Number of People Are Living on the Streets
There are roughly 653,104 homeless people in the United States and 256,610 of those people are "unsheltered"—meaning they either live on the streets, in abandoned buildings, or other areas not fit for human habitation.
That's according to the latest annual Point-In-Time survey performed in January 2023 and published by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in December 2023.
The 2023 PIT numbers show a 12 percent nationwide increase in the homeless population from 2022.
You are reading Rent Free from Christian Britschgi and Reason. Get more of Christian's urban regulation, development, and zoning coverage.
The Biden administration has blamed that jump on COVID-era eviction protections and housing assistance expiring. HUD itself cautions that its 2022 and 2021 PIT counts of the homeless population might have been artificially reduced because of the pandemic since some jurisdictions only did partial counts during COVID. So, it's possible some of the 12 percent jump in 2023 is explained by more comprehensive surveys being done.
Nevertheless, the trend line is clearly going up. The last pre-pandemic PIT survey from January 2020 reported an overall homeless population of 580,466 and roughly 230,000 unsheltered homeless.
Data from early reporting jurisdictions suggests we can expect another bump in the homeless population in the 2024 PIT.
The number of beds in temporary shelters has grown over the years, but not by enough to serve the growing homeless population. The National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH) notes in its annual report that there's 218,000 more homeless individuals than there are temporary shelter beds.
Beds in permanent supportive housing settings have grown 250 percent since 2007, reports NAEH. That reflects a shift in policy among federal, state, and local governments to a "housing first" model.
That model has come under criticism for being both expensive and ineffective at ending homelessness. Whether you agree or not with the critics, it's true that the construction of new supportive housing units is not keeping up with the rising homeless population either.
One reason might be that local governments make it incredibly difficult for even private parties to build shelters on their own property.
A Montana City Closes a Warming Center Right as Temperatures Start to Drop
In September, the city council of Kalispell, Montana, took the unusual, and likely unprecedented, step of revoking a permit it had given to a local shelter that had allowed it to offer warm beds to the rural community's homeless during the winter months.
City councilmembers blame the privately funded Flathead Warming Center for attracting out-of-town homeless people to the community, who they say have caused an uptick in crime and disorder in the surrounding neighborhood.
The Flathead Warming Center says those accusations are unfounded and the revocation of its permit was done via an ad hoc, illegal process.
The center is now suing to reclaim its permit and open the shelter again. For Warming Center Director Tonya Horn, time is of the essence.
"We have people show up at the door hoping to have shelter and we're able to give them a blanket, feed folks, and send them out the door," says Horn. Temperatures are already falling below freezing at night. "The most urgent need is for life and limb," she says.
The city of Kalispell declined Reason's request for comment, citing the ongoing litigation.
The History
Horn and co-founder Luke Heffernan opened the Flathead Warming Center in the basement of a local Episcopal Church in 2019. From the beginning, the Warming Center was "low-barrier." People didn't need to be sober to stay there (although drug and alcohol use on site was prohibited) and they could bring their pets.
The original warming center location filled up quickly each night, requiring Horn and Heffernan to frequently turn people away. In 2020, they started looking for a permanent location of their own.
Soon enough they found a suitable property in the center of town. But opening up a permanent warming center there required getting a zoning change and a conditional use permit from the city. The city council would have to approve both, which they did unanimously in September 2020.
The Warming Center says in its lawsuit that it's always striven to minimize its impact on surrounding property owners.
The center's conditional use permit application contained a set of "good neighbor" policies it had to abide by, including barring guests from loitering on the center's property when it was closed, and excluding people who acted in an aggressive manner from the shelter. Horn also agreed to give her cell phone number to surrounding neighbors and check in with them periodically.
Things went smoothly for the first couple years of the center's operation. The city allowed the center to expand from 40 to 50 beds in 2022. No neighbors protested that plan.
The Backlash
Horn says things changed in January 2023. The three-member Flathead County Commission issued a public letter blaming "a low-barrier shelter" for attracting homeless from out of the area to town. The letter called on the community to "be unified in rejecting all things that empower the homeless lifestyle."
Horn disputes the premise of the letter. The Warming Center surveys people who stay there and the vast majority are from Kalispell or have a significant connection (family or a job) to the area.
None of the county commissioners "came to visit the warming center to learn who we are, how we serve people, and who it is that we serve," says Horn. "It gave a platform for hate and we've seen hate roll out for the homeless community."
The Warming Center's lawsuit claims there was an increase in violence against the homeless following the county commission's letter. Seven homeless individuals were beaten, fatally in one such case. Others had eggs thrown at them or were shot with paintball guns.
This eventually culminated in the Kalispell City Council shutting down the Warming Center.
An Unprecedented Step
As Reason has covered before, services and shelters for the homeless are often required to get conditional use permits. Cities typically make that process pretty hard and often have wide discretion to not issue the permit.
To revoke a conditional use permit that's been issued, however, is an extraordinary step. Yet that's exactly what the Kalispell City Council did this past September.
"As far as we can tell, and we've looked, there hasn't been another city that's revoked a conditional use permit where the property owner hasn't violated any law," says Christie Herbet, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, which is representing the Warming Center.
The city government has a long list of tools for addressing problems at the Warming Center, says Herbet. It could cite the center for zoning violations. It could file a nuisance lawsuit against it in court.
The city of Kalispell did none of these things. Herbert says they couldn't have because the center had violated no zoning laws, had abided by all the conditions in its conditional use permit, and caused no nuisances.
Instead, the city held a series of public hearings in the summer of 2024 to explore taking away the Warming Center's permit. Per the center's lawsuit, a small number of local residents made vague accusations about the Warming Center attracting crime and vagrants to the area.
The center's critics eventually issued a series of demands to the Warming Center, including that it change from a low- to a high-barrier shelter, submit to random inspections and audits, hire private security to police a half-mile radius around the center, and agree never to expand.
Horn says these conditions were either intolerable or impossible for the center to meet. Negotiations broke down. In September the city council voted to revoke the center's permit.
Fighting to Reopen
In a lawsuit filed last week against the city of Kalispell, the Flathead Warming Center claims that the city's process for revoking its conditional use permit suffered from numerous constitutional deficiencies.
"Because this process was ad hoc and designed to reach the predetermined outcome of revoking the CUP, it had none of the safeguards that ordinarily attend quasi-judicial proceedings with such high stakes," reads their lawsuit.
This all violates the center's due process and equal protection rights guaranteed by the U.S. and Montana constitutions, the lawsuit argues.
The Warming Center has also filed for a temporary restraining order to allow it to stay open while their lawsuit is ongoing.
"I think there's a lot of good that could come from the pain of this process," says Horn. "As things play out through the courts hopefully our community will have a better understanding about who we are and what we do and who we serve."
San Francisco Successfully Reduces the Number of People Sleeping in Tents By Cracking Down on the Tents
The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson overturned two prior decisions by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that prohibited local governments from arresting or ticketing people for sleeping in public with rudimentary shelter if there were no available beds at local homeless shelters.
Western state governments and localities throughout the 9th Circuit frequently (and falsely) blamed the court's decisions for preventing them from policing nuisances, clearing encampments, and cracking down on public drug dealing.
It is true however that the 9th Circuit's decisions did put some limits on cops seizing tents and blankets from people sleeping outside when they had no other place to go.
After Grants Pass, localities are making up for lost time.
This past week, The San Francisco Standard reported on new city data released by Mayor London Breed's office showing the number of tents on the street had fallen by 60 percent since July 2023.
Yet, as the outlet notes, there's been no increase in the city's shelter population. Nor has there been a rise in referrals to the city's program that provides bus tickets for the homeless to get out of town.
The Standard reporters interviewed a number of the homeless who said the seizure of their tents just meant they were now sleeping on the street without tents.
"I'll go get help whenever I want to, and it has nothing to do with a tent or no tent," said one homeless man who spoke to The Standard. "I haven't ran into anyone yet who said, 'They took my tent, that's it — I'm going to rehab.'"
Quick Links
- J.D. Vance criticizes Ohio's Haitians for violating zoning laws intended to exclude them from the community. One reason homelessness was a rare phenomenon in the 19th century was that the governments didn't have zoning codes setting occupancy limits and banning cheap rooming houses.
- Fairfield, California, is allowing a local church to reopen its homeless ministry before it pays a $310,000 fine the city had slapped on it for various building code violations. Local reporting says that the city still expects the church to pay the fine. The church has claimed in the past that it was singled out for enforcement by a city government hostile to its homeless ministry.
- A University of California, Los Angeles lecturer has gone viral on TikTok with claims he can't afford permanent housing near the university on his salary, effectively forcing him into homelessness.
- Hurricane season, ineligibility from federal disaster relief, and new bans on public sleeping have left Florida's homeless with few options, reports Vox.
- LAist covers Southern California governments' post-Grants Pass crackdown on the homeless sleeping in public.
