“You shouldn’t have to wait until you’re in a casket to have a permanent home.”

A woman told me that in 2009 following the death of an unhoused man named Tim that I frequently quoted in stories and talked to regularly in Springfield, Ill.

Short and wiry like a former featherweight boxer, Tim was a kind of foreman for the community of unhoused people who camped at the public library, which was next door to city hall. When the city had information to pass along to campers, they provided Tim with the documentation to distribute.

I recall one evening sitting with Tim on brick benches after the city voted to break up the encampment that had been a source of controversy for years. (Legend had it that when Barack Obama announced his presidential candidacy in Springfield a couple of years earlier, the encampment was cleared for homeland-security concerns.) The plan called for a storage pod where unhoused people could keep their belongings; they would be able to access the pod on an appointed schedule.

One man was visibly perturbed upon learning of the plan, which he said would mess up his work schedule. Another, convinced the city was bluffing for the umpteenth time and simply hoping to temporarily placate library patrons, said he wasn’t going anywhere.

Then again, where would he?

The lives of tens of thousands of people are in the hands of the Supreme Court’s nine justices who will decide this summer whether local communities can push homeless people out of sight and mind.

‘Not one easy answer’

You don’t want them panhandling on the corner. You don’t want them sleeping on park benches. You don’t want the shelter too close to your house.

So where are homeless people supposed to go?

The question has long confronted local government officials, advocacy groups, loved ones and, most importantly, unhoused people themselves.

It’s also the question at the heart of a case before the U.S. Supreme Court known as City of Grants Pass, Ore. v. Gloria Johnson, which experts say is one of the most important cases related to homelessness in modern history.

The case is a version of the circumstances described above; in fact, most cities in America have faced these issues. It’s astonishing that it’s just now coming before the high court.

Plaintiffs argue that by passing municipal ordinances against camping and sleeping in public, the city of Grants Pass seeks to criminalize homelessness. Grants Pass argues — as did Springfield fifteen years ago and as did Birmingham, Ala., when we hosted the World Games in 2022 — that ordinances are aimed at promoting public health and safety.

Specifically, the constitutional question on which the justices heard oral arguments is whether such anti-homelessness ordinances are tantamount to “cruel and unusual punishment,” which is prohibited under the Eighth Amendment.

Some constitutional law experts hold that if the court permits the criminalization of homelessness here, the ruling could erode precedent that protects citizens from other forms of cruel and unusual punishment, such as imposing the death penalty for non-homicide offenses.

The Washington Post reported that based on justices’ questions Monday, the court was not surprisingly split along ideological lines, with conservatives Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh questioning the appropriateness of the court, rather than community leaders, dictating local policies that govern housing and homelessness.

Justice Elena Kagan called sleeping “a biological necessity,” akin to inhaling and exhaling. “For a homeless person who has no place to go, sleeping in public is kind of like breathing in public,” Kagan said.

Sonia Sotomayor, another Democratic-appointed justice posited: “Where do we put them if every city, every village, every town lacks compassion? Are they supposed to kill themselves, not sleeping?”

Such ordinances are rooted in law that stretches back across the sea, before America as we know it was born. In the U.S., laws governing offenses loosely described as vagrancy proliferated as a means to uphold white supremacy, especially in the South.

For example, Virginia passed its Vagrancy Act of 1866 to force employment on any person who appeared to be homeless or unemployed. On its face, the law was race neutral but just so happened to be passed around the time millions of formerly enslaved African Americans became newly freed from bondage and were forced to roam around in search of work.

Using a loophole in the 13th Amendment that prohibits forced, unpaid labor — except as a punishment for being convicted of a crime — Southern states went ham on creating Black Codes to criminalize the existence of formerly enslaved people and trap them in the penal system, where their bodies could be profited upon under a system known as convict leasing.

By 1888, the state of Alabama leased all prisoners in its custody, about 90% of whom were Black, to a Birmingham mining company, paying them 30 cents a day — about 10 bucks in today’s money. Alabama was the last state in the union to abolish the practice of convict leasing, in 1928.

“Through convict leasing, Southern states and private companies derived enormous wealth from the labor of mostly Black prisoners who earned little or no pay and faced inhumane and often deadly work conditions, generations after slavery was formally abolished,” wrote authors of a report published by the Montgomery, Ala.-based Equal Justice Initiative.

The causes of homelessness today are complicated, with many unhoused people having experiences with substance-use and mental health disorders, incarceration and housing and income insecurity, domestic violence and more. Oftentimes, myriad factors compound onto one another.

Before he died, Tim once explained to me: “People want to say it’s all mental illness and all drug abuse — but it’s not just one easy answer.”

Data points were made

YouGov, a U.K.-based data and analytics website, published a survey of U.S. attitudes on homelessness in December 2023. Americans overwhelmingly agree that homelessness is a major problem.

—67% of Americans said in the survey homelessness is a very serious problem, an increase from 54% over the previous year

— Also, 78% of Americans believe that housing is a basic human right. This is true of 94% of Democrats, 79% of Independents and 61% of Republicans.

Americans also generally agree that the government should do more to fix the problem. The vast majority of Americans also don’t believe that unhoused people should be rounded up and thrown in jail.

—However, nearly 50% of Americans do support the use of infrastructure that deters people from sleeping on park benches, bus stops and other public spaces. On the question of whether homeless encampments should be torn down, support for such a policy was split into thirds between supporting, opposing and being neutral on the policies.

That’s what people said about the condition of homelessness. A previous YouGov study published in 2022 asked Americans about their support for various types of developments nationally versus locally in their community to reveal NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) attitudes.

According to that survey, opposition was strongest to the very types of facilities that could address or alleviate homelessness, including psychiatric hospitals, drug rehab centers, hospitals, public restroom facilities, low-income housing projects …. and literal homeless shelters. Here are a few more facts about homelessness, from the National Alliance to End Homelessness:

—Homelessness has been on the rise since 2017, experiencing an overall increase of 6 percent in that time span

—In 2022, counts of chronically homeless individuals reached record highs in the history of data collection to 127,768

—Between 2020 and 2022, homelessness rose just 0.3 percent, although researchers note the period was marked by “both pandemic-related economic disruptions and robust investments of federal resources into human services”

—Among racial groups, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islanders have the highest rates, with 121 out of every 10,000 people experiencing homelessness

—Most groups of color have higher rates of homelessness than their white counterparts. Among whites, 11 out of every 10,000 people experience homelessness.

—For Black people, that number is more than four times as large—48 out of every 10,000 people. Only Asian Americans experience homelessness less than white people, around 4 per 10,000

— Washington, D.C., has the nation’s highest rate of homelessness. Mississippi has the lowest rate of homelessness in the U.S.

—Researchers differentiate homelessness, which encompasses a broader set of unstable housing conditions, and being unsheltered. Unsheltered homelessness is trending upward. Whereas between 2007 and 2015, the number of unsheltered people decreased most years. Since 2015, the unsheltered population has seen a 35 percent increase