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grants pass
Louisiana Advances One of the Country’s ‘Cruelest’ Anti-Homeless Bills
One homeless advocacy group said the bill, which would require homeless people to perform unpaid labor to pay for involuntary treatment, "evokes debtor’s prisons, convict leasing, and the ugliest day of Jim Crow."
Apr 18, 2026
The Louisiana House of Representatives voted this week to pass what the National Homelessness Law Center says is "one of the cruelest anti-homeless bills in the country."
Like many other anti-homeless bills being advanced around the country following a 2024 Supreme Court decision allowing states and cities to criminalize homelessness, House Bill 211, which passed by a vote of 70-28, makes unauthorized sleeping in public spaces a crime.
It is punishable by a fine of up to $500, imprisonment for up to six months, or both. Repeat offenders could face one to two years in prison with hard labor and a $1,000 fine.
The bill, which will now advance to the GOP-controlled state Senate, has been nicknamed the "Streets to Success Act" because, according to its sponsor, state Rep. Debbie Villio (R-79), the goal is not to jail homeless people but to "connect them to service providers."
Those who are convicted of sleeping outdoors could be given the option to avoid jail time by instead entering into a mandatory treatment program for at least 12 months. The bill authorizes local governments to set up semi-permanent camps in remote areas, where defendants would be required to stay and receive treatment.
The bill requires homeless defendants to pay “all or part of the cost of the treatment program to which he is assigned," a steep cost for many, as the average cost for residential drug and alcohol rehab treatment in Louisiana is more than $4,400 per week, according to the addiction referral service directory Addicted.org.
According to the bill, those who cannot afford this steep cost would be required to perform unpaid labor for the state or a local community center in lieu of payment.
Bill Quigley, director of the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University New Orleans, called the bill's entire premise "a farce."
"If people had the resources to pay for housing and physical and/or mental health services, they would not be on the street," he told Common Dreams.
He described it as a "cruel theater of the absurd" based on "the lie that people choose to be homeless." The law, he said, "assumes our communities have plenty of affordable apartments and lots of mental and physical health services available."
In reality, he said, these services are chronically underfunded, and the city would need to build about 55,000 more affordable rental units to provide enough housing for its rent-burdened population.
Though it is not uncommon for homeless people to struggle with mental health or substance use issues, increases in the cost of housing have been shown to have a direct relationship with increasing homelessness.
Homelessness in New Orleans dropped considerably in the years following the Covid-19 pandemic, when Congress provided permanent housing subsidies for those in need. But after those funds have dried up, homelessness in the city shot up higher than before the pandemic, a study by the homelessness nonprofit UNITY of Greater New Orleans found in 2024.
New Orleans City Councilmember Lesli Harris (D), who has opposed the bill, pointed to the success of the city's Home for Good program, which took a "Housing First" approach to homelessness, providing rental subsidies and allowing people to move straight from encampments into housing without requirements that they obtain treatment.
According to a May 2025 report, the program had moved 1,133 people off the streets and into supportive housing and allowed eight homeless encampments to close.
"Through our Home for Good program, we house an individual for roughly $21,844 per year. By comparison, jailing that same person costs an average of $51,000—and failing to act at all can cost up to $55,000 in emergency room visits and crisis rehousing," Harris said. "HB 211 would steer Louisiana toward the most expensive option while producing no lasting housing, no services, and no real path forward for the people involved."
Harris has also decried the bill's creation of what she called "internment camps" for treatment. The bill's text requires these facilities to be far away from downtown and other high-value neighborhoods, which she said separates those trying to rebuild their lives from work, public transit, and other critical services, and further isolates them from society.
Since the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, which allowed cities to enforce public-camping bans against unhoused people even when shelter is unavailable, around two dozen states and hundreds of municipalities have passed various measures criminalizing poverty.
The homeless advocacy group Housing Not Handcuffs points out that many of the bills were written by the Cicero Institute, a far-right think tank with heavy backing from billionaire tech investors that now has deep influence over the housing policy of President Donald Trump, who has taken a hacksaw to funding for public housing programs under the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Housing Not Handcuffs said Louisiana's bill, which would almost certainly be signed by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry if passed by the state Senate, "is an extreme take on the already extreme copy-paste legislation" peddled by Cicero.
"This bill forces homeless people charged with a crime to make the false choice between jail or at least one year of forced treatment," the group said. "Louisiana has a long history—and present—of chain gangs, prison labor, and entrenched white supremacy. This bill clearly evokes debtor’s prisons, convict leasing, and the ugliest day of Jim Crow."
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Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Unhoused Families Are Being Ignored
Local politicians don’t see advantage in tackling a crisis that is hidden from view. So, it is up to the rest of us to step up.
Aug 15, 2025
Our eviction court clients do not want US President Donald Trump’s attention. Nor the Supreme Court’s, for that matter. But they would appreciate it if the rest of us took notice.
Last month, Trump issued a heinous executive order pushing for the arrest of individuals engaged in “urban camping and loitering.” Trump’s order followed on the equally callous 2024 Supreme Court decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, which gave the legal green light for imprisoning people just because they are forced to live outdoors.
The Grants Pass decision opened the floodgates for state and local governments to destroy homeless encampments and make arrests for the crime of being unhoused.
Fortunately, many people have responded to these heartless attacks with both compassion and action. They lift up the proven success of Housing First programs that address the core need for a safe place to live, which then allows for other needs to be addressed effectively too. Sometimes, politicians and business leaders help—even when they seem to be motivated mostly by a desire to rid the city sidewalks and neighborhoods of unsightly displays of unhoused suffering.
When Trump and others label homelessness as largely caused by addiction or mental health issues, they have the causation arrow pointed in the wrong direction.
All good. Our sisters and (mostly) brothers in the streets and encampments deserve housing and dignity.
But, beyond the demonizing and harassment directed to visibly unhoused people, there is another deeply damaging outcome from all this political, media, and advocacy attention: Unhoused families are being ignored.
Thanks to the research of Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, we have long known that children are the most common demographic among the 7.6 million people who face eviction each year. That means our clients usually don’t look like the stereotypical single man on a downtown street corner or huddled under an overpass. But they need help just as much.
Consider our clients Kevin and Samantha and their infant daughter (I will not use clients’ real names), who each night squeeze themselves in to sleep in their 2011 Ford Focus. Just finding a place to park is a nightly challenge. Walmart security guards and park police pound on their windows and shine flashlights in their faces, waking the baby and kicking them out of parking lots.
Depending on the season, they have to run the car engine several hours of the night just to keep some heat or cooling going. Sleep is hard to come by in their cramped quarters, especially while keeping an eye out for police and attackers.
Since Kevin and Samantha take turns watching the baby while the other one works a shift at a fast-food restaurant, they often arrive early for their shifts. That way, they can take the baby into the restaurant bathroom and try to bathe as the best they can.
Tonya and her two children spent hundreds of dollars on rental application fees, only to be turned down each time because of a past eviction filing. For awhile, they bedded down on the floor of Tonya’s sister’s apartment. But the sister’s landlord threatened eviction for packing eight people into a two-bedroom unit.
So, when Tonya’s meager home healthcare wages allow it, she pays $75 for a night in a motel. The room is dirty—she won’t let her youngest crawl on the crunchy brown carpeting—and the parking lot is filled with loud, frightening people. But the motel doesn’t check tenant records, and it beats the alternative. On the nights Tonya cannot afford the motel fee, she and the kids sleep in the car.
Shelters Full; So is Subsidized Housing
Each morning, Samantha and Tonya call the handful of local shelters that accept families and ask if there are beds available. The answer is almost always no. After that, there is nowhere else to call. Subsidized housing for families has years-long waiting lists, which means 3 of every 4 households eligible for subsidized housing are out of luck.
These families are sometimes referred to as the hidden homeless. Parents with children avoid the streets and encampments not just for safety reasons: Allowing their kids to be seen unhoused can trigger a call to child welfare agencies. Unhoused families staying out of sight is a big reason why the official homelessness count is widely acknowledged as being far too low, especially when it comes to child homelessness.
Volunteers and professionals conducting the annual Housing and Urban Development “Point in Time” count do their best, but you can’t tally what you can’t see. That means that communities’ homeless counts sometimes fail to include almost any children at all, despite the fact a recent report by SchoolHouse Connection and the University of Michigan revealed that nearly a half-million infants and toddlers were homeless during the studied years of 2022 and 2023. For pre-K to grade 12 students, the number was 1.37 million. For context, that means the total number of kids experiencing homelessness in the US over the course of just two years is significantly larger than the entire population of the city of Philadelphia.
Living wages, childcare guarantees, and affordable housing—especially affordable housing—would shut down our eviction courts and empty out homeless family shelters.
When Trump and others label homelessness as largely caused by addiction or mental health issues, they have the causation arrow pointed in the wrong direction. For our clients and the majority of those who are unhoused, their main problem is not mental health. They simply cannot afford their rent. But their housing struggle definitely leads to health crises: Multiple studies have shown that evictions and homelessness contribute to children’s mental illnesses, respiratory conditions, infections, delayed cognitive development, and difficulties in school and social settings.
Donald Trump is not paying attention to this. Downtown business leaders are unconcerned. Local politicians don’t see advantage in tackling a crisis that is hidden from view.
So, it is up to the rest of us to step up.
The solutions are not hard to find. Families living without shelter is unthinkable in other nations, as it largely was in earlier generations here in the United States. Living wages, childcare guarantees, and affordable housing—especially affordable housing—would shut down our eviction courts and empty out homeless family shelters.
To get there, we first have to pay attention to the families of Kevin, Samantha, Tonya, and the million-plus other kids and parents who don’t know where they are going to sleep tonight.
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A Year After Grants Pass, Criminalizing Homelessness Still Doesn’t Work
Homelessness is solvable in our lifetime if our country commits to ensuring that every person has a safe, affordable, dignified, and permanent place to call home.
Jun 09, 2025
In the largest eviction of a homeless encampment in recent history, around 100 unhoused people were recently forced to vacate Oregon’s Deschutes National Forest—or else face a $5,000 fine and up to one year in jail.
The forest was the last hope for the encampment’s residents, many of whom were living in broken down RVs and cars. Shelters in nearby Bend—where the average home price is nearly $800,000—are at capacity, and rent is increasingly unaffordable.
“There’s nowhere for us to go,” Chris Dake, an encampment resident who worked as a cashier and injured his knee, told The New York Times.
Today, a person who works full-time and earns a minimum wage cannot afford a safe place to live almost anywhere in the country.
This sentiment was echoed by unhoused people in Grants Pass, 200 miles south, where a similar fight unfolded. A year ago this June, in Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court’s billionaire-backed justices ruled that local governments can criminalize people for sleeping outside, even if there’s no available shelter.
Nearly one year later, homelessness—and its criminalization—has only worsened.
Today, a person who works full-time and earns a minimum wage cannot afford a safe place to live almost anywhere in the country. The federal minimum wage has remained stagnant at $7.25 since 2009, and rent is now unaffordable for half of all tenants.
As a result, there are now over 770,000 people without housing nationwide—a record high. Many more are just one emergency away from joining them.
The Supreme Court’s abhorrent decision opened the door for cities to harass people for the “crime” of not having a place to live. Fines and arrests, in turn, make it more difficult to get out of poverty and into stable housing.
Since Grants Pass, around 150 cities have passed or strengthened “anti-camping” laws that fine, ticket, or jail people for living outdoors—including over two dozen cities and counties in California alone. A Florida law mandates that counties and municipalities ban sleeping or camping on public property. Due to a related crackdown, almost half of arrests in Miami Beach last year were of unhoused people.
Emboldened by Grants Pass, localities have ramped up the forced clearing of encampments—a practice known as “sweeps.”
While officials justify them for safety and sanitation reasons, sweeps harm people by severing their ties to case workers, medical care, and other vital services. In many cases, basic survival items are confiscated by authorities. Alongside being deadly, research confirms that sweeps are also costly and unproductive.
Punitive fines, arrests, and sweeps don’t address the root of the problem: the lack of permanent, affordable, and adequate housing.
President Donald Trump is only doubling down on failed housing policies. He ordered over 30 encampments in D.C. to be cleared based on a March executive order. And his budget request for 2026 would slash federal rental assistance for over 10 million Americans by a devastating 43% (all to fund tax breaks for billionaires and corporations.)
For too long, our government policies have allowed a basic necessity for survival to become commodified and controlled by corporations and billionaire investors. We must challenge this if we ever want to resolve homelessness.
Housing is a fundamental human right under international law that the U.S. must recognize. Homelessness is solvable in our lifetime if our country commits to ensuring that every person has a safe, affordable, dignified, and permanent place to call home.
As housing experts have long noted, governments should invest in proven and humane solutions like Housing First, which provides permanent housing without preconditions, coupled with supportive services.
Despite the obstacles, communities continue to fight back—including in Grants Pass, where disability rights advocates are challenging the city’s public camping restrictions. Others are forming tenant and homeless unions in their cities, organizing rent strikes, and pushing for publicly funded housing (or “social housing”) that’s permanently affordable and protected from the private market.
The Grants Pass decision may have opened the door to new cruelties, but local governments still have a choice to do what’s right. Now, more than ever, we must demand real housing solutions.
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