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grants pass
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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Why Society Cannot Sweep Its Way Out of Homelessness
Officials justify sweeps for safety and sanitation reasons, but in the end they harm and displace people who have nowhere else to go. It's the opposite of a solution, especially when we know what's needed and what works.
Dec 21, 2024
This summer, the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass ruling made it much easier for local governments to criminalize homelessness. Since then, cities and states across the country have stepped up their harassment of people for the “crime” of not having a place to live.
Penalizing homelessness has increasingly taken the form of crackdowns on encampments — also known as “sweeps,” which have received bipartisan support. California Governor Gavin Newsom has ordered state agencies to ramp up encampment sweeps, while President-elect Donald Trump has also pledged to ban encampments and move people to “tent cities” far from public view.
Evidence shows that these sweeps are harmful and unproductive — and not to mention dehumanizing.
Housing justice advocates caution that sweeps disrupt peoples’ lives by severing their ties to case workers, medical care, and other vital services. Many unhoused people also have their personal documents and other critical belongings seized or tossed, which makes it even harder to find housing and work.
Sweeps, like punitive fines and arrests, don’t address the root of the problem — they just trap people in cycles of poverty and homelessness.
According to a ProPublica investigation, authorities in multiple cities have confiscated basic survival items like tents and blankets, as well as medical supplies like CPAP machines and insulin. Other people lost items like phones and tools that impacted their ability to work.
Teresa Stratton from Portland told ProPublica that her husband’s ashes were even taken in a sweep. “I wonder where he is,” she said. “I hope he’s not in the dump.”
Over the summer, the city of Sacramento, California forcefully evicted 48 residents — mostly women over 55 with disabilities — from a self-governed encampment known as Camp Resolution. The camp was located at a vacant lot and had been authorized by the city, which also owned the trailers where residents lived.
One of the residents who’d been at the hospital during the sweep was assured that her belongings would be kept safe. However, she told me she lost everything she’d worked so hard to acquire, including her car.
The loss of her home and community of two years, along with her possessions, was already traumatizing. But now, like most of the camp residents, she was forced back onto the streets — even though the city had promised not to sweep the lot until every resident had been placed in permanent housing.
Aside from being inhumane, the seizure of personal belongings raises serious constitutional questions — especially since sweeps often take place with little to no warning and authorities often fail to properly store belongings. Six unhoused New Yorkers recently sued the city on Fourth Amendment grounds, citing these practices.
Sweeps, like punitive fines and arrests, don’t address the root of the problem — they just trap people in cycles of poverty and homelessness. Encampments can pose challenges to local communities, but their prevalence stems from our nation’s failure to ensure the fundamental human right to housing.
People experiencing homelessness are often derided as an “eyesore” and blamed for their plight. However, government policies have allowed housing, a basic necessity for survival, to become commodified and controlled by corporations and billionaire investors for profit.
Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage has remained stagnant at $7.25 since 2009 and rent is now unaffordable for half of all tenants. Alongside eroding social safety nets, these policies have resulted in a housing affordability crisis that’s left at least 653,000 people without housing nationwide.
While shelters can help some people move indoors temporarily, they aren’t a real housing solution, either.
Human rights groups report that shelters often don’t meet adequate standards of housing or accommodate people with disabilities. Many treat people like they’re incarcerated by imposing curfews and other restrictions, such as not allowing pets. Safety and privacy at shelters are also growing concerns.
Officials justify sweeps for safety and sanitation reasons, but in the end they harm and displace people who have nowhere else to go. Instead, governments should prioritize safe, affordable, dignified, and permanent housing for all, coupled with supportive services.
Anything else is sweeping the problem under the rug.
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