California Turns on Its Homeless Population

California officials are turning against the state's homeless population in a series of lawsuits that are urging the courts to weigh in on the homelessness crisis.

Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho, the top prosecutor of California's capital, sued the city on Tuesday for allegedly failing to enforce local laws that have allowed the homeless population to result in Sacramento "collaps[ing] into chaos."

"We have an erosion of everyday life," Ho said during a press conference announcing the suit, which was filed alongside companion lawsuits from local residents and business owners. "We forget what it feels like to be safe and that brings us to this lawsuit...We need to get people off the streets."

The issue of escalating homelessness has reached a breaking point in California, which has the largest homeless population in the United States. Estimates suggest that roughly a third to nearly half of the nation's unhoused people live in the Golden State.

Ho, who has been threatening legal action against city officials since July, is not the first in California to file a challenge concerning the state's homeless population. San Francisco and Santa Ana have also been at the center of legal battles and the state has even asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on the encampments across California.

Republicans have used the encampments in the California's major cities as proof of failed Democratic policies, but even liberal voters and public officials in the state have become frustrated with the situation.

The same day that Ho sued the city of Sacramento, the California State Association of Counties and League of California Cities also filed a legal brief with the Supreme Court on Tuesday, asking the justices to appeal a 2018 ruling against the city of Boise, Idaho, that upended homeless policy in West Coast cities.

"The State of California and its cities and counties are engaged in unprecedented efforts to address homelessness through the creation of significant new policy initiatives and funding investments," the brief reads. "However, camping ordinances can be a useful tool in appropriate circumstances in addressing the complex conditions that exist in our homeless populations."

Five years ago, a federal appeals court affirmed a lower court decision which ruled that the city of Boise cannot enforce a ban on camping in public parks because "the 8th Amendment prohibits the imposition of criminal penalties for sitting, sleeping, or lying outside on public property for homeless individuals who cannot obtain shelter."

The ruling in Martin v. Boise has made it extremely difficult for cities in the nine state that fall under the Ninth Circuit Court's jurisdiction to clear encampments. Officials in cities like San Francisco have argued that the homeless situation in California is fundamentally different from Boise's, pointing to the billions of dollars that the state has funneled into housing and homelessness programs.

Speaking to Sacramento news station KCRA-TV on Tuesday, Ho said: "Frankly, the city has had seven years to deal with our unhoused crisis, and frankly, in those seven years our homeless crisis has increased by 250 percent."

"Now is the time to act," he said. "I believe that the response as well was that they've been working day and night to enforce the law. I would respectfully disagree with that."

In a separate appeals case that stemmed out of southern Oregon and that a string of California business groups and cities joined, conservatives on the Ninth Circuit Court criticized their liberal colleagues for not reconsidering the 2018 ruling.

"Homelessness is presently the defining public health and safety crisis in the western United States. California, for example, is home to half of the individuals in the entire country who are without shelter on a given night," Judge Milan Smith wrote in a July dissent joined by eight others. "There are stretches of[Los Angeles] where one cannot help but think the government has shirked its most basic responsibilities under the social contract: providing public safety and ensuring that public spaces remain open to all."

The bench was split 14 to 13 on whether to rehear a case coming out of a city in southern Oregon that challenged the 2018 ruling.

The legal challenges and growing homelessness crisis has mounted political pressure on California's top officials. Governor Gavin Newsom, who has helped clear homeless camps himself, recently announced that the state was sending cities and counties an additional $38 million to "clean up encamptments."

"In California, we are cutting red tape and making unprecedented investments to address homelessness, but with each hard-fought step forward, the courts are creating costly delays that slow progress," Newsom said in a statement last month. "I urge the courts to empower local communities to address street encampments quickly and comprehensively."