Homelessness Is Not A Crime

Image of a homeless individual sleeping on a bench.

Health Trust/ Flickr

There is an affordable housing crisis in America. This fact is well-known to Washington, D.C. residents. Indeed, the Washington Post reported in March of this year that apartments in the District renting for $800 or less fell 42 percent since 2013, and there are no longer any such apartments available on the open market.

This mirrors what is happening across the country, where 1 in 4 renters is paying more than 50 percent of her income toward rent. These renters, who must make heart-wrenching choices between paying for housing, child care, health care or other necessities, are one unfortunate event away from homelessness. And, once they become homeless, it is an incredibly difficult cycle to escape.

In such an era, it is important that we support policies that promote housing stability and homelessness prevention. Just as importantly, we must oppose those policies and practices that perpetuate and worsen homelessness for those who fall victim to it. One important way to do this is to put an end to discrimination against homeless people.

One particularly egregious form of discrimination is the criminalization of homelessness. In 2014, the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty published “No Safe Place: The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities,” which reported an explosive growth of laws that treat the life-sustaining activities of homeless people – such as sleeping or sitting down – as crimes. These laws, designed to remove visibly homeless people from business centers, tourist districts, and gentrifying residential neighborhoods, do not address the underlying causes of homelessness. Instead, they exacerbate the problem by saddling homeless people with criminal convictions that can compromise their ability to obtain housing, employment, and needed social services.

Moreover, these laws waste precious taxpayer dollars. Temporarily cycling people through the expensive criminal justice system, only to release them to the streets with no new housing or shelter options, costs communities millions of dollars each year. Indeed, a growing number of cost studies have shown that the criminalization of homelessness costs communities two to three times as much as simply providing housing to homeless people.

These laws also cost communities by exposing them to litigation for violations of homeless persons’ civil and human rights. The U.S. Department of Justice has stated that it is unconstitutional to arrest homeless people for sleeping in public places when there is no lawful alternative available to them.
And, in the past five years, the majority of cases challenging criminalization laws, including those banning panhandling and sharing food with homeless people, have resulted in positive outcomes for homeless people and their advocates.

But much more work remains to be done to protect the rights of our nation’s homeless people.
Even in D.C., where the city has done many things right to reduce the criminalization of homelessness, including implementing a positive code of conduct for its police force, homeless people continue to experience discrimination at the hands of local law enforcement. Indeed, in an April 2014 survey by the National Coalition for the Homeless, 67 percent of homeless people reported experiencing discrimination by police.

Law enforcement is not the only problem, however. The same report also described discrimination against homeless people by private business, medical services and social services. While these forms of discrimination are distinct from criminalization practices, they similarly harm homeless individuals’ ability to enjoy the rights that many of us simply take for granted. And, like criminalization policies, they harm homeless persons’ opportunities for escaping homelessness.

To address pervasive discrimination against homeless people in D.C., a coalition of local homeless advocates has been lobbying for an amendment to the D.C. Human Rights Act to include homelessness as a protected status. Amended multiple times over the years to protect vulnerable populations from discrimination, the change in the law would provide needed protection to homeless people in accessing housing, employment, public accommodations and educational institutions.

Our city can and should build on its positive efforts to minimize the criminalization of homelessness and provide legal protection to homeless people who continue to experience multiple forms of discrimination in the District. Doing so will benefit not only homeless people struggling to get back on their feet, but also benefit our larger community by helping to eliminate barriers to escaping homelessness.

Our Founding Fathers proclaimed that all men are created equal and throughout the generations, our nation has continually labored to live up to this declaration. Now, it is time for our nation’s capital to affirm equality and dignity for all once again by incorporating homelessness as a protected category in its human rights law, demonstrating to the entire nation that no one’s human rights should be jeopardized simply because they cannot afford a home.

Tristia Bauman is a senior attorney at the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty.


Issues |Housing|Living Unsheltered


Region |Washington DC

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