A recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing municipalities to impose bans on camping on public property is unlikely to change Santa Fe’s homeless enforcement policies, according to city officials.
In a 6-3 vote on June 28, the court ruled in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that executing such bans does not constitute “cruel and unusual punishment” — reversing a prior decision from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The ruling on the policies of the small city in Oregon will pave the way for municipalities across the nation to enforce similar ordinances without legal challenges.
Santa Fe bans camping on public property. In a Wednesday email, Santa Fe City Attorney Erin McSherry wrote the case “changes the legal framework that applies to the topic.” However, the city’s policies will continue unchanged, Mayor Alan Webber said Friday.
Webber and some homeless advocates said they are concerned about the larger implications of the ruling.
“The more broad danger with this decision is people will interpret it as meaning it’s possible to arrest your way out of homelessness,” Webber said. “And that’s just completely false.”
The city has been enforcing its ban on camping on public property for the last two years after relaxing enforcement during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
During the pandemic, Webber issued an emergency proclamation deprioritizing enforcement of the city’s anti-camping ordinance based on recommendations from the federal Centers from Disease Control and Prevention to reduce risk from COVID-19.
The city resumed enforcement in September 2022, which has largely been undertaken by its park rangers. Under the jurisdiction of the Parks and Open Space division, the rangers are responsible for patrolling city property and delivering 24-hour notices to people sleeping or camping in public spaces.
Rangers have discretion when it comes to dealing with people on city property, and Webber said the goal of the city’s policies is to direct people to a place to stay.
“It’s not just trying to break up encampments, it’s trying to rehouse people wherever we can,” he said.
But with an estimated homeless population of about 450, there aren’t enough places for people to go, said homeless advocate Joe Dudziak.
Known as “Chaplain Joe,” Dudziak conducts outreach to people living in encampments and said enforcement of the city’s ban is traumatic for many homeless people.
“What the city’s doing is they’re chasing the same people around,” he said.
Dudziak has criticized the park rangers in the past, but in a recent interview also credited them for trying to connect people with resources. The problem is, in many cases people who are camping outside have been banned from the shelter due to drug use or other issues and have nowhere else to go, he said.
Not living in a permanent location also makes it harder to connect homeless people to resources, Dudziak said, because they are more mobile and harder for service workers to reach.
In his outreach work, he said he encounters fewer traditional encampments than he did previously, which he thinks is due to the city’s enforcement.
“I used to ask people, ‘Hey, where are you staying?’ and they’d tell me where,” Dudziak said. “Now I ask them and they say ‘Well, I slept under that bush last night and the day before I slept around the corner.’ A lot of times what people are doing now is they just bed down for the night; they don’t actually set up a camp.”
Encampments are a polarizing topic at the local level. While the Grants Pass ruling drew criticism from many organizations that support the homeless, community meetings are invariably full of people calling for the city to do more to crack down on panhandling and encampments.
Sanctioned camping sites have hit roadblocks in local communities. A proposal to have a sanctioned site at the midtown campus in Santa Fe during the pandemic was scuttled, and the future of a current encampment in Española is unclear.
American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico legal director Maria Martinez Sanchez criticized the court ruling for not addressing the root causes of homelessness.
“Here in New Mexico, we believe our state constitution provides broader protections than its federal counterpart and we will continue to push back against municipalities that criminalize people for simply existing in public spaces,” she said in a statement.
An ACLU spokesperson did not respond to a request to discuss the organization’s legal strategies.
No matter what anyone thinks about the ruling, Webber said it would be a mistake for any community to view the Supreme Court as having found a solution for homelessness.
“It’s a very bad signal to send out, that somehow arresting people eliminates homelessness,” he said. “The only thing that eliminates homelessness is housing.”
Mark Oldknow, associate director of the New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness, said he does not believe any communities in New Mexico are poised to “bring the hammer down” on the homeless following the ruling.
“I doubt there’s going to be a lot changed, but we have to wait and see,” he said.
Oldknow said while the ruling gives cities broader latitude to criminalize homelessness, jailing people is expensive and having a criminal record makes people less able to find a path to housing, not more. He said he hopes the ruling does not mean New Mexico cities will conduct enforcement at the expense of exploring other options as well.
“At the risk of sounding overly sentimental, I always hope … we err on the side of our heart, rather than the side of our fear,” he said. “I think compassion gets us to think in ways that may present alternatives Grants Pass does not necessarily offer us.”
