They Will Always Keep Coming Back No Matter How Many Times You Sweep — Because They Have No Choice!

MCSU+H is built for the Functional Unsheltered™ — the nearly half of all unsheltered people who aren't addicted or mentally ill, and who can move off the street on their own with the right tool.

For years, there was a rule of thumb behind how cities were allowed to treat homeless encampments: don't clear people out unless you have a shelter bed for each person you're displacing. That standard came from Martin v. Boise, a 2018 federal appeals court ruling that applied across the nine Western states under the Ninth Circuit's jurisdiction. It wasn't generous. It was a floor. It said, at minimum, you cannot punish someone for sleeping outside if you haven't given them anywhere else to go.

In June 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court took that floor away. City of Grants Pass v. Johnson ruled that cities can enforce camping bans whether or not shelter space exists. No bed required. No alternative required. A sanitation crew can now legally arrive, load a person's tent, blankets, and belongings into a truck, and tell them to be somewhere else — with nowhere else being an acceptable answer.

Here is what that ruling doesn't change: the reason that person was at that specific location in the first place.

People don't end up sleeping in a particular doorway, underpass, or block by accident. They're there because that location gives them something they need to survive:

• Food — a soup kitchen, a food pantry, a restaurant that doesn't run them off, a dumpster that reliably has something
• Water — a spigot, a public fountain, a business that will fill a bottle
• Medical care — a clinic, a mobile health van's regular stop, an ER they know will treat them
• Transit — a bus line to a job, a shelter intake appointment, a court date, a case worker
• Restrooms — one of the few public ones left that hasn't been locked or removed
• Support services — a case manager, an outreach worker who knows their name, a day center

Take any one of those away by force, and the person doesn't disappear. Outreach workers and reporters covering encampment sweeps have observed the same pattern for years, across cities: people go find what they lost again, usually within blocks, usually within days. Move them further, and they simply walk back. That's not defiance. It's survival math. A person without a car, without money for one, will not permanently relocate away from the only clinic that treats them or the only bus line that gets them to work. They can't.

Now put that next to the "solution" some states have tried since Grants Pass: designated legal camping areas. On paper, it sounds like the humane alternative to a sweep — an actual, sanctioned place to go, instead of just an order to move. But look at where these designated sites actually get proposed, on the rare occasions they get proposed at all. Texas passed its version in 2021; the state's own tracker of approved sites — public record, required by law — has recorded zero submissions in four years. Kentucky's version has logged hundreds of citations for illegal camping and produced no compliant site. The sites that do get proposed tend to land on cheap, available land — industrial parcels, floodplains, highway margins — not distance from downtown, but distance from the food bank, the clinic, the bus stop, the shelter.

Ask yourself honestly: if a city offered you a legal place to sleep, safe from arrest, but it was a mile from the only clinic that treats you, with no bus route, no food source, and no one who knows your name — would you stay? Or would you do exactly what any person would do to survive, and go back to the block where the things you need actually are?

That's the answer cities keep getting from designated sites that sit empty while enforcement continues elsewhere. It isn't defiance of the law. It's the same reason the original encampment was there to begin with. Grants Pass gave cities the legal power to clear a location. It did not, and cannot, remove the reason people return to it.