Is it illegal to exist without a home?
The question before the Supreme Court is nothing more than a choice cities make
The main piece today is an exercise in trying something new. I set out with the challenge of writing about a national issue for a national audience, albeit a make-believe one. Worcester appears only insofar as it’s a useful example. But the topic is one which is very relevant to Worcester and as such important to understand. So it’s not just an exercise in national journalism for the sake of it. The upcoming Supreme Court ruling on homeless sweeps is a Worcester story. The matter at hand for the Supreme Court is something that Worcester does on a regular basis.
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First, two quick-hit sections on stuff that’s more immediately relevant. And before those even, a palate cleanser...
Introducing: Gus Takes Over The World
Katie’s going to take her Valentine’s present to me...
... and turn it into a comic strip for Worcester Sucks! It’s called GUS TAKES OVER THE WORLD. And it’s about our cat Gus (short for Augusta). Here’s Issue #1!
Now these Sunday editions are coming with their own funny pages people!
On a somewhat related note, here’s a wholesome story: Worcester Public Library Offers Fee Forgiveness for Cat Pics. If I’m reading correctly, the above cartoon would qualify!
Shotspotted!
On Thursday, Wired published a massive piece on Shotspotter, the spurious gunshot detection technology the Worcester Police Department has been using since 2013. Headlined “Here Are the Secret Locations of ShotSpotter Gunfire Sensors,” the story makes public a massive amount of leaked data for where the company’s microphones are. They are, unsurprisingly, in areas that skew poor and diverse.
An analysis of sensor distribution in US cities in the leaked data set found that, in aggregate, nearly 70 percent of people who live in a neighborhood with at least one SoundThinking sensor identified in the ACS data as either Black or Latine. Nearly three-quarters of these neighborhoods are majority nonwhite, and the average household earns a little more than $50,000 a year.
While underreported, we’ve had the Worcester data for a while now. The Shotspotter coverage here is certainly in line with the national trend. Here’s a demonstration I pulled a couple years ago.
Even more grim, here’s an overlay of Shotspotter and an old redlining map!
There’s a lot more to get into here, especially because Worcester uses not only the gunshot detection technology, but also the company’s “crime forecasting” model.
We’re working on getting something more substantial together soon. Keep your eyes peeled!
Table Talk Punt
The “pay for itself” narrative around Polar Park continues its precipitous crumbling! From the Worcester Business Journal: “Development planned for former Table Talk Pies site, key to funding Polar Park, having difficulty raising financing.”
The developers behind a proposed 375-unit apartment complex at the former site of the Table Talk Pies factory are requesting an extension of site plan approvals from the Worcester Planning Board until Feb. 1, 2026, citing difficulties in obtaining funding for the project in the current economic environment.
“The Applicant has been forced to delay the submission of a definitive site plan approval application in connection with the Project due to challenges with respect to access to financing and capital related to the rise of inflation and interest rates, instability of the banking system and an overall slowdown in the commercial real estate market,” reads a Jan. 25 letter from Worcester law firm Bowditch & Dewey, LLP, who are representing Quarterra Multifamily Communities, the North Carolina-based developers behind the project.
Ah well. Who could have foreseen this? It was supposed to be 0 interest rates forever... We were banking on that.
Aaaand relatedly: a proposal for a 100 percent affordable housing project on Mason Street has now been changed to 15 percent affordable. The company “did not offer any details explaining why the original plan of making all of the units affordable was abandoned,” per the WBJ, but you have to imagine the same “rise of inflation and interest rates” plays a part.
Now to the main attraction, which is itself related.
Is it illegal for unhoused people to exist?
Can a city move a person who has nowhere else to go? Put another way: is it illegal for unhoused people to exist?
That’s the core question in front of the US Supreme Court in the Grants Pass v. Johnson, which just recently got its date in court.
In April, Supreme Court justices will issue a decision that will ripple down to just about every city in America. The court will decide, essentially, whether it is de facto illegal for an unhoused person to exist. Forcible removals of unhoused people, most often called “sweeps,” are accepted policy nearly anywhere in America with a homeless population.
Worcester is one of those cities. Encampment sweeps are carried out by a team of police and city workers called the Quality of Life team, and the practice isn’t formally regulated by city ordinance. This is an entirely par-for-the-course response. Only loose guidelines dictate what the city should do when a camp eviction is requested. While the city employs a variety of tactics, the end result is the same. The city makes the unhoused pack up and move. Where they go is a secondary concern. If they have nowhere to go, they still have to leave. Staying where they are is not an option. Refusing to move is grounds for a trespassing charge.
Later in the piece, we’ll look at Chattanooga Tennessee, a city taking a different approach, and achieving remarkable success. It stands as a demonstration that what cities like Worcester are doing is a choice.
In 2022, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that fining or arresting people for sleeping outside is unconstitutional if there isn’t an alternative. In 2018, a civil suit was filed on the behalf of unhoused residents of Grants Pass, Oregon. The city had banned the use of stoves and sleeping bags in public places, and issued fines to people caught doing so. They didn’t have a homeless shelter that met federal definitions. The federal court ruled in favor of the unhoused, calling the city’s strategy cruel and unusual punishment.
In its ruling, the court wrote that “uprooting homeless individuals, without providing them with basic sanitation and waste disposal needs, does nothing more than shift a public health crisis from one location to another, potentially endangering the health of the public in both locations.”
Relevant to Worcester, the court attacked “quality of life laws” directly, saying they “erode the little trust that remains between homeless individuals and law enforcement officials.” Such laws lead to confrontation and contribute to a “cycle of incarceration and recidivism,” the court ruled.
Since the decision, the city of Grants Pass has pushed for a Supreme Court hearing, arguing in a brief that the Eighth Amendment has no bearing on “what can be a crime in the first place.” Essentially, they’re arguing unsheltered homelessness should be a crime. They’ve been encouraged by other cities and states around the country. California Gov. Gavin Newsom filed a brief in support of Grants Pass with the Supreme Court, as have red states (Idaho, Montana, Nebraska) and ostensibly blue cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco).
The Supreme Court’s incoming decision will either preserve a tepid protection for unhoused people or take the guard rails off what sort of punishment cities can inflict. The situation improves by inches or worsens by yards.
The scheduled ruling comes as homeless populations around the country rapidly outpace the capacity to house them. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently released its 2023 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, which includes a “point in time” count of the country’s unhoused population.
The headline data point is that homelessness increased nationwide by 12 percent—some 70,650 more people—from 2022 to 2023. The 653,100 unhoused people counted is the highest figure since they started counting, back in 2007.
Farther down in the report, there’s a less newsy but much more interesting data point. Over the same period that the unhoused population increased by 12 percent, the amount of available emergency shelter beds increased by 7 percent, and the amount of permanent supportive housing units increased by 6 percent. Homelessness rose at roughly twice the rate of both temporary and permanent shelter availability. That’s what we call a deficit.
This is central to understanding the main contention of the case in front of the Supreme Court. The 9th District court’s condition for the availability of “adequate shelter” is not being met across the nation. At the same time, routine sweeps are the norm.
As production of new shelter capacity lags, and the affordable housing crisis worsens, visible unsheltered homelessness is understandably growing. Increasingly cruel solutions for the visible existence of unhoused people are gaining traction.
Florida Gov. Ron Desantis is pushing for internment camps. The camps are, in part, about “ensuring that people’s property values are maintained,” he said.
The “round ‘em up” strategy was also laid out by the guy who is probably going to be our next president. In a video he posted to Truth Social last year, Donald Trump laid out a loose plan to relocate unhoused people to “tent cities” on “inexpensive tracts of land.”
“When I’m back in the Whitehouse we will use every tool, lever and authority to get the homeless off our streets,” he said. He wants to ban encampments outright, arresting anyone in them unless they accept “treatment and services.” This is basically what Worcester and most every city in America already does, minus the new “tent cities” (ie: internment camps).
I’ve written often about the sort of unmitigated rightward drift in homelessness discourse in Worcester, but we’re far from the only place and far from the worst.
Amid this national surge and increasingly hostile rhetoric, there’s one city which stands as a remarkable exception. Chattanooga, Tennessee, a city roughly the size of Worcester at 182,113 people, saw a 49 percent drop in its homeless population from 2022 to present. That’s crazy!
How the city accomplished that drop will sound familiar to those who’ve paid attention to local demands from progressives. The three-pronged approach is permanent supportive housing, prevention, and an impact response that includes a temporary sanctioned homeless encampment, increased emergency shelter capacity, and public restrooms.
In a release from June, 2022, the city described a thoughtful, two-month plan to relocate a large encampment. Instead of sweeping it outright, as likely would have happened in Worcester, they carefully and thoughtfully relocated people—some to permanent supportive housing, some to the sanctioned camp. The rest were “offered a new tent and relocation assistance.”
“The solution to homelessness is a home, and we will continue to work every day to help our
most vulnerable residents find an off-ramp from homelessness that works for them and their
families,” said Sam Wolfe, director of the city’s Office of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, in the release.
The mayor is quoted in the release connecting the issues of homelessness and affordable housing, and cites a $33 million budget line item for creating new affordable units.
The release throws Worcester’s communication on this issue into stark relief. The most startling aspect is the way Chattanooga’s language centers unhoused people. They aren’t a detriment to “quality of life.” They are people who deserve a home.
In this response, we see how each of the three prongs of Chattanooga’s approach works in tandem. It’s worth going through each prong in some detail.
The city has invested heavily in permanent supportive housing, creating a 70-unit complex with plans to replicate it. The city is investing heavily and directly into affordable housing production. On top of that, they have eviction prevention and diversion programs, workforce training programs and programs for at-risk students in the public schools. The sanctioned encampment is aided by direct investment of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) money into temporary shelter capacity to meet immediate needs.
It shouldn’t be a shock that Chattanooga saw such a drop in homelessness. It’s a sensible plan with adequate funding. It worked. The real shock is that the city is such an outlier. Only a small handful of cities bucked the national rise, and none nearly as acutely as Chattanooga.
Unlike Worcester, Chattanooga wouldn’t have to change course at all if the Supreme Court upholds the decision. They are not doing the things that the 9th District Court has ruled unconstitutional. They’re doing things that work. Many of those things are unthinkable in Worcester. The main difference between the two cities is political will.
It seems intuitive that cities looking to decrease their own homelessness numbers would look to it for guidance, instead of rooting for Grants Pass to win its Supreme Court case.
Perhaps some have, but I can say for a certain fact that Worcester is not one of them. Instead of exploring the Chattanooga Model, city officials here have taken to avoiding any sort of discussion.
Recent criticism of the endless sweeps was met with indignance by city council members, who acted if they'd been personally attacked. Meanwhile, the city manager intentionally removed the “homelessness outreach” work from a report on the team that carries it out. And subsequently he tried to muddy the waters by drawing a distinction between the Quality of Life Team and the Homelessness Outreach Team, despite the fact the Homeless Outreach Team is a unit of the Quality of Life Team.
Adding enough temporary shelter capacity is not on the table, a sanctioned encampment is outside the Overton window, and a direct investment in affordable housing production is seen as impractically expensive. Instead of the two-month coordinated effort we saw Chattanooga take to clear a camp, we give a week's notice at most and do our best to make sure an eviction doesn’t make the news. Officials here paint an either-or picture of permanent housing versus temporary shelters. ‘We aren’t adding shelters because permanent supportive housing is better.’ But we’ve added almost none of the permanent housing units on offer. Some proposals remain years away and others have quietly died. And in the meantime there’s a 140+ bed shelter deficit with no concrete plan for addressing it. Nevertheless, the sweeps continue. In Chattanooga, they didn’t draw a distinction. They added both, and then some, in a coordinated fashion. There, they talk about the deficit in permanent housing options, outlining a plan to address it. Here, we have a deficit of any option, and officials maintain the line that temporary shelters are not part of the strategy. There, the homeless populationis down by nearly half. Here, it continues to rise exponentially, in line with the rest of the country.
Where Chattanooga’s city government proactively developed a strategy, funded it, acted on it, Worcester’s city government has been mostly content to throw its hands in the air at the “complex” nature of the problem. As we covered recently, Councilor Kate Toomey tried to say the issue is “bigger than all of us in government.” A tough line to swallow when you see what another city government of a similar sized city did!
Unfortunately, it’s Worcester’s approach that’s the norm, not Chattanooga’s. Our response isn’t uniquely evil, it’s just mediocre. Par for the course. Chattanooga on the other hand is remarkable—something that should be held up as a model nationwide. And they haven’t done anything that hasn’t been suggested by local progressives. It comes down to political will. And here, as in most places, we simply don’t have it.
Where the Supreme Court ruling would have little effect on Chattanooga’s approach, Worcester’s will either become firmly unconstitutional or formally sanctioned.
Here and almost everywhere else, the impending decision will either make the current strategy a bit more complicated or give a green light to make it all the more punitive and counterproductive. Here’s to hoping the latter doesn’t happen! But in the event it’s the former, it’s merely stemming a certain tide.
It’s on cities, not the Supreme Court, to come up with solutions. And the first step is actually wanting a solution. In Chattanooga we see what can happen when you take that first step. In Worcester, we see the opposite.
Worcester could easily do everything that Chattanooga is doing. It’s very frustrating to consider why we don’t. What stands in our way is a half dozen elected officials give or take and the city manager they hired. There are three city councilors who would happily adopt the Chattanooga Model. But it simply will not happen until those three votes become six.
More frustrating still, that overall dynamic is probably the case in almost every city hall. Most cities in America are looking at a solvable problem and refusing to solve it. The political will prevents the solution.
In perhaps the one city that’s actually tried, we’re faced with a depressing reality: it’s easy. It’s actually dumb fucking simple. Chattanooga did not perform a miracle, they just gave a shit. They just did something that makes sense. And they did it because they had the political will to do it.
In Worcester, the Chattanooga Model would be rejected by an 8-3 or 7-4 vote of the current city council. I’ve seen enough votes on homelessness to say that comfortably. Almost objectively. To get to a 6-5 vote in favor, we’d need to turn two or three seats. I’ll spare you the election analysis but we almost had those seats last November. A thousand more progressive voters and we would have, easily. That’s all we’d need to tip the scales! In a city of 200,000, a thousand new people could have got us there, and everyone would have benefited. It’s crazy—and so completely depressing—to think about. While I’m not versed in the political realities of other cities like I am this one’s, I have to imagine there’s something that rhymes here.
For some reason, Chattanooga got to do the things progressives across the country have been saying we should do—and it’s working! Surprise surprise!
But that’s the only city! Or one of a small handful. There are very few examples of localized homeless populations lowering, and the city that lowered theirs the most did so with progressive policies and investments.
You have to wonder how many cities across the country could and would repeat Chattanooga’s model, if not for the barrier of political will.
There’s nothing the Supreme Court can do about that besides make it worse, and they probably will, given who sits on it.
In a sane world, Chattanooga would be the star of the homelessness story. They are a footnote at best. An aberration, an outlier. They laid down a repeatable model for how to solve this problem, and it took sitting down to research this story for me to hear about it.
Collected Worcester Sucks essays on homelessness
Here are “the big ones.”
Oct. 25, 2021 | “Options were offered”: The city demolished a homeless encampment because Walmart asked them to
Aug. 17 2022 | If cruelty's the goal, we're doing a damn good job: Another camp eviction highlights the city's poor homelessness policy
March 15, 2023 | “I wish I had a magic wand and I could find you an apartment” The cruelty continues unexamined
June 27, 2023 | Before Adam was dead, Adam was blight: The city's cruelty produces an inevitable outcome
Aug. 27, 2023 | “Attack the lowlife abusers”
Dec. 1, 2023 | “The bureaucratic machinery mirrors popular belief”: It’s not so much whether we can do better, it’s whether we want to
Jan. 13, 2024 | The Cruelty Machine made visible: The unmitigated rightward drift of homelessness discourse in Worcester and everywhere else
Feb. 11, 2024 | The Garbage Police take out the garbage, and most people think that's fine
Odds and ends
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A few more quick things to mention.
Turtleboy is out of jail now unfortunately. Fun while it lasted.
The Worcester Housing Authority is calling the recent news about “deplorable” conditions a “personal vendetta” led by the union for its electricians and such. Hmmmm idk.
On a positive note though Sam Olney, an unhoused resident and organizer for HALO Worcester has been “invited to the table,” attending the city manager’s monthly coordinating sessions on unhoused issues.
I’ll leave you with a clip I pulled of Olney speaking out against the “cat and mouse game” between unhoused and city hall.
Ok cheers! Til next time.
I'm sure the city manager would say that it would be 'very impossible' to follow Chattanooga's lead (just like with municipal internet infrastructure).
Good piece 👏