Hundreds of demonstrators gathered Monday outside the U.S. Supreme Court, waving signs that read “Housing Not Handcuffs” and “Housing Dignity” as they protested moves to legally penalize homelessness while justices heard oral arguments on a case that experts say could change how the country treats its homeless people.
“Can you imagine anything more cruel and usual than throwing somebody in jail for having a blanket?” Jesse Rabinowitz, the National Homelessness Law Center’s communications director and the emcee for Monday’s demonstration, told the crowd outside the court. “Does that seem fair to you?”
In the morning chill, hundreds of demonstrators lay near the Supreme Court steps under emergency blankets that caught the sun — a symbolic nod to the $295 ticket for sleeping outside with a blanket that Grants Pass’s authorities were handing out, Rabinowitz said in his remarks before Monday’s crowd. Many of the protesters had come from New York City, Philadelphia and elsewhere to join the rally in D.C.
The arguments before the country’s highest court come as homelessness policy nationwide has become electrified. Last year the country saw a spike in homeless numbers, the fallout from record inflation and the end of covid-era eviction protections and rent relief. Conservative activist groups have since mobilized in state legislatures to pass aggressive criminalization laws similar to Grants Pass’s approach. Housing activists have countered by advocating about spiking rents and a lack of affordable housing.
Speakers at the rally included the heads of leading advocacy organizations such as the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s Diane Yentel, the National Alliance to End Homelessness’s Ann Oliva, and the National Coalition for the Homeless’s Donald Whitehead.
“You know the president is in public housing, so we should be able to do it for everyone,” said Rev. William Barber II of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School, taking a poke at the White House.
At one point between speakers, Rabinowitz noted that one of the original plaintiffs from the case being heard be in the court, Debra Blake, died in 2021.
“She lived outside for 10 years,” Rabinowitz told the crowd. “Debra died without housing in the richest country in the world.”
“No she was murdered,” a woman pushing a walker in the crowd shouted. “She was murdered! Get your words right!”
This was Robin Martin, a 68-year-old retired security guard from New York City who was once homeless and has been in supportive housing for the past year. The situation wasn’t working for her, but she can’t leave.
“I’m 29 years clean from drugs,” said Martin, who came to D.C. with the activist group Vocal New York. “They put me in housing where they are housing drug addicts. Why would you put me there? I can’t stay there. I’m scared. So now I got to make myself homeless again?”
Deborah Woolford, a social worker from Baltimore, came with fellow advocates for the rally. “We are here to make sure the clients we serve that are chronically homeless have a right to affordable, sustainable housing,” she said. “How can you expect you them to think about sending their children to school or getting a job when you are worried about where you are going to sleep at night?”
Wilfrado Ramos, 48, arrived with a group from Philadelphia, his T-shirt printed with the Zip code of the city’s infamous drug-infested Kensington neighborhood that was not only Ramos’s home, but also where he fell into homelessness 10 years ago.
“I broke my foot, and then they prescribed me Percocets,” he said. From there, he began using street opioids — an addiction that led him to lose his house and end up on the streets.
Ramos eventually got clean through a program. The next step was housing, he said. He is staying with a friend and waiting on a housing voucher. But he has been waiting for a year — a hard year, he said, for a recovering addict.
“I’m still carrying in me that thing I have, that need to make the pain feel better,” he said.
Pushing a stroller with his 2-year-old baby, Ramos said he would keep waiting for the voucher.
