The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson changed the landscape of homelessness policy, making it legally permissible for communities to enforce laws that punish people for sleeping or camping in public spaces, even if they have nowhere else to go. Since then, communities across the country have been considering and adopting policies that criminalize homelessness, which are overwhelmingly ineffective, inhumane, and not in the best interest of young people experiencing homelessness. Providers, young people with lived experience, and advocates have an important role to play in challenging criminalization, reducing its harms, and advancing solutions that address the root causes of homelessness.
The National Network for Youth, National Homelessness Law Center, and National Youth Homelessness Partnership have developed three new resources to help providers, young people, and advocates respond to efforts to criminalize homelessness in their communities. These resources offer practical tools, strategies, and examples to help communities push back against harmful policies, or identify opportunities to reduce harm and influence how a policy is implemented when its passage cannot be stopped.
1. Talking Points and Templates: Making the Case Against Criminalization
When a state legislature or local government proposes a law or ordinance criminalizing homelessness, advocates need to respond quickly. Our new resource provides clear, accessible language that providers, young people, and advocates can use when talking with policymakers, community leaders, the media, and the public. The resource explains why criminalization is overall an ineffective strategy to reduce homelessness and can instead make it harder for people to access housing, services, health care, and supportive relationships. It also helps shift the conversation toward responses that actually work, including outreach, prevention, housing, and voluntary services.
2. North Dakota Case Study: Finding the Wins
What happens when advocacy cannot stop a harmful ordinance from passing? You keep advocating. A case study from North Dakota demonstrates how providers and advocates were able to influence policy implementation and funding sources to reduce harm even when they could not prevent the criminalizing ordinances from being adopted. In Fargo, providers helped introduce an outreach and warning process requiring that individuals be connected with services before citations or enforcement actions. In Bismarck, advocacy contributed to investment in developing a strategy to engage and house people experiencing homelessness following passage of the ordinance.
3. Strategic Guide: Collecting Data to Inform Advocacy
Our strategic guide provides additional practical guidance for providers, young people, and advocates pushing back on efforts to criminalize homelessness and working to advance better responses. This guide is intended to help people think strategically and ethically about how to collect and use data on the ways that they are seeing and experiencing the direct effects of criminalization of youth experiencing homelessness. The guide also offers considerations for how data can shape narratives and community-driven alternatives to criminalization.
We Can’t Criminalize Our Way Out of Homelessness
Grants Pass may have changed what governments are legally allowed to do, but did not change what we know about preventing and reducing homelessness and what young people need to thrive. A citation will not create housing. Displacement will not resolve homelessness. Punishment will not address the poverty, family conflict, lack of affordable housing, trauma, or other circumstances that contribute to youth, young adult, and young parent family homelessness. Communities need responses that prevent homelessness, connect young people to housing and supportive services, and create pathways to stability, not policies that make an already difficult situation harder.
We hope these new resources give providers, young people, and advocates the tools they need to use their voices, influence policy, reduce harm, and keep pushing for solutions that work. Criminalization may be legally permissible, but it is not inevitable. Together, we can advocate for something better.
