Camping Bans Move Homelessness. They Don't Reduce It.

By Common Ladder · June 11, 2026 · 9 min read

The frustration behind camping bans is easy to understand, and worth taking seriously. Phoenix lived through "The Zone" — a sprawling downtown encampment that, at its peak, was among the largest in the country, with conditions so severe that nearby property owners sued the city and a court ordered it cleared in 2023.⁵ Business owners, residents, and people living in the camps themselves all had reason to want something to change. When a problem is that visible and that grim, "make it stop" is a natural demand, and elected officials hear it loudly.

So the question that matters is not whether the frustration is legitimate. It is whether the most common policy response — banning public camping and enforcing it with citations, fines, and arrests — actually reduces homelessness. For years that question went mostly untested, which let both sides argue from conviction. The evidence has now caught up, and it points in a single direction.

What the Supreme Court actually decided

On June 28, 2024, the Supreme Court decided City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. By a 6–3 vote, the Court held that enforcing ordinances against public camping — even against people who have nowhere else to go — does not violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.¹ The majority reasoned that because Grants Pass's ban applied to anyone camping in public, not only to unhoused people, it punished conduct rather than the "status" of being homeless.

It is important to be precise about what this ruling did and did not do. It removed a constitutional limit that had constrained cities in the western states for several years. It did not say camping bans are wise, effective, or a good use of public money. In fact the majority went out of its way to call homelessness a "complex" problem best left to policymakers. The decision is a green light for enforcement, not a finding that enforcement works — and the rush that followed has been substantial. In the year after the ruling, advocacy trackers counted hundreds of new criminalization bills introduced across the country, with well over a hundred communities adopting new camping restrictions.⁶

The first nationwide test: no city where bans reduced homelessness

In 2025, political scientists Hannah Lebovits of the University of Texas at Arlington and Andrew Sullivan of the University of Central Florida published what they describe as the first nationwide study of whether criminalization laws actually reduce homelessness.² Appearing in the peer-reviewed Policy Studies Journal, the study examined ordinances enacted between 2000 and 2021 across the 100 most populous U.S. cities, measured against homelessness counts drawn from HUD's Continuum of Care data — the same federal numbers cities use to track the problem themselves.

The headline finding is blunt: across every city studied, the analysis found no reduction in homelessness attributable to these laws. On average, unsheltered homelessness was about 2.2% higher in cities that adopted ordinances than in those that did not — a difference the authors are careful to call statistically insignificant, meaning the honest reading is not "bans increase homelessness" but "bans do nothing to reduce it." What the data did show in some cities was a revealing pattern: a quick dip in visible homelessness right after a law passed, followed by a rebound that pushed counts above where they had been. "The deterrence logic doesn't hold," Lebovits put it. People without housing do not acquire housing because sleeping outside became illegal. They move — to another block, another jurisdiction, or out of sight — and the underlying number does not fall.

Why moving people has a body count

Enforcement is not cost-free for the people it targets, and one of those costs is measurable in deaths. In 2023, a team led by Dr. Joshua Barocas at the University of Colorado published a study in JAMA modeling what happens when unsheltered people who inject drugs are repeatedly displaced — through sweeps, move-along orders, and encampment clearances — across 23 U.S. cities.³

The projections were stark. Continual involuntary displacement could contribute to between 15% and 25% of deaths in that population over a ten-year horizon, alongside large increases in overdoses, serious infections, and hospitalizations. The mechanism is not mysterious: displacement severs people from the clinics, outreach workers, and treatment they were connected to, scatters their medication and supplies, and pushes drug use into more dangerous, more isolated conditions. The researchers ran hundreds of scenarios. In none of them — in no city, under no assumptions — did displacement turn out to be neutral or beneficial for health. That is an unusual degree of consistency for a simulation, and it should weigh on any city treating sweeps as harmless housekeeping.

It is also the costly choice

Set the human cost aside for a moment and look only at the budget, because criminalization fails on fiscal grounds too. Citations generate fines that unhoused people cannot pay, which become warrants, which become jail stays; jail and the emergency room are among the most expensive services a public system buys. A rigorous 2021 Urban Institute evaluation found that supportive housing delivered through a Housing First approach not only ended chronic homelessness for participants but reduced jail days and offset a large share of its own cost.⁴ Advocacy analyses that tally the full arrest-jail-hospital cycle routinely put its annual per-person cost well above the cost of simply housing someone with support. The precise dollar figures vary by city and methodology and should be read as estimates, but the direction is consistent across study after study: punishing homelessness costs more than ending it.

Arizona's experiment in pressure

Arizona has gone a step beyond most states. In November 2024, voters approved Proposition 312, which lets a property owner apply once a year for a refund of property taxes — capped at what they paid the previous year — to cover documented expenses caused by a city's "policy, pattern, or practice" of not enforcing public-nuisance laws, including illegal camping, loitering, panhandling, and public drug use.⁵ The measure runs from 2025 through 2035 and was openly motivated by "The Zone." Its logic is to put financial pressure on cities to enforce.

That pressure is real, and the conditions that produced it were real. But Prop 312 changes the incentive to clear camps without changing the thing that determines whether clearing them reduces homelessness — whether there is somewhere for people to go. A refund for an unenforced nuisance law does not build a shelter bed or a unit of housing. If the Lebovits and Sullivan findings hold in Arizona, the predictable result of harder enforcement without more housing is the pattern their data already shows: visible camps dispersed, the underlying count unmoved, and the people in those camps pushed somewhere less visible and less safe.

What this means for practice

None of this means cities must tolerate dangerous encampments, and it is not an argument that public space belongs to no one. It is an argument about what actually works. Enforcement can relocate a problem; the best available evidence says it does not shrink it, that it raises deaths among the most vulnerable, and that it costs more than the alternative. The interventions that do reduce homelessness are the unglamorous ones this site keeps returning to: housing matched to need, prevention dollars aimed at the households most likely to lose their homes, and outreach that connects rather than scatters.

For local officials and residents weighing a camping ordinance, the honest framing is a trade-off, not a solution. A ban can make a block look better for a while. Whether it makes homelessness smaller is a separate question, and on that question the evidence is now clear enough to act on. "Make it stop" is a fair demand. The data simply says that bans are not how you make it stop.

Have a correction or an updated figure? Email corrections.commonladder@gmail.com.