The U.S. approach to addressing homelessness in the wake of a recent Supreme Court ruling will maim and kill people, housing rights advocates and experts tell Truthout. It will disproportionately harm disabled Americans, who comprise more than a quarter of the nation’s population and about half of its unhoused population.
The court’s decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, issued in June 2024, allows local governments to cite or jail unhoused people for camping on public lands even if there is no shelter available to them. The ruling de facto criminalized homelessness nationwide.
Meanwhile, since it came down, state governments have also given the green light to ramped-up policing as a response to homelessness. The Trump administration has also expressed support for carceral approaches, including banning urban camping and forcibly relocating homeless people into psychiatric institutions or detention camps.
“I’m terrified of being [detained] in an encampment when that starts happening, and I think that it will if things continue the way they are going,” Finn, an unhoused and disabled resident of Portland, Oregon, who is using only their first name due to safety concerns, told Truthout.
Homelessness in the U.S. reached a record high in 2024, with the Department of Housing and Urban Development recording more than 771,000 unhoused Americans during its annual point-in-time count. That marked a staggering 18 percent increase from the number of unhoused people recorded at the previous annual count.
At the same time, policy makers have begun to turn away from the evidence-based Housing First model for addressing homelessness and embrace punitive approaches. Right-wingers have long advocated for the carceral approach, and Democratic lawmakers have begun to echo them in recent years, with cities, including San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, corralling unhoused residents in encampments and enforcing camping bans.
Disabled Americans are at particular risk from the nationwide trend to criminalize homelessness. They are overrepresented among the nation’s unhoused population due to several factors. Policies that allow employers to pay subminimum wages to disabled workers and place caps on the savings or income of recipients of Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and some Medicaid benefits contribute to increased poverty among disabled people and render them less able to prepare financially for a crisis.
People with disabilities also experience discrimination in housing, health care, employment and wages, making it difficult for some to secure stable housing and earn the income needed to meet their basic needs. These forms of discrimination are compounded for women, people of color and trans people. The U.S. also has a significant shortage of affordable and accessible housing.
Experts warn that even more disabled people are likely to slip into poverty and homelessness as the Trump administration eyes cuts to Medicaid, slashes funding for protection and advocacy agencies, undermines public health programs and pursues pharmaceutical tariffs that are likely to make medications more expensive. These are concerns that keep David Zoltan, a Chicago-based human rights activist, awake at night. “I am measuring my life right now in months,” they told Truthout.
“Nobody goes through homelessness unscathed.”
Zoltan, an amputee who lives with chronic illnesses, including complex post-traumatic stress disorder, experienced homelessness for several months almost a decade ago. While they have been off the streets for years, the roof over their head has never stopped feeling tenuous, and conditions have worsened since Donald Trump began rolling back federal support programs. “I survive because I have SSDI, Medicare, Medicaid, a housing voucher and SNAP benefits,” Zoltan told Truthout. “And still, I’ve literally had to stop paying my electric bill just to be able to make the rest of my bills work.”
Supplemental Security Disability Income (SSDI) provides monthly payments to individuals with health conditions that limit or prevent them from working. SSI provides payments to disabled and older adults with low incomes. These benefits have lost 20 percent of their buying power since 2010 as rising consumer prices outstrip annual cost-of-living adjustments to the payments, according to an analysis by The Senior Citizens League.
Like Zoltan, several disabled people who spoke to Truthout for this article expressed concern about rising living costs outstripping support programs. Janine Harris, an unhoused resident of Grants Pass, Oregon, the town that brought the now infamous Supreme Court case, also noted the disproportionate share of medical debt shouldered by disabled Americans. “There are disabled people out here and elderly people out here who cannot afford to live in a house because the rents have gotten so high, and some of them are using credit cards to pay off medical debt,” Harris told Truthout. “They don’t have the money or the medical or housing benefits to deal with that, and so they end up losing their homes, and they’re on the street.”
Once a disabled individual loses their housing, they face having to navigate homelessness services that are often inaccessible. Barriers to accessing homeless shelters are ubiquitous, according to experts and advocates who spoke to Truthout. “They may not be physically accessible. They may not allow people to bring service animals. They may not allow people to store medications or get other kinds of really elementary accommodations,” Tom Stenson, deputy legal director at Disability Rights Oregon (DRO), told Truthout.
Miranda DeNovo, a New Yorker who has spent the last year advocating for a friend with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and long COVID who was made homeless by caregiver abuse, told Truthout that the pair have been in contact with over a dozen housing and case management organizations, none of which has been able to provide the support needed to help DeNovo’s friend transition into housing. DeNovo’s friend was not able to access domestic violence shelters because they require regular visits from a caregiver, which the shelters could not accommodate due to privacy concerns.
“When we asked them to recommend alternatives, every single service provider just said my friend would need to go into a nursing home,” DeNovo told Truthout. “I’m just so frustrated at the lack of awareness of this issue, that sick people are still being pushed into institutions even though we fought for programs to prevent that.”
For many long COVID patients and others who are immunocompromised or concerned about the dangers of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases, the crowded indoor environment and lack of infection control measures at most communal shelters make those spaces inaccessible.
Meanwhile, Finn — the Portland, Oregon, resident — told Truthout that they once left a shelter even though they had nowhere else to go because they witnessed shelter staff physically abuse other disabled residents and feared for their own safety.
When shelters are inaccessible or hostile to disabled people, individuals are often forced to stay outdoors in conditions that can exacerbate health issues. Harris struggled to live in a local communal shelter due to her claustrophobia, which manifests in panic attacks. Other shelters would not accept her service animal. Since she began living outdoors, her arthritis and chronic migraines have worsened. “My health is deteriorating every single day; I can feel it,” she told Truthout.
Jeffrey Dickerson, another unhoused resident of Grants Pass, has had a similar experience. Dickerson has been intermittently unhoused since experiencing an aneurysm that left him unable to work in 2006. He is unable to save enough from his SSDI payments to cover the first and last month’s rent and security deposit needed to move into most apartments.
“These proposals are not just criminalizing being poor, but they’re criminalizing having a disability.”
But sleeping outside on a gravel lot, where Grants Pass lawmakers have sequestered the town’s unhoused population after banning urban camping, has worsened Dickerson’s chronic nerve pain. That pain is a symptom of neuropathy, which also causes weakness in his feet, making it difficult for him to walk on the uneven gravel. “It’s not just physical either,” Dickerson told Truthout. “It’s emotional, it’s stressful.”
Zoltan told Truthout that for nondisabled and disabled people alike, the experience of homelessness can lead to new health problems. “Nobody goes through homelessness unscathed,” they said. “To what extent it is disabling, that’s going to differ from person to person, but I would argue that it has an effect on everybody.”
For disabled people living on the street, the recent proliferation of policies criminalizing homelessness has compounded dangers. At least 150 cities in 32 states have passed or strengthened ordinances banning outdoor camping since the Grants Pass v. Johnson decision last summer.
“Cities out there are creating restrictions on camping, and sitting, and lying down in public that carry with them some implicit understanding that you have to be able to move around, you have to be able to carry your tent around, or you have to be able to move across a particular area that’s not paved or doesn’t have a safe way for people who use wheelchairs to get around,” DRO’s Stenson told Truthout. “These proposals are not just criminalizing being poor, but they’re criminalizing having a disability.”
Those who cannot meet the new demands are more likely to be swept up in crackdowns, raising the prospect of citations, arrests, police violence and confiscation of belongings. Unhoused individuals interviewed by Truthout reported having necessities — including mobility aids, medications and identity documents — taken in police sweeps. Recent reporting in San Francisco showed that the city confiscated dozens of wheelchairs and walkers in sweeps of homeless encampments in 2024.
The disability community is not only on the front lines of increasing violence against unhoused people nationwide, but it is also front and center in fighting anti-homeless policies in the courts. A lawsuit filed in February 2025 by DRO and the Oregon Law Center against the City of Grants Pass is one example. Harris and Dickerson are both plaintiffs in the suit, which asserts that the town’s new policies on homelessness violate Oregon laws, including laws prohibiting discrimination against disabled people. A judge halted enforcement of the city’s rules on March 28, 2025, while the lawsuit moves forward.
While Grants Pass Police continue to cite unhoused people for non-enjoined sections of the law, such as for leaving out trash or having a too-large tent footprint, there is no indication that they have violated the court’s order, according to DRO.
Legal battles like this one have been made more complex by last year’s Supreme Court decision, which advocates said has empowered anti-homeless contingents within government and the public. Still, Stenson told Truthout that the lawsuits send a message that “the rights of people with disabilities have to be respected.” If recent anti-homeless legislation goes unchallenged, Stenson fears that under the policies, “it would just be illegal for hundreds of people to exist.”
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