A recent study shows that encampment bans and other policies that criminalize homelessness don’t keep people from living on the street. The analysis did not find a reduction in homelessness in the cities studied as a result of such ordinances.
The study examined the effect of ordinances enacted between 2000 and 2021 across the 100 most populous U.S. cities, using data pulled from Continuums of Care—local entities that administer federal homelessness funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The study, published in the Policy Studies Journal, looked beyond camping bans and included laws criminalizing public drunkenness, urination, or other actions that are criminalized when conducted in public but not behind closed doors.
In some cases, co-author Hannah Lebovits says, the study found a quick dip in visible homelessness after laws were passed followed by a surge in homelessness that exceeded prior levels.
The authors say it is the first nationwide study looking at criminalization laws and their impact on homelessness.
“The deterrence logic doesn’t hold,” says Lebovits, assistant director of the Institute of Urban Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington.
Lebovits says she and her co-author, Andrew Sullivan, an assistant professor in the University of Central Florida’s School of Public Administration, began studying the issue after a series of anti-camping ordinances were passed in 2020 and 2021, when homeless encampments were growing across the country. Lebovits says they wanted to look specifically at the question of deterrence, the underlying logic behind many camping ordinances.
The report found that there was a 2.2 percent average increase in unsheltered homelessness in cities that implemented criminalization ordinances compared with cities that did not introduce ordinances, but noted that this number is “statistically insignificant” and not evidence that ordinances are increasing homelessness.
Advocates for unhoused people, including from the Housing Not Handcuffs campaign, have argued that criminalization and homeless encampment sweeps increase rates of homelessness because they can result in arrest records that make it more difficult to secure housing and because belongings, including identification and work gear, are often discarded in sweeps. Lebovits stressed that the report she co-authored did not look at these consequences, which would require a longer look at housing and employment.
The authors did look into whether criminalization ordinances could decrease unsheltered homelessness at the local level by pushing unhoused people into neighboring cities and counties that don’t have sanctions, but didn’t find any evidence to support this.
Homeless encampment bans are increasing
Big city mayors across the political spectrum have embraced some level of sanctions and homeless sweeps to address encampments.
This is largely because mayors have direct control over their police force but less control over the policies that could house people. A 2021 survey of 126 mayors in 39 states conducted by Boston University found that 78 percent of mayors said that police have some influence over their city’s homeless policies. Meanwhile, 81 percent of mayors said they didn’t have much control over the issue of homelessness, though 73 percent said that they would be held accountable for it by their constituents. Forty percent of mayors defined success as reducing the numbers of people who are homeless in their city. Some said their main goal was to move people along, even if only temporarily.
Public encampments popped up across the country during the first several months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the CDC recommended against encampment clearance because congregate shelters could increase the spread of the virus.
Homelessness overall has also grown in the past few years as a result of rising housing costs, although that was briefly slowed by pandemic stimulus funding. HUD’s most recent Point in Time count found that on a single night in January 2024, 771,480 people were homeless, the highest number since the count began. That includes 274,224 people who were unsheltered.
On June 28, 2024, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson, deciding that cities could sweep homeless encampments and implement other punitive measures even if there was no shelter for homeless people to go to. The decision led to a flurry of new anti-camping laws.
According to the National Homelessness Law Center, in the year since the Grants Pass decision, 260 laws criminalizing homelessness have been passed in cities across the country, most of them camping bans. And 57 state-level laws criminalizing homelessness were introduced in 17 states, although only eight were passed.
To stem the tide of criminalization, the National Homelessness Law Center created model legislation called the Gloria Johnson Act—named for the unhoused plaintiff in the Grants Pass case—which would make it illegal to cite or arrest someone for sleeping outside when there is nowhere else to go. It would also change laws to allow more car and RV camping. The bill has been introduced in 11 states but has not been passed anywhere yet.
A national version of the bill, the Housing Not Handcuffs Act, was introduced in Congress by Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Maxwell Frost. On June 26, elected officials and co-sponsors gathered at a press conference in Washington, D.C., to introduce the bill. “Homelessness is not a personal failure, it is a policy failure,” Rep. Jayapal said.
In a press release ahead of the bill’s introduction, Southern Poverty Law Center CEO Margaret Huang said, “The arguments driving these anti-camping laws and litigation are rooted in the same justifications once used to legitimize vagrancy laws, which are historically intertwined with economic and racial subordination and rely on the false idea that poverty is synonymous with criminality.”
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Laws passed in the last year include an ordinance in California’s San Joaquin County that requires people sleeping outside to move at least 300 feet every hour. Violation can lead to a $1,000 fine or six months in jail.
In February of 2025, the city of Fremont, California, passed a camping ban that made it illegal to aid or abet a homeless encampment, a law that could criminalize outreach workers, also with a $1,000 fine or six months in jail.
In May of this year, Gov. Gavin Newsom called on California cities to make encampments illegal. The governor posted a model ordinance written by his office that said that the “Supreme Court’s decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson clarified that officials can take reasonable actions to clear encampments.” Confusingly, Newsom’s model ordinance also claims that the main holding of Grants Pass is inhumane without attributing it to the Supreme Court, saying “No person should face criminal punishment for sleeping outside when they have nowhere else to go.” The model ordinance does not lay out any specific criminal sanctions or fines for sleeping outdoors.
The Cicero Institute, a conservative think tank started by Palantir founder and billionaire Joe Lonsdale, has been pushing to criminalize homeless encampments across the country with its own model ordinance that would penalize counties with “housing first” approaches.
Lebovits believes these types of laws are driven by the idea that “the reason why we see visible homelessness is the cities are permissive.” That means it’s important, she says, “to have a study that shows definitively that is not the case.”
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