Imagine you’re sick. Like, really sick. The sort of sick where your brain is telling you things are out there that aren’t, you hear voices that berate you but see no bodies that they belong to. It’s hard to get relief. There is medicine for it but the medicine makes you feel awful. You’re dizzy, you’re confused, your mouth is dry, your face swells, you gain weight, and you hate the sleepiness. Sometimes you avoid the medicine. But the voices persist.

It’s hard to keep a job when you’re confused and struggling to keep your finger on reality. You get a break: Social Security Disability income. It’s around $800. Rents for a studio apartment are around $900. So you’re living with your brother, but when you have a particularly rough psychotic episode he tells you that he cannot handle this. You cannot come back. You go live with your mom. Her landlord finds out. She wasn’t supposed to have anyone else in the apartment according to the lease. It’s another place where you can’t live. So where do you go?

Let’s say your community doesn’t have enough homeless shelter beds. You have no place to sleep. You live everywhere and no where simultaneously. Everyone pretends they can’t see you. You find a gap under a highway bridge, on concrete, try to get some blankets to keep warm, and do the miserable best you can. Everyone who sees you regards you with disgust. You go from being treated a person to a nuisance, a problem, and a blight. It’s a type of hell. You have no where else to go.

The Supreme Court ruled that this situation can now be a crime. The crime isn’t the society that fails to adequately take care of people, valuing city aesthetic over human welfare. The crime is to be someone who cannot adequately participate in the economy enough to maintain a home. The crime is to run out of options. The wordsmiths with quibble: it’s a ban on sleeping outside, regardless of who you are or why you are doing it. The thing is, some people do not have other options. It is not unconstitutional for the ban to applies to people who are doing it because they do not have another way to exist.

I have spent over a decade working in systems that are intended to help people who are experiencing homelessness get permanent places to live. People are usually homeless because they ran out of money. The job didn’t earn enough, the illness made someone lose the job, a breadwinner died, the house caught fire… there’s so many ways bad luck can financially cripple someone. Some people have disabilities where cognitive or psychiatric circumstances compromise their ability to manage money. Every human being needs help at some points in their existence; this is normal. Some people need very specific help to manage life; this is also normal. The programs I work with now are aimed at helping people with serious mental illnesses (like schizophrenia) get into residential programs. I don’t exclusively work with homeless programs, but it is a large part of my job.

The homeless system of care in my community uses a triage process that takes into consideration, among other things, how long someone has experienced homelessness. This is considered a best practice. If you’ve been without a home the longest, you’re prioritized for a bed. Many people experience homelessness for close to a year before they can get access to a voucher. If they could have found another way out within that year, they would have. We have many, many more requests for beds than we have beds. The solution to homelessness is housing, and I am incredibly grateful every time my local, state, or federal government invests in more.

One of the culture shocks for me when I moved to Seattle in 2010 was how much of the urban core smelled like urine. The skyrocketing costs of housing pushed a lot of people into unsheltered homelessness without any other options. Without shelters or public bathrooms, there was parks and the sides of buildings. It was unpleasant. I would argue it was also the natural consequence of not dealing with escalating income inequality. If people do not have other options, what are they going to do? Buffalo, in a right to shelter state, with some of the most affordable housing in the country, usually isn’t like that. We are very far from perfect and homelessness in our community has been rising too.

Criminalizing sleeping in public spaces does not make housing more affordable, increase wages or SSD income, or make landlords more willing to overlook a colorful history on a background check. There will always be people experiencing homelessness as long as the price of housing is unobtainable for some portion of the population.

This ruling prioritizes the aesthetic of cities over the well-being of the most vulnerable residents. It gives legitimacy to municipalities’ efforts to shuffle off undesirable circumstances instead of doing the work to fundamentally address the problem. Often people of means would prefer not to contend with the moral dilemmas brought about by witnessing the suffering of those without means.

Society will always have vulnerable people. There’s a moral imperative to recognize the inherent worthiness of everyone and the ways we are all interconnected and interdependent. Justice requires we work towards everyone being OK. You solve the problem of people not having housing by making housing available for those who can’t make capitalism work for them, not by criminalizing their situation.

Just because you can do something does not mean you have to do it. Just because the Supreme Court decided that it’s not cruel to ban people from sleeping outside even if they have no where else to be doesn’t mean municipalities are obligated to. So let’s not do it. It is my hope that local leaders choose empathetic and compassionate solutions to the problems of poverty: housing, care, and safe places to be.