An overhaul of House Bill 437 by the Senate Judiciary Committee takes its language from a template created by the Cicero Institute. It would ban camping on public lands in North Carolina and hold local governments that allow or sanction camping liable by authorizing residents and business owners to file lawsuits.
It also gives local governments the right to create so-called “designated areas” for camping by the homeless, so long as they’re not near residential areas or in places that would adversely affect businesses.
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Republican State Senator Brian Biggs explained it in a Judiciary Committee hearing last week, and acknowledged it’s an unfunded mandate.
"We understand that there's not going to be additional funding from the state at this time, but we feel like that this is actually going to alleviate so many problems that they're currently dealing with, because there's a lot of money being spent on homelessness. It's just ineffective," he said.
Biggs also said the legislation would help state agencies be more competitive for grants from Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which gives grants for homelessness services and housing through regional Continuums of Care (CoCs). That's likely true: new changes from HUD — which are based on President Donald Trump’s executive order on homelessness — will change how a lot of grants related to homelessness are spent.
Cape Fear CoC Homeless Services Director Andrea Stough says the last Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) put out by HUD explicitly rewarded camping bans. That NOFO was forced to change substantially after a court order, but the new version, which came out June 1, still gestures at the idea.
"They talk about providing evidence that you don't interfere or impede with local efforts to advance the objectives of protecting public safety," she explained. It also rewards efforts that "quickly clear tents and encampments on public property."
The new paradigm will likely move money from major cities towards rural areas, and de-prioritize housing-first policy and permanent supportive housing. As the names imply, housing-first programs focus on getting a homeless person housed prior to dealing with issues like substance use, mental health, or unemployment, and permanent supportive programs provide long-term housing with wraparound services.
National Alliance to End Homelessness CEO Ann Oliva says that part of the funding doctrine will actually create more homelessness.
"We conservatively, using the most conservative assumptions that we could use, estimate that 97,000 people will lose their permanent housing nationwide as a result," she said.
The funding is instead aimed at transitional housing programs, shorter-term assistance options that advocates say aren’t as effective at reducing homelessness as housing-first and permanent supportive programs.
Eric Tars is the senior policy director at the National Homelessness Law Center. He said the language in the law is “smoke and mirrors,” since the accepted locations for designated areas essentially exclude all city properties.
"The only place that you're going to be able to cite one of these is out in the middle of nowhere, like Alligator Alcatraz, for example, and that's going to be far away from services and far away from people's access to jobs to medical care, and in none of the states where these bills have passed so far, have any of these designated sites actually been located yet," he said.
Tars said camping bans based on Cicero’s language have passed in nine US states. Earlier this month, a bill passed in Louisiana that goes even further than the typical criminalization: it would create a 'Homeless Court' system, and require a defendant who goes through treatment in the court to pay for their own court-ordered treatment.
"And if you can't pay for it they can rent you out to one of their friends and you know force you to labor, so like this is this is the future that they are trying to create," Tars said, adding that such a strategy doesn’t help the homeless. That bill is now on the governor's desk.
Tars added, “When you force [the homeless] to go into a jail and they can't get to their work shift, they lose their job, or they have to just pay off these fines before they can actually save up to get out of homelessness, so all of these tough love tactics are actually pushing people further from getting out off the streets rather than helping them.”
North Carolina is following a national trend in enacting this ban. Wilmington Mayor Bill Saffo said in a recent city council agenda meeting that the bill was concerning.
"This bill looks like it's making us corral human beings and putting them in some sort of almost like an encampment, which creates a whole other issue for the surrounding areas that will be impacted by this. And talking to other mayors from around the state, and even the country, in respect to this, this is a serious issue, and I don't think anybody's really thinking it through, or he's even called us, or talked to us about it," he said.
The anti-camping language was added to House Bill 437 by the Senate committee as a proposed committee substitute, or PCS. These are used to gut and/or dramatically amend existing bills, which can end up looking nothing like the original versions that were filed months ago. A PCS will sometimes serve to introduce controversial or divisive legislation with less scrutiny than a traditionally filed bill.
The bill is moving rapidly through Senate committees, but because it's a PCS with significant new language, it will need another vote in the House before it heads to the governor’s desk.
