Why Discrimination Against Unhoused People Makes the Housing Crisis Worse—And What We Can Do About It

When the local homeless shelter was full, Katrina slept in its parking lot. She figured she could bang on the shelter door if she needed help. But she wasn’t safe. Police officers often woke her up around midnight and threatened to charge her with sleeping in public—a criminal offense—if she did not leave. “When police drive me out of the shelter parking lot in the middle of the night, it feels like they are saying, ‘Yeah, go out there and hopefully you will get attacked and die. It will be one less person for us to worry about,’” Katrina told me.

Negative beliefs, attitudes, and practices toward unhoused people like Katrina are as toxic and destructive as racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination. Yet, they are often difficult to challenge under current law, which does not recognize housing status as a category that is protected from discrimination. And these beliefs and practices are spreading as local governments learn from one another.

How California Criminalizes Homelessness

Since the early 1980s, the United States’ affordable housing programs have been gutted while the cost of market-rate housing has skyrocketed. California, the nation’s epicenter of houselessness, illustrates the devastation that is wrought when lawmakers pursue policies that segregate, banish, cite, and imprison unhoused community members instead of adequately addressing a chronic shortfall of affordable housing.

Not surprisingly, persecuting those most impacted by our affordable housing shortage has not solved California’s houselessness crisis. California is home to about 12 percent of the nation’s population but over half of all houseless people who are living in places not fit for human habitation, such as parks, cars, and abandoned buildings (51 percent), and a little over a quarter of all people who are unhoused (that is, all houseless people, who are those either living in places not fit for human habitation or in shelters and transitional housing). The risk of housing displacement falls disproportionately on Black people, who, as a result of the nation’s history of institutional and structural racism in employment, housing, education, and access to other opportunities, make up about 6.5 percent of California’s population but about 31 percent of its unhoused population.

Policy measures have not stemmed the state’s rising tide of housing displacement. According to data compiled by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the number of unhoused Californians has increased by almost 82 percent since 2015 while the general population has increased by less than 1 percent. Eligible low-income people wait on lists for years, or even decades, to obtain subsidized affordable housing vouchers. Meanwhile, the average fair-market rent on a two-bedroom apartment now tops $2,000 a month (and is much higher in urban cores like Los Angeles and the Bay Area). California has the highest poverty level of all the states in the nation when taking the cost of living into account—primarily because its housing costs are so high.

In large part, the state and its local jurisdictions have responded to the affordable housing crisis by persecuting unhoused Californians. Tactics include restricting their ability to exist in certain places (for example, at parks or near schools); bulldozing their living accommodations; confiscating and destroying their belongings; surveilling and harassing them; and citing and jailing them for living, standing, or resting in public places (that is, for being unhoused); and for engaging in survival strategies like collecting recyclables or panhandling. They banish unhoused people to places far from lifesaving resources like health care, water, and food, subject them to forced treatment, and corral them in mass shelters by threat of citation and jail time.

How Criminalization Impedes Solutions to Homelessness

The consequences of criminalization are grave. Unhoused people experience an increased risk of mortality and high rates of criminal legal involvement, mostly for innocent conduct such as sitting, resting, sleeping, or having personal property in public. They are exposed to higher levels of violent and non-violent victimization than the general population.

But the effects of this harassment extend far beyond the direct harm inflicted on houseless people, horrifying as it is. First, treating the survivors of this broken system as if they are the problem is bad public policy. Criminalization, on its face, is designed to deter houselessness. However, people are unhoused because they do not have access to housing they can afford—not because they are making a poor life choice. Criminalizing houselessness misdiagnoses the problem and, in doing so, diverts public resources away from real solutions and toward a policy response that is set up to fail.

A second source of harm stems from the negative stereotypes that accompany criminalization. To bolster the false narrative that punishment is an appropriate policy response to houselessness, public officials and policymakers often portray unhoused people as dangerous or broken. Researchers, policy experts, and the media contribute to this discourse by scrutinizing, analyzing, and speculating about houseless people—as if the answer to the housing crisis could be in their group characteristics. In turn, laws that criminalize houselessness institutionalize these baseless stereotypes and give them a great deal of legitimacy.

These negative beliefs have a powerful influence on policymaking because they depict unhoused people as undeserving. They result in housing policies that are under-resourced. Take California’s “Housing First” policy, codified as California Welfare & Institutions Code § 8255. This law requires all housing programs to adopt the Housing First model—but without providing the funds for the housing needed to get people off the streets. Or consider the decades-long failure of state legislators to make investments in subsidized affordable housing significant enough to end, or even decrease, houselessness.

The hate-filled noise that dominates public debate also drowns out an empirically based diagnosis of the housing crisis. When the microscope is trained on houseless people, the public hears little about the real culprits, including the policymakers who have failed to replenish our affordable housing stock and interest groups, such as real estate and apartment associations, that reap tremendous financial benefits from the current unequal system.