Why Encampment Bans Don’t Reduce Homelessness

Abstract

The issue of homelessness remains widespread all across America. To combat the issue, cities have passed policies that place restrictions or bans on homeless encampments in public spaces, and this right to do so has been reinforced by the Supreme Court’s passing of City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. To determine whether bans on homeless encampments in public spaces are effective in addressing the issue of homelessness, I use data from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Census Bureau to perform a difference-in-differences analysis to compare counties – Sacramento County, Manchester CoC, and Miami-Dade – with policies passed to neighboring counties without policies passed. Our results indicate that encampment-banning policies did not lead to a statistically significant reduction in the unsheltered homeless population for any of the counties analyzed. However, our results revealed that fewer barriers to policy implementation correspond to more statistically significant change, and non-monetary penalties are associated with reductions in homelessness.