State and Local Policymakers Should Advance Policies Prioritizing Stability and Dignity to Solve Homelessness

Our communities are safer when each person has a stable place to call home. Policies that improve access to housing assistance together with robust, voluntary services have been shown to both prevent and resolve homelessness.^[1] Indeed, homelessness has declined where policymakers have provided more adequate and consistent funding for rental assistance and related services: at the local level in cities like Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Los Angeles, California, for example, as well as among veterans at the national level.^[2] But because policymakers at all levels have underfunded affordable housing programs and services, more people than ever are becoming homeless and struggling to access housing.^[3]

Rather than take steps to increase the availability of affordable housing and access to services, many communities are responding to more people experiencing homelessness with punishment-driven policies that are costly, ineffective, and racially discriminatory.^[4] Since 2022, at least eight states have passed — and dozens more have considered — legislation to ticket, fine, or jail people simply for having no safe place to sleep, often under the direct influence of the right-wing Cicero Institute.^[5] Additionally, over 320 local ordinances to fine or arrest people for sleeping outside have been introduced in the months following the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass v. Johnson decision, which eliminated certain legal protections for people forced to sleep outside with no alternative shelter or housing.^[6] The Trump Administration issued an executive order that — if implemented — will pressure more states and communities to fine, arrest, and institutionalize unhoused people. ^[7]

In 2025 and beyond, state and local policymakers should reject and repeal these ineffective and life-threatening policies, like they recently did in Alabama, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and eight other states.^[8] Instead, they should focus on preventing and ending homelessness by increasing access to housing that people can afford and services that support them, including through resources like rental assistance.^[9]

Policies that punish people experiencing homelessness are not new. State and local governments have been using them for decades — building upon centuries-long efforts to exclude and subjugate groups of people based on race or ethnicity, disability status, and income.^[10] Because Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, American Indians and Alaska Natives, and Black and Latine people disproportionately experience homelessness, the expansion of policies that ticket, fine, or even arrest unhoused people compounds the racial inequities that stem from long-standing structural racism in the criminal legal system, housing, education, and employment.^[11]

Anti-homeless laws and actions can result in mounting debt due to fines that go unpaid, loss of crucial personal property during encampment clearings, traumatic encounters with law enforcement, and criminal records that make it harder for people to get a job or rent housing given employer and landlord screening practices. Communities implementing these practices actively hinder people from exiting homelessness, thus worsening, not solving, the nation’s homelessness crisis. Even so, these failed policies are proliferating thanks in part to organized lobbying efforts by groups like the Cicero Institute — well-funded policy influencers attacking health^[12] and economic security programs,^[13] undermining trust in proven solutions, and advocating for more punishment.

Over the past several years, the Cicero Institute, a think tank from Austin, Texas, has followed its peers’ well-worn tactics to advance a punitive, inequitable, and counterproductive policy agenda. Template legislation circulated by Cicero lobbyists and picked up by dozens of state legislatures include policies that, when combined, erode civil liberties and subject people to extreme government surveillance and control merely because they cannot afford a place to live.^[14] Now the federal government is adopting Cicero’s policy agenda.

Key elements of these harmful policies include:

• Punishing the act of sleeping or “camping” on public land with tickets, fines, and arrests, even when people have nowhere else to go. In some cases where the state advances these policies, local jurisdictions would be subject to lawsuits if they don’t enforce these anti-camping laws.
• Diverting state and flexible federal funding away from affordable housing and services. Instead of sustaining evidence-based solutions like eviction prevention, rental assistance, and flexible supportive services, funds would go towards emergency mass shelters with time limits on stays, police-driven “homeless outreach teams,” programs with drug test requirements, and short-term, state-run encampments.
• Removing legal protections for people experiencing homelessness. Doing so increases people’s risk of involuntary commitment to psychiatric institutions, which can be traumatizing, counterproductive, and expensive.^[15] Many of these provisions also impose criminal or civil penalties on people who do not fully engage in court-ordered outpatient mental health or substance use treatment — even though that treatment typically fails to address housing needs or provide access to ongoing supportive services.

Policymakers and local advocates should be wise to the influence of the Cicero Institute and other groups seeking to take advantage of public outcry over encampments and genuine concern for the well-being of unhoused people. These proposals cross partisan lines. Cicero-style anti-homeless legislation and policies have appeared in a variety of states including Arizona, California, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin. Fortunately, of the 57 state-level bills introduced so far in 2025, almost 80 percent have been voted down or tabled^[16] after people experiencing homelessness and local advocacy leaders have called out the harm they would cause and emphasized more effective policy solutions to encampments: connecting people to quality shelter, supportive services, and permanent housing.

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Homelessness is solvable. State and local policymakers can make strategic policy choices that resolve individual encampments, reverse longstanding racial disparities, and address homelessness at scale.^[17] They can fund long-term rental assistance and enact eviction preventions, increase incomes, expand access to services that meet health-related social needs through Medicaid, and build and preserve more affordable and supportive housing.^[18] (See Figure 1.) In fact, the only effective way to reduce encampments and ensure that fewer people experience homelessness is to connect unhoused community members to housing and health care.

The way forward is not through punishing people for struggling under a flawed system, but through prioritizing supports that can end their homelessness or prevent it from occurring in the first place.