Kalispell, Montana, has blocked residents from using the bus and parks, but a federal injunction has stopped it from closing a shelter.
They’ve issued one ruling after another expressly designed to restrict unhoused residents’ access to city services, many of them far-reaching. To stop people sleeping on bus stop benches, they did not just remove the benches. They got rid of every bus stop and switched to a high-tech public transport system requiring riders to call a bus via an app linked to their credit card. Since unhoused people rarely have fully functional cellphones or credit cards, they were suddenly unable to use the bus system, too.
The US supreme court, in its Grants Pass decision last June, gave broad discretion to local authorities to police their public spaces and impose criminal penalties on people who sleep in the open. That discretion has been embraced by city and county governments across the political spectrum. What makes Kalispell unusual is that the attempt to close the warming center – on the grounds that it has exacerbated the homelessness problem instead of addressing it – infringes on private property rights that even the conservative majority on the supreme court has so far left untouched.