Bathrooms as a Homeless Rights Issue
Ron Hochbuam, Loyola University Chicago
Bathrooms
are a bellwether of equality. Segregated bathrooms were at the center of the
Civil Rights movement. Accessible bathrooms were at the heart of the Disability
Rights movement. Now, gender-neutral bathrooms or bathrooms assigned by gender,
rather than sex, are at the heart of the Transgender Rights movement.
This
article is the first to examine the right to access bathrooms as it relates to
the homeless community. The article explores the current paradox where cities,
counties, and states provide few, if any, public bathrooms for the homeless
community and the public at large, while criminalizing public urination and
defecation.
To
better understand this paradox, the article contains two original
multi-jurisdictional surveys. The first reviews the prohibitions on public
urination and defecation in the 10 municipalities with the most homeless
individuals. The second explores the Freedom of Information Act and Public
Record Act responses of those municipalities to requests for information
regarding the public bathrooms they operate and potential barriers to use for
homeless individuals.
The article contextualizes the
paradox in relation to human dignity, public health, and the historical use of
bathroom access as an exercise of power. It contends that government actors use
bathrooms to marginalize the homeless community in the same way that they have
used them to marginalize women, people of color, individuals with disabilities,
and transgender individuals. The article concludes that any long-term solution
to the problem requires an examination of the paradox through the lens of the
homeless community.
Improving Homeless
Persons’ Quality of Life: Using Evidence of Government Hostility Towards
Homeless Persons to Challenge Quality of Life Laws Under the Equal Protection
Doctrine
Ericka Peterson, Georgetown University Law Center
Cities across the United States have been using the guise
of equal application of the law to pass a flurry of legislation aimed at
ridding their cities of homeless persons. These laws, such as laws prohibiting
sleeping or sitting in public spaces are known as quality of life laws, and
make a homeless person’s very existence criminal.
Quality of life laws started springing up around the United
States after courts found vagrancy laws, which had formally been used to
control and expel the homeless, unconstitutional. Because quality of life laws
are often facially neutral, many challenges to them have been unsuccessful. In
this article I will argue that despite some difficulties, the Equal Protection
Doctrine could be successfully used to challenge many quality of life laws.
While the doctrine is usually analyzed within the framework of tiered scrutiny,
there is abundant support for the idea that legislation created with the intent
to harm unpopular groups violates equal protection guarantees. Using the legislative history, as well as public
discourse surrounding the passage of a form of quality of life laws known as
sit-lie laws in nine cities, I will analyze and build a framework with which
advocates could challenge quality of life laws using the Equal Prot