The Law Is Ugly

I learned about “ugly laws” this week. The only reason I am not crying is that I am so damned angry.

I have an invisible illness. That fact has always felt like luck, not privilege in the usual sense — just the difference between moving through the world and being treated as something the world should not have to look at. For people whose disability is obvious — a cane, a wheelchair, an amputation, a visible difference — American cities once made that presence a crime. Those ordinances stayed on the books until 1974.

They are gone. The instinct behind them is not.

This is a post about what those laws actually were, what they were not, what is changing now in disability and homelessness policy, and who is fighting to keep disabled people in community instead of out of sight.

What this post is not claiming: No current U.S. law sends someone to jail for using a cane, a wheelchair, or having a visible disability in public. The Americans with Disabilities Act still protects that. The danger is quieter and more structural: less enforcement, weaker community supports, and a renewed push toward institutions and civil commitment — especially for people who are poor, unhoused, or living with psychiatric disability.

What the “ugly laws” actually were

From 1867 to 1974, a string of American cities passed what historians now call unsightly beggar ordinances, or ugly laws. San Francisco went first. Chicago, Omaha, Portland, Columbus, Denver, and others followed. Pennsylvania even wrote cognitive disability into its version.

The language was almost identical from city to city. Chicago’s 1881 ordinance is the one most often quoted: it was illegal for any person who was “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object” to “expose himself or herself to public view.”

These were not abstract morals. They were tools for clearing streets. The usual targets were poor disabled people who begged, sold newspapers, or simply existed in public in a way that made other people uncomfortable. Punishment was a fine, jail, or shipment to the poorhouse.

New ordinances mostly stopped after World War I. Too many disabled veterans made the politics ugly in a different way. Enforcement dwindled. The text, though, sat in municipal codes for decades.

The last known arrest attempt was in Omaha in 1974: an officer wanted to pick up a homeless man, found the old ordinance still on the books, and cited the “marks and scars on his body.” Prosecutors declined to pursue it. One of them pointed out the obvious problem — you cannot prove in court that someone is legally “ugly.”

That same year, Chicago repealed the last of these laws. An alderman called it “cruel and insensitive” and “a throwback to the Middle Ages.” It had been in effect for 93 years.

The name “ugly laws” itself was coined in 1975 by disability rights advocates Marcia and Robert Burgdorf, after that Omaha case. They needed a phrase sharp enough to make people see what the ordinances had always been.

If you want the full history, read Susan M. Schweik’s book The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. National Geographic also published a clear overview in 2024: “Illegal to be ‘ugly’? The history behind one of America’s cruelest laws.”

What came after: 504, the ADA, Olmstead

Disability advocates in the 1970s used the ugly laws as proof that “please be nicer” was not a civil-rights strategy. They needed statutes.

• Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (1973) banned disability discrimination by programs that take federal money. Disabled activists occupied a federal building in San Francisco for 26 days in 1977 to force the government to issue the regulations.
• The Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) extended those protections into public life: employment, state and local government, public accommodations, transportation. Using a wheelchair or a cane in public is not a favor. It is a right the ADA was written to protect.
• Olmstead v. L.C. (1999) is the Supreme Court decision that said unjustified isolation in an institution can be discrimination under the ADA. If community placement is appropriate, the person does not oppose it, and the state can reasonably provide it, the state cannot warehouse people as a default.

That last piece is the one under the most pressure right now. Ugly laws said: do not be seen. Olmstead said: you have a right to live among everyone else, with supports, instead of being stored somewhere convenient for the rest of us.

What is actually changing in 2025–2026

The ADA has not been repealed. Section 504 has not been repealed. Olmstead has not been overturned. Anyone telling you that a wheelchair is about to become a jailable offense is flattening a real fight into a slogan.

Here is the real fight.

1. Federal enforcement is being pulled back

The Department of Justice has withdrawn long-standing ADA guidance documents and stated that its 2011 Olmstead enforcement guidance is “not enforceable.” It will not rely on that guidance when enforcing Title II of the ADA. Staffing and casework on disability civil rights have dropped sharply compared with the previous administration.

Guidance is not the statute. But guidance is how businesses, cities, and state agencies were told what the statute required in practice. Removing it does not erase the law. It makes the law easier to ignore until someone has the money and stamina to sue.

2. The integration mandate is being reinterpreted

In June 2026 the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a memo arguing that neither the ADA nor Section 504 requires states to provide services in the most integrated setting appropriate — the reading courts and advocates have used since Olmstead.

An OLC memo is not a Supreme Court decision. Courts are not bound by it. Existing consent decrees and state laws still exist. What it does do is tell federal agencies they may stop treating community living as something they are obligated to enforce. That is how rights die in practice: not with a repeal ceremony, but with a decision that no one in the building will pick up the phone.

The Arc has a running resource hub on this: DOJ opinion on Olmstead and community living.

3. Homelessness policy is being aimed at institutions

This is the part that collides with the ugly-law memory.

A July 2025 executive order on “crime and disorder on America’s streets” frames unsheltered homelessness as a public-order crisis driven by addiction and mental illness, and directs agencies to support “civil commitment” and “long-term institutional settings.” Federal homelessness funding is being shifted away from Housing First toward “Treatment First.”

People with disabilities are already overrepresented among people experiencing homelessness. When community supports shrink and civil commitment expands, the people most likely to be removed from public space are not abstract “vagrants.” They are disabled. That is the historical rhyme. It is not the same ordinance. It can produce a similar result: fewer disabled poor people visible in the city, more of them behind institutional walls.

Read the order itself: Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets.

4. States are also testing the floor

A multi-state lawsuit, Texas v. Kennedy, has challenged aspects of Section 504 regulations and the community-integration framework. Several states have already dropped out after disability advocates pressed them. The case is still a live threat to how broadly those protections are read.

Why “eugenics” keeps coming up

Historical American eugenics was not a metaphor. It was forced sterilization, marriage bans, and institutions designed to keep certain people from reproducing or appearing. Buck v. Bell (1927) is still on the books as a Supreme Court decision. The last known sterilization of a disabled person in the United States is far more recent than most people want to believe.

Current policy is not a reprint of those statutes. Using the word carefully matters. What advocates mean when they reach for it is this: a governing theory that treats some disabled lives as a cost, a disorder, or a visual problem to be managed rather than as citizens with a right to remain in the community. If the tools are budget cuts, enforcement retreat, and civil commitment instead of surgical sterilization, the destination can still be the same — fewer of us in public, more of us contained.

Anger is a reasonable response to that pattern. Precision is how the anger stays useful.

What able-bodied people can actually do

Disabled people should not have to carry this alone. If you have a body that the state is not currently trying to manage, use it.

1. Learn your state’s Protection & Advocacy agency. Every state has one. They are the legally mandated lawyers for disability rights. Start at the National Disability Rights Network and click through to your state.
2. Show up when community services are on the chopping block. Medicaid home- and community-based services, housing vouchers, and local Olmstead plans are where institutionalization either happens or does not. State budget hearings are not glamorous. They are where the bodies go.
3. Refuse the “out of sight, out of mind” frame on homelessness. Asking “where should this person sleep tonight that is not a cage” is a different question from “how do we make the sidewalk look nicer.”
4. Share primary sources, not just rage posts. The history is bad enough without inventing a new criminal code that does not exist. Credibility is a resource.
5. Give money and labor to the organizations already in court. They are listed below.

If you are in crisis yourself: You are not required to be a symbol. Local independent living centers, your state P&A, and 988 (call or text) are there for the immediate need, not the political argument.

Organizations doing the work

These are the groups I would send a reader to first. They are not interchangeable. Some litigate. Some organize. Some write the policy memos that keep showing up in court.

Disability civil rights and community living

• National Disability Rights Network (NDRN) — umbrella for every state’s Protection & Advocacy system. Start here if you need a lawyer in your state.
• The Arc of the United States — intellectual and developmental disability advocacy; running an Olmstead resource hub and fighting the DOJ shift.
• Judge David L. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law — the shop that has spent decades on psychiatric disability, institutions, and community integration.
• Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) — national law and policy center; deep in Section 504 and Texas v. Kennedy.
• Center for Public Representation — public-interest litigators on integration, Section 504, and institutional rights.
• American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) — national cross-disability political organization.
• National Council on Independent Living (NCIL) — the independent living movement; community living as a civil right, not a program preference.
• Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) — policy and organizing led by autistic people; strong on institutionalization and “treatment” rhetoric.
• Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities — coalition of national disability organizations working federal policy.
• ADA Watch / Coalition for Disability Rights & Justice — grassroots campaign focused on defending community living.
• Center for Disability Rights — organizing and policy, including work on a legislative response to the OLC memo (the Latonya Reeves Freedom Act).
• National Health Law Program (NHeLP) — Medicaid, home- and community-based services, and the funding that makes Olmstead real.

Homelessness, housing, and the street-level fight

• National Homelessness Law Center — litigation and policy against criminalization of homelessness.
• National Low Income Housing Coalition — housing policy; has written directly on the DOJ Olmstead memo.
• National Alliance to End Homelessness — research and federal homelessness policy.
• National Coalition for the Homeless — organizing with people who have lived experience of homelessness.

Find local help

• Your state Protection & Advocacy agency
• Independent Living Center directory (ILRU)

A closing that is not a slogan

I am lucky that my illness does not announce itself. That luck is an accident of diagnosis and of other people’s eyes. It is not a moral category, and it is not protection if the supports that keep people housed, medicated, employed, and un-institutionalized are dismantled.

The ugly laws were an official statement that some bodies were not fit for the sidewalk. We repealed the ordinances. We have not repealed the wish that certain people would just not be there.

The work now is unglamorous: keep Olmstead enforceable in practice, keep home- and community-based services funded, keep housing from being replaced by a locked ward with a treatment brochure on the door, and refuse to treat disabled poverty as a sanitation problem.

If you have an able body and a platform, use both. If you are disabled and tired, you already did enough by surviving a country that once wrote your existence out of the municipal code. The rest of us can carry some of the filing, the calling, and the showing up.

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Written September 2026. Laws and agency guidance change; check the organization pages above for the latest. Primary sources worth bookmarking: the ADA, Section 504, Olmstead v. L.C. (1999), the June 2026 DOJ OLC memo on the integration mandate, and Executive Order 14321 (July 24, 2025).