Lawsuit Puts Oregon City Back In Spotlight Over Homeless Camping

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,

An activist group is suing an Oregon city over its public camping policies after the city prevailed in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allowed municipalities to enforce homeless camping bans.

The new lawsuit comes after the Supreme Court in June 2024 upheld a local ordinance banning public camping, which activists claimed criminalized being homeless. The court rejected 6-3 the novel argument that the local law in Grants Pass, Oregon, violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

The new legal complaint in Disability Rights Oregon v. City of Grants Pass was filed on Jan. 30 in the Circuit Court for the State of Oregon for Josephine County. Grants Pass, with a population of 39,000, is in southwest Oregon near the California border.

The city has one overnight shelter that adults may access, called the Gospel Rescue Mission.

Some homeless people don’t stay there because it requires regular attendance at religious services, and bans smoking, alcohol, illegal drugs, and pets, according to the complaint.

On Jan. 7, the City Council voted to shut down the larger of two city-owned campsites on which homeless people had been permitted to stay and to restrict the use of the smaller one. City officials said the larger site was an unsanitary eyesore. Construction of a water treatment facility is expected to begin at the larger site in May.

The legal complaint said both sites were unsuitable for use by disabled people, including those using mobility devices such as wheelchairs.

These people “often found themselves struggling to traverse the uneven ground, requiring assistance to make it even a short distance within the campsites.”

The smaller site is open from 5 p.m. to 7 a.m., after which campers have to remove their belongings.

The lawsuit asks the state court for a temporary restraining order reversing the closure of the larger campsite and halting the city policy restricting the hours of the smaller campsite.

Portland-based Disability Rights Oregon and five homeless individuals who are disabled say in the complaint that the city’s new camping policies discriminate against disabled people and run afoul of a provision in Section 195.530 of the Oregon Revised Statutes, a state law.

Subsection 2 of the law states that: “Any city or county law that regulates the acts of sitting, lying, sleeping or keeping warm and dry outdoors on public property that is open to the public must be objectively reasonable as to time, place and manner with regards to persons experiencing homelessness.”

Subsection 4 allows a homeless person to “bring suit for injunctive or declaratory relief to challenge the objective reasonableness of [such] a city or county law.”

The complaint argues the city is breaking the law because the space in which camping is now allowed is, among other things, too small.

The small plot of land is “only large enough to hold less than 20% of the tents of people who are currently homeless in Grants Pass. For about 80% of the homeless people in Grants Pass, Grants Pass city code now makes it illegal for them to exist and survive by virtue of their poverty and disabilities,” according to the complaint.

Instead of making objectively reasonable regulations “the city has chosen to use its authority to recriminalize being homeless in the guise of a time/place/manner restriction,” the complaint said.

The city “wants to make being homeless in Grants Pass so unpleasant that people go elsewhere,” the complaint said. “Despite the presence of numerous elderly, ill, and disabled people on site, the city increased its draconian restrictions in the dead of winter leaving hundreds of people with no legal option for their continued survival.”

The city “currently has no meaningful plan to provide shelter or otherwise assist homeless people to find places to live. People have no place to legally go,” the complaint states.

Jake Cornett is the executive director and CEO of Disability Rights Oregon.

“Putting the lives of people with disabilities at risk in the dead of winter because they don’t have housing is cruel and illegal,” he said in a statement. “Without adequate shelter space available, forcing a person in a wheelchair or someone with a chronic illness to pack and move their belongings daily is not just impossible, it’s inhumane. Grants Pass’s dangerous actions must be stopped.”

The Epoch Times reached out to Mark Bartholomew, interim city attorney for Grants Pass, for comment. No reply was received by publication time.