Why are cities in Oregon scrambling to find solutions to house their local homeless populations?
A large part of the answer is two recent court rulings in the Northwest that have significantly influenced how cities, including Sweet Home, are dealing with homelessness, because they have set boundaries on what communities can and cannot do to address the issue.
Martin v. Boise
This 2018 decision, by the Ninth Circuit Court – which has jurisdiction over nine western states, including Oregon, ruled that people experiencing homelessness cannot be criminally punished for sleeping outdoors on public property if there are no available alternatives. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the decision, which suggests (in legal circles) that it essentially agreed with it.
In Martin, six plaintiffs who were or had recently been homeless residents of Boise, Idaho, challenged two city ordinances that punished homeless people for sleeping or camping in public spaces. Boise’s “camping ordinance” prohibited and punished the use of any streets, sidewalks, parks, or public places as a camping place at any time.
Martin v. Boise is regarded as setting an influential national precedent.
The lawsuit, led by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, Idaho Legal Aid Services, and Latham & Watkins LLP, specifically challenged enforcement of the city of Boise’s camping and disorderly conduct ordinances, which allowed people experiencing homelessness to be ticketed or otherwise criminally punished for sleeping in public spaces.
The Ninth Circuit Court ruled that, in the absence of adequate alternatives, criminalizing people experiencing homelessness for sleeping in public constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment” and therefore violates their Eighth Amendment rights.
Blake v. Grants Pass
The Boise case really got legs in Oregon when a federal judge decided on July 22, 2020, that Grants Pass, a city of 37,500, violated its homeless residents’ Eighth-Amendment rights by excluding them from parks without due process and citing them for sleeping outside.
Grants Pass has seen mushrooming growth, from 23,000 in the 2000 census to an estimated 38,000 in 2020, when the decision was handed down. Grants Pass City Manager Aaron Cubic noted when testifying in the case that the city had a vacancy rate of 1%, which “essentially means that there’s no vacancy.” Transiency has been a major and very visible issue in Grants Pass for many years.
City leaders, in 2013, determined “to make it uncomfortable enough for them in our city so (homeless individuals) will want to move on down the road.” They came up with a list of “action items,” including increasing police presence downtown, creating an exclusion zone and possibly a blanket trespassing regulation, a ban on feeding in parks and other specific areas of the city, “zero tolerance” signs announcing that certain ordinances would be strictly enforced, helping to provide safe areas at agencies to protect volunteers from aggressive behavior, and more. Those were added to the city’s strategic plans.
Debra Blake, the lead plaintiff in the class-action case, was ticketed and banished from all city parks after she was discovered sleeping in one on Sept. 11, 2019. She had lost her job and housing approximately 10 years previously and had been “involuntarily homeless” in the community since then, according to the court record.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark D. Clarke rebuked the city for the way it was fining people living outside: “Let us not forget that homeless individuals are citizens just as much as those fortunate enough to have a secure living space.”
Clarke ruled that the city must simply follow the Martin v. Boise ruling, stating that his own ruling “does not say that Grants Pass must allow homeless camps to be set up at all times in public parks. Just like in Martin, this holding in no way dictates to a local government that it must provide sufficient shelter for the homeless, or allow anyone who wishes to sit, lie, or sleep on the street at any time and at any place. Nor does this holding cover individuals who do have access to adequate temporary shelter, whether they have the means to pay for it or because it is realistically available to them for free, but who choose not to use it.”