Grants Pass Fought to the Supreme Court to Clear Public Camps. So Why Are City Parks Still Filled with Homeless?

For three years, David Dapper lived with the loud music, the screaming, the constant fighting coming from the homeless campers in Tussing Park in Grants Pass, Ore.

Even just stepping out to take out the trash often led to yelling matches and Dapper being accosted by people living in the parks, most of whom, he said, are “drug addicts replaying the hippie thing in the ’60s.” One Monday night a few years back, Dapper was arrested after he and his wife walked down to the park to confront the homeless campers about the loud noise, and he fired a warning shot into the air, according to news reports.

Tussing Park, like most of the other parks in this small southern Oregon city, “went to crap,” Dapper told National Review. Addicts openly bought and consumed hard drugs, passed out in their tents and cars, and littered the parks with needles and drug paraphernalia.

Two homeless men were involved in a fatal shooting in a local park last year, according to local news reports. The body of another homeless man who overdosed and died in a park was removed while kids were playing baseball earlier this year.

But there was seemingly little that city leaders could do.

A District Court ruling in 2020, which was later upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, found that the city’s ban on public camping was unconstitutional. Grants Pass was placed under a federal injunction, which required it to allow the homeless to camp in 15 of its 16 parks, including Tussing.

Dapper then was among the Grants Pass residents who cheered a Supreme Court ruling in late June that reversed the Ninth Circuit, finding that barring people from camping in public parks and imposing fines on violators does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

It seemed to many residents that the city’s shackles had finally been removed.

But three week after the ruling, leaders in Grants Pass, who fought all the way to the Supreme Court for their right to regulate homeless camps, have so far done nothing to clear the camps in their parks. And city leaders have warned residents that when they do eventually take action, the homeless will likely still be allowed to camp in some parks.

“I’m frustrated beyond belief,” Dapper said.

Grants Pass resident Brock Spurgeon, co-founder of a community group called Park Watch, which enlists residents to clean and monitor local parks, said his members are also upset.

City leaders, he said, “knew this Supreme Court ruling was going to come down. Do you have a plan one way or the other? And they didn’t.”

In an interview with National Review, Grants Pass mayor Sara Bristol acknowledged that residents are frustrated and deserve to be. But it’s a “very complicated situation,” she said. While the Supreme Court ruled in the city’s favor, they’re still technically under the Ninth Circuit’s injunction for now, and they also must comply with a new state law that vaguely requires any local anti-camping rules and laws to be “objectively reasonable.”

While Oregon communities can establish time, place, and manner restrictions on homeless camping, they must have some place for people with no other options to sleep.

“Here’s the reality that we have, since people do have to be allowed to be somewhere, where is that somewhere?” Bristol said. “Is a sidewalk or a right-of-way a better spot? Or an alley or a parking lot or an undeveloped lot? We’ve got all those options on the table.”

While the Supreme Court’s ruling affirmed that local governments do have the right to take action against the squalid homeless camps that have proliferated in parks and on sidewalks in many west coast communities, the Court did not in any way direct local governments to clear those camps. Some have already said that they won’t.

In Pima County, Ariz., which includes Tucson, county attorney Laura Conover said they will not be changing their permissive approach to homeless camping. She called the Supreme Court’s ruling in Johnson v. Grants Pass “unacceptable” and “wrong from a moral, and ethical, and humane standpoint,” according to a report in the Arizona Daily Star. “As a community, we will not dehumanize people.”

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling, Darrell Steinberg, the mayor of Sacramento, Calif., similarly said his city also would not be changing its “balanced, compassionate approach” toward homeless people, according to the Sacramento Bee.

Last year, district attorney Thien Ho, a Democrat, sued Sacramento for failing to enforce its laws against the homeless, disregarding city protocols, ignoring citizen complaints, maintaining a public nuisance, and allowing homeless campers to pollute local rivers. Sacramento residents have complained about being threatened by homeless residents with knives, garden shears, broken wine bottles, and even a chainsaw.

A recent Los Angeles Times editorial declared that the Supreme Court’s ruling “will do nothing to end homelessness” That is true, said Timothy Sandefur, vice president of legal affairs for the conservative Goldwater Institute in Arizona.

“The Supreme Court wasn’t pretending to be curing homelessness,” he said. “What the Supreme Court was doing was getting out of the way an obstacle the Ninth Circuit had put in place for trying to address these problems.”

In Grants Pass, city leaders say they do intend to take action. But it’s not clear yet what that will entail, and it’s not clear when they’ll be able to implement whatever plan they devise. At a public meeting last week, city manager Aaron Cubic said Grants Pass will likely remain under the Ninth Circuit’s injunction for 30 to 90 days.

In addition to briefing the crowd on the status of the injunction, Cubic also outlined other obstacles the city faces regarding clearing its parks.

In addition to the new law requiring “objectively reasonable” time, place, and manner restrictions on homeless camping, another new law requires that local governments give 72 hours’ notice before clearing an established campsite. He also warned that if Grants Pass designates a specific space for the homeless, that could lead to a “state-created danger” meaning the city could be held responsible if something goes wrong there.

During the meeting, Cubic polled attendees about which four city parks they were most receptive to being used for continued homeless camping, and which four parks they absolutely wanted camping to be banned at.

“All of them,” multiple people responded. Other frustrated residents called out that campers be allowed only at “City Hall” or on “your land.”

“We don’t have the option of picking nothing,” Bristol told the crowd.

The bulk of public speakers at the meeting criticized the city’s handling of the homeless camping and pushed back on allowing camping in their public parks. “Give us our town back,” said one woman. “No more excuses.”

One resident accused the city of failing to enforce laws against drug use, littering, and open fires. Another said city leaders had turned the parks into an “embarrassment.” One father said his young child once picked up a Big Gulp cup filled with urine in a city park. An 80-year-old widow said she can no longer walk through the parks with her grandkids and great-grandkids, and that she’d once been threatened by “machete man.”

One resident urged city leaders to defy the federal injunction. “It’s not like we’re going to get sued again and it’s going to go to the Supreme Court,” he said.

One woman accused city leaders of using the poll to “create an illusion that the public made the choice” to continue housing the homeless in the parks. “That’s wrong,” she said.

Bristol told National Review that the poll was just a “hands-on exercise in the tough decisions that the council has to make. Because I think it’s really easy for some people to say they don’t want the people to be anywhere, and that’s not an option.”

While options besides parks are on the table, Bristol was clear during the meeting that while camping will likely be banned in some parks soon, it will probably still be allowed in some parks “because we don’t have a shelter, other established place for them to go.”

Bristol said she’s seen the struggles that West Coast cities have had with homeless camps on their sidewalks, “sometimes literally right outside business doors.”

“We haven’t had that situation here in Grants Pass,” she told National Review. “But if we move people from the parks, do we end up with that situation?”

“You don’t snap your fingers and have people disappear,” she added.

Dapper just wants the parks back. Tussing Park was a draw for Dapper and his wife four years ago when they moved to Grants Pass, a blue-collar former lumber town. They bought a house two doors from the park so they could visit the duck ponds and walk their dogs.

But about soon after they moved there, the homeless camping exploded.

Dapper and others believe the rise in homelessness was also tied in part to Oregon’s disastrous drug-decriminalization experiment, which voters approved in 2020.

“They passed this law that legalized meth and heroin, and everything just went berserk,” Dapper said, adding that license plates in the parks tell the story. “They’re here from Idaho, they’re hear from Nevada, other states. They come here for the drugs.”

Spurgeon, whose son is a homeless drug addict, said residents have sympathy for people who are truly struggling financially. There is a real housing problem in Grants Pass, he said.

“We keep trying to say, it’s not just homelessness,” he told National Review “It’s a drug problem. We’re not afraid of homeless people. We’re afraid of these people screaming and yelling at the moon.”

Spurgeon agreed that drug-decriminalization has contributed to the problem.

“We’d go to the police and say, ‘They’re all down there smoking meth,’” he said. “And the chief would look at us — great guy — and he’d say, ‘Look, you get what you vote for, and right now that’s just an infraction.’”

Earlier this year, Oregon lawmakers passed a law that reintroduces criminal penalties for possession of hard drugs. It goes into effect on September 1.

While city leaders continue debating when and how to further regulate homeless camping, Spurgeon and his Park Watch members are doing weekly counts of tents in the parks. Their most recent count found 77 tents in eight city parks, along with 36 car campers.

“So, it’s not that many,” he said. “It’s just that they’re spread everywhere and there’s drugs and violence and theft. And just the whole town has gone to heck in a big way.”

Bristol pushed back on the notion that the homeless are driving crime in the city.

“Most of our crime, and especially the more serious crime, is happening outside the parks among the housed population,” she said. “That is taking the bulk of our police resources, but the unhoused situation is getting a lot of attention.”

While some West Coast communities have been slow to change course regarding their handling of homeless camps, the Supreme Court ruling has had some immediate impacts.

An appeals court recently overturned an injunction that had prevented the city of San Francisco from enforcing laws prohibiting homeless camping on sidewalks and parks. The city attorney in Spokane, Wash., recently told officials that the ruling indicates that a voter-approved proposition banning camping in most of the city is constitutional.

The city of San Marcos near San Diego approved an encampment ban earlier this month, while the city of Folsom, Calif., has resumed enforcing its anti-camping laws.

Sandefur, quoting Winston Churchill, described the Supreme Court ruling in the Grants Pass case as not the end of the fight, or even the beginning of the end of the fight.

“But it may be the end of the beginning,” he said.

Some local leaders, he said, remain “ideologically committed to just leaving people on the streets because they honestly think that is the compassionate thing to do.”

“It’s going to take pressure from the taxpayers and the hardworking citizens of these communities to insist upon the enforcement of the law,” he said. “And I think we are going to see that kind of movement in a lot of places.”