Oregon City at Center of Landmark Supreme Court Ruling Finally Prepares to Clear Homeless Camps

After a years-long legal fight culminating in the Supreme Court ruling that the small Oregon city of Grants Pass has the right to regulate homeless camping in its borders, city leaders finally agreed this week on a plan to evict homeless campers from their parks.

Late Wednesday, the Grants Pass city council unanimously voted to bar public camping in any of the city’s parks — a rebuke to administrators who, despite the Supreme Court win, had initially pushed to continue to allow the homeless to sleep overnight in some parks.

To abide by a vague state law that requires  local anti-camping rules to be “objectively reasonable,” the city council agreed to designate four city-owned lots for people with nowhere else to go to set up camp temporarily.

The vote was an emphatic win for residents of the former lumber town who for years have raised concerns about the increasing number of homeless people — many of whom are transplants from other places, they insist — who have taken to the parks to camp and consume hard drugs. Residents regularly complained to city leaders about being confronted by addicts, and finding needles, litter, and human waste in the parks.

National Review profiled the city’s struggles to regulate homelessness last month.

But the debate before Wednesday’s vote points to the continued issues that Grants Pass and other communities are likely to have with homelessness, despite the Supreme Court’s late-June ruling that barring homeless camping and fining violators does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Ahead of the vote, city residents peppered city representatives with additional concerns unaddressed by the camping ban.

Advocates for the homeless raised concerns about not having drinkable water at the four designated camping sites, the lack of designated parking spaces for people who camp in their cars, and the city’s ongoing lack of shelter space and affordable housing.

Residents who live near the newly designated camping lots complained about the impact on them. One resident said having a designated lot near his home “is going to make my house, my property, completely worthless.”

Still, others complained that city leaders weren’t going far enough. One resident said that at most, the city should designate “maybe one or two” camping spots. “And I would like to see that go down to zero,” he told the council.

Representative Dwayne Yunker acknowledged that the plan the council approved was not perfect and would likely need to be adjusted. But it was a step forward.

“Nobody wants homeless people who are doing drugs near them,” he said. “We don’t want drug addicts in our town. That’s not a secret. But we do, we have them here. So, now we have to deal with them. So, we’re dealing with them the best way we can.”

For years, Grants Pass was not allowed to do much about the campers in its parks.

In 2018, just weeks after a controversial Ninth Circuit ruling in Martin v. Boise, which backed the right of people with nowhere to go to camp on city land, Grants Pass was sued by three homeless residents over its ban on homeless camping. A district court ruling in 2020, which was later upheld by the Ninth Circuit, agreed that ban was likely unconstitutional. Grants Pass was placed under a federal injunction, which required it to allow the homeless to camp in 15 of its 16 parks.

Many elected leaders blamed the Ninth Circuit rulings in the Martin and Grants Pass cases for the explosion of squalid homeless camps in West Coast communities.

But the Supreme Court’s June ruling in Johnson v. Grants Pass reversed the Ninth Circuit, leading some Grants Pass residents to believe that the city’s leaders could immediately take action to clear homeless camps from their parks.

That’s why some residents told National Review in late July they were “frustrated beyond belief” that the city had seemingly done nothing to improve the conditions in the parks.

City officials said their hands were tied; they were still technically under the Ninth Circuit’s injunction, and Oregon’s Democratic leaders had recently required that communities offer someplace for the homeless to sleep, with any regulations being “objectively reasonable.”

Last month, Grants Pass mayor Sara Bristol and other city officials warned residents that the city would likely still have to allow the homeless to camp in some parks.

At a mid-July meeting, city manager Aaron 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.

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

At a follow-up meeting in late July, Cubic brought the city council two proposals: one that would explicitly bar camping in most city parks, but not all, and one that would specifically designate select parks for camping, but not including any that had playgrounds or ballfields.

The city council representatives weren’t having any of it.

“I don’t like any of these options,” Yunker said. “I’m not for any parks.”

“I think basically what you’re hearing, the council has listened to the public. And we know how bad they want their parks back,” representative Valerie Lovelace said. “Parks are not meant for what they’ve been used for.”

The council sent Cubic and his staff back to the drawing board with suggestions for city-owned lots, not parks, where campers could go if necessary.

On Wednesday, the council voted to approve camping in only four lots — a space next to the city’s water treatment plant, a small lot near city hall, a lot that abuts a park, and a lot between a park and a city fire station. The council didn’t approve a lot next to the city’s police station, because a building needed to be razed before that space would be ready.

The estimated cost for the plan runs about $250,000 annually to install and clean portable toilets, to include handwashing stations and trash bins, and to install fencing around the lots and security-camera trailers in a couple of locations.

City leaders can begin enforcing the new ordinance once the Ninth Circuit frees them from the injunction. It was not immediately clear when that would happen.

“It could be next week, it could be 30 days from now,” Cubic said.

Brock Spurgeon, a leader with the community group, Park Watch, which enlists residents to clean and monitor Grants Pass parks, told National Review ahead of Wednesday’s vote that he was happy with the city’s progress, even if it seems slow.

“It’s all coming together,” he said. “I think that half of these people in town that are from out of town, they’re going to leave. It’s not an open party anymore.”

He noted that starting next month, law enforcement will again be allowed to crack down on illegal drug use after lawmakers reintroduced criminal penalties earlier this year in the wake of the state’s failed drug-decriminalization experiment.

“The homeless aren’t the problem. It’s the drug addicts,” said Spurgeon, whose son is a homeless addict. “We know the wheels of justice turn really slowly.”

While leaders of some West Coast cities and communities have vowed to continue a permissive approach to homelessness in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling, others are beginning to take action. 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 last month, while the city of Folsom, Calif., has resumed enforcing its anti-camping laws.

San Francisco mayor London Breed issued an executive directive last week that directs city staffers and contractors to offer homeless people relocation services — bus tickets, airfare, and cash assistance — before offering them any other city services, including shelter and housing.

On Thursday, California governor Gavin Newsom threatened to redirect state money away from counties that don’t show demonstrable improvements on homelessness.

“There’s no more excuses,” he said, according to the Los Angeles Times. “You’ve got the money. You’ve got the flexibility. You’ve got the green light. You’ve got the support from the state and the public is demanding it of you, and if this is not the most important issue, you’re not paying attention. This is the biggest scar on the reputation of the state of California.”