Brian Chapman, a homeless Grants Pass resident, helps a friend, Janine Harris move her things. Harris is physically incapable of moving herself due to arthritis and an injured right shoulder from falling on the street, but is required to do so under Grants Pass ordinances. Credit: Photo courtesy of Lionheart
The city of Grants Pass is scrambling to meet basic humanitarian standards after it cleared homeless residents from its parks and into its first sanctioned encampment Aug. 24.
The J Street site — one of two sites opened in the weeks since Grants Pass City Council approved four total sites earlier this month — is an open concrete and gravel lot half-covered in patches of dried grass. Advocates say the space endangers the roughly 90 people forced to live there under threat of civil and criminal penalties.
The Friday of Labor Day weekend, Aug. 30, Grants Pass anticipated high temperatures of 102 degrees, and up to 101 degrees on Aug. 31, according to the National Weather Service.
“My greatest concern is death,” Cassy Leach, Mobile Interactive Navigation Team, or MINT, cofounder, said of the weekend heat wave. “I try not to be dramatic, but —”
MINT provides medical care to homeless residents via a mobile unit and its new navigation center. The organization helps people move their belongings every week from one park to another — and now from one sanctioned site to another — as required by the city.
A new sanctioned site for Grants Pass homeless residents sits on concrete and gravel half-covered in dried grass. Local nonprofits are tasked with providing essential services, like water and shade.
Within a 24-hour period beginning Aug. 23, police moved residents onto the property, which lacked basic services, including shade, water or any method for cooking food. By Monday, the city closed the gate to the fenced-in site. Advocates say the fence, fashioned with an array of padlocks, makes homeless residents feel kettled inside.
Warren Hensman, Grants Pass police chief, told Street Roots people are “absolutely” allowed to come and go as they please, saying much of the fencing was already in place and is intended to delineate the space from vehicle traffic and neighboring businesses.
Hensman said Grants Pass police have not arrested anyone under the new ordinance at the time of publishing, but could not confirm if police cited anyone for public sleeping.
“I’m confident that there were probably some citations, behavior-related, because that’s an unfortunate norm at times when we deal with people in general,” Hensman said.
City Council scheduled an emergency meeting Aug. 28 to address advocates’ concerns about the lack of basic hygiene and humanitarian aid. City Council voted 8-1 on a motion to meet sanitation standards for restrooms, dog waste and cigarette disposal while allowing nonprofits MINT and United Community Action Network, or UCAN, to deliver water and shade to people living on site.
Leach said providing services mostly falls to those nonprofit organizations, but their resources are limited. The small teams are working to deliver tables, build makeshift shade canopies and distribute countless bottles of water donated by community members.
“I just don’t know why elected officials wouldn’t want to supply water to their community when they don’t have it,” Leach said. “I feel like they’re asking a lot of a small, grassroots nonprofit. That’s sometimes hard for us because we’re trying to be good partners, but we need grace and help sometimes, you know?”
The situation in Grants Pass highlights ongoing concerns many West Coast cities face when addressing the homelessness crisis through punitive actions. Namely, where can people go after they are told to leave a given area?
Like every city in Oregon, Grants Pass must comply with ORS 195.530, a state law stating local ordinances concerning homelessness must be “objectively reasonable.” Gov. Tina Kotek was speaker of the house when the Legislature passed the law in 2021, and she said the intent was to codify, in state law, the Martin v. Boise decision, which determined cities cannot punish homeless residents for sleeping in public when a city does not have sufficient shelter capacity.
Kotek’s office referred Street Roots to Oregon Housing and Community Services, or OHCS, the agency responsible for housing finances and poverty prevention in Oregon. OCHS was unable to provide comment at the time of publishing.
MINT, UCAN and community members raised the alarm after they said the new site impaired their work providing medical care to homeless residents. City Council gave MINT a key to get through a gate to provide care, but residents worry they may be inaccessible to emergency services if they need care. Some have already been hospitalized due to heat exposure, according to Leach.
“If anyone has a reason why an elderly, medically fragile person should move every four days, please enlighten me. But right now, I do not see the reason for that.”
— Vanessa Ogier, Grants Pass city councilor
However, service providers face another, less material roadblock. Aaron Cubic, Grants Pass city manager, said the city explicitly discourages the community from donating resources to the sanctioned sites, as a buildup of resources could lead to overcrowding in the area.
“We do not want donations at that site,” Cubic said. “That becomes a whole issue of itself.”
Cubic said there is no legal obligation for the city to provide more than a place for people to stay and cautioned the more sites, plans and services in place, the more staff and other city resources would be required to maintain them.
Dwight Faszer, Grants Pass city councilor, remained concerned the city would be on the hook to provide services in perpetuity if it voted to provide services in the short term.
“I am firm and unwavering about the city providing any more amenities to these sites,” Faszer, who cast the only vote against providing services, said.
In the City Council meeting, city councilors debated how often homeless residents should be required to move, ultimately voting by a narrow 5-4 margin to allow people to stay at either site for one week with a 72-hour notice to follow under threat of citation. The resolution, passed Aug. 7, initially required residents to move every 96 hours from the J Street site and every 24 hours from the A Street site, prior to the Aug. 28 emergency meeting.
Vanessa Ogier, Grants Pass city councilor, said City Council’s goals necessarily pivoted from its previous efforts to move homeless residents out of the parks to providing a place for people to rest.
“I really encourage this council to look to the future, have an ounce of vision and ask what the next goal is after that,” Ogier said. “Is it to get these people back into housing, or is it to be cruel? Because largely what is left on these public sites are people that cannot walk. They are elderly people with walkers and wheelchairs, and we’re telling them that they have to move every four days? I do not understand why.
“If anyone has a reason why an elderly, medically fragile person should move every four days, please enlighten me. But right now, I do not see the reason for that.”
The city is still under federal injunction requiring it to provide 24-hour notice to people with sleeping materials in parks and to not enforce park rules in the evening hours at certain times of the year. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is expected to dismiss the injunction in the coming weeks, meaning police will cite and remove homeless residents without notice if found sleeping in areas outside of the sanctioned sites.
Background
The titular victorious city in Grants Pass v. Johnson unanimously passed a new ordinance regulating sleeping on public property weeks after the Supreme Court issued its decision on June 28. The Supreme Court ruled it is constitutional to punish homeless residents who have no other option, overturning a lower court injunction governing homelessness policy in western states since 2018.
Grants Pass’ previous ordinance made being in public while homeless punishable by civil and criminal penalties, despite homeless residents having no other option within the city limits.
The new ordinance upholds restrictions on where people can sleep, but reduces fines from the previous amount of $295 for those found in violation to a fine of up to $50, and requires courts to reduce penalties for residents if they show they engaged with service providers between the time of receiving a citation and their hearing.
City Council also simultaneously passed the resolution identifying four sites where homeless residents are allowed to stay, including the J Street water treatment facility, the A Street location next to City Hall, a small corner of Riverside Park and a small plot near the Rogue River. It is also expected to eventually approve a fifth site — a parcel of land adjacent to the police station.
Hensman voiced concerns in the Aug. 7 meeting about placing people in direct contact with the officers responsible for arresting them.
“We write a lot of tickets, a lot of citations, and we take a lot of people to jail,” Hensman said. “We arrest people, we cite people, and we’re not always the best of friends, and then we can have a population of people that are going to be right beside the police department that we may have arrested the night before.”
The ordinance defines camping as maintaining “a campsite in a single location of City Property for more than 24 hours” and defines a campsite as “a location upon City Property where camping materials are placed.” Further, the ordinance includes somewhat vague language to describe “camping materials” as tents, tarps and personal property that appear to be arranged or used as camping accommodations — leaving that determination up to police officers.
The updated ordinance also gives police broad discretion to dispose of materials deemed to have “no apparent utility or monetary value,” and maintains penalties for criminal trespassing if found in violation of park rules.
Hensman said the workload and staffing required to enforce the ordinance is also a top concern for the police department, particularly as Oregon drug laws change Sept. 1. Those concerns support readily available data showing arresting people does not address the homelessness crisis and rather exacerbates the issue.
“September 1, it’s going to be a crime again to be in possession of a controlled substance, and you can be guaranteed, people will be arrested for possession of a controlled substance,” Hensman said.
Public space race
Research shows people who are incarcerated on one occasion experience homelessness at seven times the rate of the general public and 13 times when incarcerated more than once. Once homeless, people are also more likely to be arrested, as police often arrest homeless residents for unavoidable, low-level offenses — like sleeping in public spaces, panhandling or public urination, according to research by the Prison Policy Initiative.
In the Aug. 7 council meeting, a local resident inadvertently highlighted the ineffectiveness of banning public sleeping and punishing residents in the absence of sufficient shelter, saying he was concerned moving people from the city center would only push them into other neighborhoods. The concern comes as western states perpetuate a public space race to force homeless residents outside of one border, across another, and subsequently into another — to a yet-undetermined end.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision, California Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered state agencies to sweep homeless encampments on state property and partner with local jurisdictions to remove other encampments. Within a week of the order, San Francisco Mayor London Breed took immediate action, issuing an executive order Aug. 1 mandating service providers to attempt to relocate homeless residents before offering any city shelter or service. As part of its strategy, San Francisco provides bus tickets out of the city — a tactic Grants Pass attempted in previous years.
Grants Pass Mayor Sara Bristol told Street Roots she is concerned about homeless Californians moving to Oregon as its southern neighbor becomes more aggressive about moving people out of its cities. She added California is home to nearly one-third of the nation’s homeless population and Oregon already has the second-highest rate of homelessness, per capita, in the nation.
“We’ve already been grappling with how to manage our outsized homeless population, and we are not equipped to manage a wave of newcomers,” Bristol said. “It has been suggested to me many times that we should buy homeless people a bus ticket out of Grants Pass. That’s not a very neighborly attitude, is it? To make our problem someone else’s problem.”
Bristol said Grants Pass needs to address the lack of affordable housing in the city, as short-term measures like temporary shelters will not resolve residents’ homelessness. Bristol was sworn into office in 2021 after the city’s lawsuit in the 9th Circuit was already in motion. The city has no low-barrier overnight shelter available for homeless residents — a key issue in the lawsuit that made its way to the Supreme Court. For years the only shelter was the Gospel Rescue Mission — a shelter run by a religious organization, requiring participants to enter a high-barrier program.
“I’m concerned that, as a nation, we have become fixated on shuffling people around while failing to address the social and economic forces that are causing greater numbers of people to become homeless and to be stuck in homelessness,” Bristol said.
Leach said the region is slowly beginning to fund options for people, noting the Mid Rogue Foundation and other organizations are working to bring more affordable housing online.
“Ultimately, it’s a steep curve,” Leach said, citing concerning statistics for the region’s elderly population, who are vulnerable to homelessness in the coming years.
Compared to 2022, estimates suggest Josephine County will be home to nearly 5,400 more people over the age of 65 by 2030 and roughly 12,000 by 2050, according to the State of Oregon’s Legislative Policy and Research Office.
Leach said organizations like Adapt Integrated Health Care are building more supportive housing for those with substance use disorders. That is thanks to funding from Measure 110, which decriminalized drugs and used cannabis tax dollars to fund an array of addiction treatment services. Kotek signed HB 4002 on April 1, re-criminalizing drugs beginning Sept. 1. Funding for treatment services will continue under the new bill.
Danger, danger
Since City Council passed the new sleeping ordinance, little has changed from how Grants Pass previously operated. Helen Cruz, a formerly homeless resident who provides essentials to homeless Grants Pass residents, said the water is still shut off in parks and the restrooms are closed.
The public remains angry about homelessness, as evidenced by the tenor of recent council sessions. Homeless residents continue to live under threat from local police and community members who volunteer to surveil people living in parks.
Other community members, some part of a group dubbed “Parkwatch,” continue harassing homeless residents, posting photos and videos of their findings in a Facebook group. Some have volunteered to help the police, saying police do not have the resources they need to get people out of the parks.
“We will start to identify who is selling drugs,” one post said. “We will start to log their movements and descriptions. Who is driving, license plate numbers and schedule. We will have, and share this info with the police. September the 1st is nearing and we plan to be ready. When drugs are illegal again, we go on the offense. Cameras and phones ready in hand.”
Bristol said she is aware some residents are frustrated by some unwanted or dangerous behavior, including drug use increasing in city parks during the last four years. She said she believes police are doing their best to protect and serve the interests of all citizens, including the homeless population.
“At the same time, I do not condone harassment, threats or acts of violence,” she said.
Ogier acknowledged concerns from locals and city staff that opening temporary shelters could require significant city staffing and resources to manage and maintain the sites but said other solutions could alleviate that responsibility.
“I would just like to highlight for council that if there was a shelter in our community, there would be less people occupying these public spaces, and they, more than likely, would be opting for the use of a shelter, reducing the burden on the city to manage those people,” Ogier said.
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly investigative publication covering economic, environmental and social inequity. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
