The city of Grants Pass took its tough-on-homelessness approach all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2024, and won. But despite the high court saying U.S. cities can punish homeless residents who lack shelter, Oregon cities — including Grants Pass — are bound by a state law requiring local homeless regulations to stay within reason.
Disability Rights Oregon, or DRO, finalized a settlement Aug. 15 after suing the city in January over its lack of accommodations for homeless people, particularly those with disabilities.
Grants Pass must provide Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant, low-barrier shelter for at least 150 people, and improve conditions at all designated sites.
The settlement also requires the city to provide potable water, handwashing stations, shade and portable restrooms. It will also provide a $60,000 grant to an undecided local service provider to deliver services to homeless residents.
The lawsuit was the second claim brought under a 2023 state law requiring city ordinances targeting homeless residents to be “objectively reasonable.”
What defines “objectively reasonable” is left to the courts, but the law created a pathway for legal action for anyone alleging a city’s laws are harmful.
Asked if the settlement demonstrates the state law is working as intended, Tom Stenson, DRO deputy legal director, said “yes — with some caution.”
“You can’t create an ordinance that’s so arduous that it punishes people for being homeless or being poor,” Stenson said.
Of the two lawsuits alleging state violations since the law was enacted, attorneys for homeless residents have forced the respective cities to change course after local judges issued injunctions halting enforcement of the local ordinances. The latest settlement reinforces the basic legal protections homeless Oregonians have despite ongoing threats from cities and the federal government.
The Oregon Law Center and DRO filed a class action lawsuit in January saying Grants Pass’ ordinances failed to consider the full scope of the circumstances, including “the impact of the law on persons experiencing homelessness.”
Grants Pass won its eponymous U.S. Supreme Court case, Grants Pass v. Johnson, in June 2024. The Supreme Court ruled it was legal to punish homeless people who have no other place to go. But the state law holds that homeless residents cannot be punished when shelter capacity and standards are inadequate. That law enshrined a 2018 lower court ruling, Martin v. Boise, which the Supreme Court also effectively overturned in its decision.
The latest DRO lawsuit alleged the ordinances also violated another state law, which says a place of public accommodation may not discriminate against a person with a disability, according to the complaint. That state law is intended to align with federal law under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Stenson said the lawsuit helped push the city to invest in some reasonable options for homeless Grants Pass residents — both through the final settlement and in how the city changed its practices during litigation.
“It’s obviously far from where we would like the policy to ultimately be, but we have moved them a lot from where they were in January,” Stenson said.
The city, for its part, quickly resumed its sweeps of homeless residents after the court dissolved the injunction. Mike Zacchino, Grants Pass information coordinator, told Street Roots Aug. 19 that police would resume posting 72-hour notices in local parks, forcing people into designated resting sites.
“The resting sites will remain open, but now the 96-hour length-of-stay restrictions can be enforced unless an ADA accommodation is necessary,” Zacchino said.
Homeless residents staying at the city’s designated sites are required to move from one site to another every 96 hours, with the exception of people with disabilities.
Zacchino declined to comment on Street Roots’ questions asking if the city sees an opportunity to address homelessness differently following the settlement, but said the city will comply with state and federal laws as required.
The settlement requires the city to improve conditions at the city’s resting sites, and it must maintain ADA compliant low-barrier shelter for at least 150 homeless individuals, managed either by the city or by a third party. The sites must be generally available to homeless residents, meaning beyond basic safety requirements, limitations cannot be imposed on residents as a condition of entry.
The city appears to prefer hiring a third party to run the sites. As the DRO litigation was ongoing, the City Council voted unanimously June 18 in favor of a “homeless solutions grant program,” which provides $1.2 million in grants to nonprofits that will manage resting sites and align with state laws regarding homelessness.
Grants Pass first opened two designated sites, providing virtually no resources, in August 2023. A local doctor told Street Roots at the time that people living at those sites were enduring “unconscionably bad circumstances,” and people with disabilities were at risk of serious injury.
Stenson said the city’s approach did not give homeless residents the opportunity to engage with service providers.
“A campsite where the primary third parties going into the campsite are police officers, is not the way to run things,” Stenson said.
Stenson said the state’s “objectively reasonable” statute was designed to give cities and counties flexibility in their policies in order to fit various local needs, including different economic structures, population sizes, weather and geographic conditions.
“At its heart, the reasonability standard preserves the notion that there still has to be a way to not have a home,” Stenson said. “You can’t punish people for just being poor or being homeless. If you have a reasonable ordinance and people violate it, you can hold them to task for violating it, but you can’t just punish them.”
The Grants Pass settlement is the second legal move forcing cities to adopt more humane local policies under the Oregon law. The city of Portland altered its ordinances in 2023 after a Multnomah County judge issued a temporary injunction barring the city from enforcing its sleeping ban. The Oregon Law Center — also a party to the latest DRO lawsuit — sued Portland under ORS 195.530, the state’s “objectively reasonable” standard.
Still, federal threats persist under President Donald Trump. A July 24 executive order outlined a “new approach focused on protecting public safety.”
Trump’s order shifts the national approach to homelessness, claiming without evidence that the federal government and states “have spent tens of billions of dollars on failed programs that address homelessness but not its root causes, leaving other citizens vulnerable to public safety threats.”
“Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order,” Trump’s order said.
Trump’s approach is an about-face from longstanding, albeit undersupported, strategies. Years of studies have influenced the Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, approach to Housing First, which is broadly understood to utilize the most effective tactics for addressing the root causes of homelessness. Now-deleted reports from federal agency websites outline evidence showing housing and services is a reliable means to ending homelessness.
Evidence Matters, a HUD quarterly publication through the Office of Policy Development and Research, published a research article in 2023 compiling evidence from multiple studies, showing Housing First offers greater long-term stability than treatment first models, and may be more cost effective.
“In addition to the consistent evidence that Housing First programs increase housing stability among people experiencing chronic homelessness, some evidence indicates that Housing First programs may also limit costs more effectively than do treatment first programs,” the document said.
But Trump continues to escalate attacks on homeless people, particularly in the nation’s capitol. By Aug. 15, Trump placed the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under federal control, blaming crime on homeless residents, without evidence, in a press conference. Federal agents, including the FBI, Secret Services, Department of Homeland Security and the Metropolitan Police Department patrolled homeless residents near the White House in D.C., according to the National Homelessness Law Center, or NHLC.
Jesse Rabinowitz, NHLC campaign and communications manager, told Street Roots on Aug. 20 that police continue evicting homeless D.C. residents, destroying tents and other property. That’s despite the familiar story, as in Grants Pass, in which the city maintains an insufficient number of shelter beds for people who have no other means.
Rabinowitz said Trump remains clear about his intention to broaden racist attacks on homeless people across the U.S. In D.C., 90% of homeless residents are Black, according to Rabinowitz.
“Donald Trump is trafficking in tried and true racist stereotypes about poor people, and about Black people,” Rabinowitz said. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he has started in D.C. He is using dehumanizing language about people experiencing homelessness to announce this authority and takeover of D.C. in a textbook fascist playbook, where you test your policies on groups with little public sympathy.
“Whether it’s homeless folks, whether it’s trans folks, whether it’s migrants, we have to be really clear that he’s not going to stop there and it’s not going to stop in DC.”
Rabinowitz reiterated that the lack of affordable housing is the main cause of homelessness, adding that an increasing number of people struggle to pay rent. Trump’s efforts do nothing to solve the issue, while allocating significant resources that could otherwise go to housing, he said.
“We don’t need more police,” Rabinowitz said. “We don’t need the military roaming our streets. We need resources. We need housing. We need after-school programs. We need healthcare. But Donald Trump is not actually interested in the solutions — again, he just wants to assert his power.”
Rabinowitz said Trump’s executive order mirrors messaging from the Cicero Institute — a think tank founded in 2016 by surveillance technology billionaire Joe Lonsdale. (The Cicero Institute filed amicus briefs on behalf of Grants Pass to the Supreme Court in 2024.)
Cicero and other wealthy people are out of touch with the daily experiences of homeless people, but use their power to criminalize poverty rather than help people, according to Rabinowitz.
“These billionaires, I think, are so out of touch that they actually think homelessness is a choice,” Rabinowitz said. “Because they’ve never struggled to pay rent, and they probably don’t know anybody who struggled to pay rent. But they don’t see what most people do in this country, which is, the rent is too damn high. They have misdiagnosed the cause of homelessness — which means their cure will never work.”
Advocates, including Stenson, agree that laws criminalizing homelessness do not help, while an adequate stock of affordable housing is a proven solution.
“We’ve been finding out for the last 40, 50, 100 years, that no matter what laws you pass, homelessness is a reality,” Stenson said. “It is not a product of an absence of laws. It’s a product of people not having a place to live.”
Moving forward, Oregon can demonstrate to other jurisdictions how to solve homelessness in the face of federal moves to dismantle basic protections, according to Stenson.
“We have a real possibility of showing the nation a way forward,” Stenson said. “What’s very likely to happen, with cities and other states trying to take a more punitive approach to homelessness, is that we already know that doesn’t work. We already know where that’s going to lead.”
Further, the settlement could outline a legal pathway for advocates in other Oregon cities seeking better outcomes for their homeless population.
“It’s entirely possible that there are communities, that there are organizations, or other attorneys who are going to look at this and say, ‘Hey, you know, this is important work, this is an important statute, and you know, I don’t like what’s going on in my community’,” Stenson said. “Some city and county governments are getting that message.”
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This article appears in August 27, 2025.