This story is part of a series examining housing and homelessness issues in Southern Oregon’s Josephine County.
Update April 7: On April 5, Rogue Retreat announced it would not open a shelter in Grants Pass, after the city flip-flopped several times on the matter. The Medford-based organization had overcome pushback from neighbors to gain a conditional-use permit from the Grants Pass City Council, and it struck a deal with the owners of the proposed site. Most recently, the nonprofit pulled back on the project due to additional insurance requirements the building's landlord is requiring for the shelter. Insurance costs have skyrocketed in the area since the wildfires in September. According to Heather Hassett, business development director at Rogue Retreat, signing the lease would have been a "fiscally irresponsible" move and too large of an investment for the 90-day temporary shelter, which was intended to open for the winter. Rogue Retreat is not pursuing another shelter location in Grants Pass at this time.
Update March 8: Grants Pass’ first low-barrier shelter has overcome community opposition and is back on track to open by April 1. In response to pushback from neighbors and their appeal to the Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals, the owners of the proposed shelter site initially pulled out of the deal with Medford-based Rogue Retreat in mid-February, after this article was published. But on March 5, Rogue Retreat announced it was able to alleviate the concerns of the owners, who ultimately decided to sign a lease with the organization to open the shelter.
More than half of the people experiencing homelessness in Oregon are unsheltered. At 64%, it’s the second highest percentage in the country, and the situation is especially dire in Southern Oregon’s Josephine County.
A statewide shelter study found that 91% of the 650 unhoused people accounted for in 2018 in Josephine County were also unsheltered. Since then, amid the county’s severe lack of affordable housing, the homeless population has more than doubled to 1,422, according to last year’s Point in Time Count. Meanwhile, the county has remained largely indifferent to the growing need, offering few resources and zero low-barrier shelters.
Some members of the county’s houseless population may soon find temporary relief in Grants Pass, the county’s largest town, with a population of just over 38,000.
On Jan. 20, Grants Pass approved a temporary use permit for its first low-barrier shelter. Rogue Retreat, a Medford-based nonprofit, will operate the shelter for 90 days following its planned opening on March 1.
While the nonprofit hopes to open a permanent year-round shelter following its closure after the 90 days are up, the timeline for doing so is uncertain as city councilors consider amending local zoning laws.
The short-lived shelter will be modeled after Rogue Retreat’s Kelly Shelter in Medford. Grants Pass’ facility, however, will be non-congregate and have 40 separate rooms for families, couples and individuals.
“We don’t simply believe in warehousing people,” said Heather Hassett, Rogue Retreat’s business development director. “We have case managers work with residents to address the barriers to their homelessness.”
Getting approval even for this temporary shelter was no simple task. A local zoning ordinance prohibits social service facilities from being in commercial districts, so Rogue Retreat applied for a temporary use permit from City Council. The site, near downtown Grants Pass, was previously home to the United Community Action Network (UCAN) and is surrounded by various medical and professional buildings.
Typically in this type of land use decision, public sentiment plays a small role. But local business owners and community members flooded the City Council with over 200 letters in opposition to the shelter and about 30 in support. As winter days ticked by, City Council delayed its decision by two weeks to allow for more public comments.
Many residents acknowledged the need for a shelter, but they didn’t want it near their businesses. Some worried about the shelter being placed across from Brighton Academy, a private school. Others cited past issues of loitering around the building.
The past tenant, UCAN, provided walk-in social services, while the new shelter will allow people to stay there all day. Staff will be on site at all hours, and the council is requiring extra measures to address the public’s concerns, such as a security service from 6 a.m. to midnight and fencing around the smoking area.
“I don’t think that those fears will be founded,” said Grants Pass’ new mayor, Sarah Bristol. “The neighbors’ concerns were kind of an apples-to-oranges situation with how the shelter is going to operate.”
In addition to fighting against the location of the shelter, some residents disagreed with the concept of shelters altogether.
Russell Leavitt, a local ophthalmologist, wrote in a letter, “Providing a homeless shelter to relieve the consequences of terrible personal choices is not empathy for the poor, unfortunate, helpless, innocent victims of society. It is enablement.”
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Opposition to the shelter was of no surprise to longtime locals like Doug Walker, who sits on the city’s housing advisory committee. He said the region, filled with retirees and tourists, has “developed a culture of less government, less social services and less effort put towards helping others in the realm of social services.”
Even though the new shelter is funded by Rogue Retreat, not taxpayers, the culture Walker described was on full display during public testimonies.
The few social service agencies in the region, like UCAN, are overwhelmed. With no accessible showers, unhoused people struggle to maintain basic hygiene, said Judy Ostroski, who has been homeless since 2008.
“I’ve even been to smaller towns than this that have more services,” Ostroski said. She is excited for the shelter to open and may work there as security.
Those in favor of the shelter saw it as an opportunity for the city to address a problem that has gained visibility as people experiencing homelessness have taken to living in Riverside Park, just south of downtown.
This “tent city” is the result of a recent lawsuit houseless residents brought against the city with the help of Oregon Law Center.
A federal judge ruled that the town’s use of violations and fines to punish people for sleeping outside is unconstitutional when there is nowhere else to rest. People now may have their tents set up in Grants Pass parks from 5 p.m. to 7:30 a.m.
Ed Johnson, director of litigation at the Oregon Law Center, said, “For a city the size of Grants Pass, it’s very unusual that they have not had any homeless shelter in recent years.”
Last winter, UCAN and Rogue Retreat operated the city’s first warming shelter out of an old Driver & Motor Vehicle Services office. Two hundred sixty people spent at least one night there, and another 261 people were turned away after the facility reached capacity.
Connor McDonnell, housing integrator at Oregon Housing & Community Services, said communities typically add homeless services facilities in “baby steps.”
“If you don’t have any shelter, start with a warming center,” he said. “Then the next step from that is a winter shelter, sometimes. And then from there, it’s a year-round shelter.”
McDonnell said that like Josephine County, much of rural Oregon experiences high rates of unsheltered homelessness. Some Central Oregon communities, however, are looking to turn seasonal warming centers into year-round shelters. Warming centers can be expensive, and it can be difficult to find volunteers and buildings to house them. Grants Pass has no warming center this year, and temperatures have consistently dropped below freezing.
The only housing option that resembles a shelter in the town is the Gospel Rescue Mission, which operates as 30-day transitional housing. It qualified as a homeless shelter years ago before it lost its federal funding and implemented a program where residents must work six-hour days for the mission and attend chapel twice a day. Residents are also separated by sex and can be evicted for minor rule violations such as smoking.
Brooke Amlin, who is homeless, said she wouldn’t live at the Gospel Rescue Mission because she would be separated from her partner, whom she is not married to. At the mission, intimate relationships on and off the property are permitted only for those who are legally married.
Ron Strom, chairperson at the mission, explained in an email, “Some homeless people are content with their lives on the street so are not willing to abide by the rules at the Mission, including no smoking, alcohol or drugs.”
A partner of the mission, St. Vincent de Paul, hopes to fill in service gaps by offering a mobile soup kitchen on weekdays in different areas across the city, such as the county jail and various churches.
“We try and keep (the food cart) as local as we can, so that (people) can walk or ride a bike, but it’s still very difficult,” said Don Fasching, supervisor of the mobile kitchen project.
For 18 years, St. Vincent de Paul ran a kitchen downtown. But in 2015, the city suggested they operate a mobile food program instead in an attempt to stop houseless people from gathering at a single location and dispersing downtown. The city helped raise $94,000 to start the project and has helped fund the cart ever since.
This move came during a time when the city vocally viewed homeless populations as a deterrence for visitors and took actions to push them out of town. These included circulating a list of people with “undesirable behavior” among homeless service providers and banning those people from receiving free meals or services.
As Street Roots reported last year, in a 2013 “City Council Community Roundtable on Vagrancy,” then-City Councilor Lily Morgan explained, “The point is to make it uncomfortable enough for them in our city so they will want to move on down the road.” Morgan later became a Josephine County commissioner and was recently elected to the Oregon House of Representatives.
In December 2015, to ensure populations didn’t congregate downtown as they had with the dining hall, the city passed an ordinance saying “social service facilities” could be located only in industrial or business park zones. Homeless shelters fall into the category of social service facilities. This is why, in late 2020, Rogue Retreat had to apply for a 90-day temporary use permit to operate the shelter in a commercial zone.
“We are researching options to create a full year-round shelter, at this location, or any that would be suitable and within budget,” Hassett said in an email on behalf of Rogue Retreat. “At the end of the 90 days the temporary shelter will close. Our case managers will be working diligently with our guests, for the 90 days we do have, to help them find more permanent solutions to prevent them from going back to the streets. We know that not everyone will be able to achieve this within 90 days, but with the support and encouragement of our staff we believe we can offer them hope of a better and brighter future.”
If Rogue Retreat wishes to operate the shelter in the same location once those 90 days are up, the city will have to amend the ordinance to allow social service facilities in commercial zones. Bristol, the mayor, said the council is looking into this option but doesn’t know whether it will amend the ordinance.
Rogue Retreat is interested in creating a year-round shelter, much like the Kelly Shelter it runs in nearby Medford. In that 4-year-old shelter, residents are given 180 days to rebuild their lives with case managers, who help with everything from finding mental health services and health care to searching for affordable housing and employment.
Chad Mccomas, executive director of Rogue Retreat, told the Grants Pass Daily Courier that 60% of people who enter Rogue Retreat facilities move on to more permanent housing.
“It is not a handout,” said Elise Johnson, who recently completed the program and moved into an affordable rental. “You have to work the program, and you have to help yourself here.”
Those opposed to the shelter in Grants Pass worried that opening such a facility would only draw more people experiencing homelessness to the area. Johnson said that at the Kelly Shelter, residents are largely from the Medford area.
“It is not really going to draw people in,” Johnson said. “It’s simply going to help the population that’s already there.”
George Mashlakjian, for instance, came to the shelter in the fall after his trailer and all of his belongings burned in the Almeda Fire. After staying in the shelter for a few months, Mashlakjian now lives in Hope Village, Rogue Retreat’s transitional tiny-home village. He described this as a “move upward” toward long-term housing.
Rogue Retreat will soon run a similar transitional housing project in Grants Pass, called Foundry Village. It could open as soon as this summer, with 17 tiny homes and a community building.
Vanessa Ogier, one of Grants Pass’ new city councilors, said it took the former council four months to approve the use of land for Foundry Village.
“I think that’s one really great example of not acting to scale, on the level of the crisis that we’re facing,” she said.
Ogier is part of a slate of candidates who ran and won on promises of bringing greater transparency to city government and prioritizing the housing crisis. The new council members and Mayor Bristol toured Rogue Retreat’s Medford facilities prior to taking office.
“We are so lucky to be able to just look through the curtains of Medford and see what’s going on over there,” Ogier said.
Maig Tinnin, a resident of Jackson County, where Medford is located, said Jackson County’s coordination of services and funding appears to be more structured than Josephine County’s.
Although, Tinnin emphasized that Jackson County is nowhere near perfect. There are 434 people on the waiting list for the Kelly Shelter, which can hold 64 people, and these numbers have only grown with the pandemic and recent wildfires that burned through the county.
“I just don’t think that the Rogue Retreat model works for everybody,” said Tinnin, who volunteers with Siskiyou Rising Tide, a group that advocates for climate justice and aids those affected by the fires.
“As the weather started to get more cold and we realized how many people were on the street, we just knew that there was going to be a need for another option for people,” Tinnin said.
That’s why the group helped create Judi’s Midnight Diner, a volunteer-run mobile warming station that offers late-night coffee, food and other resources for those in need. Judi’s sets up around Jackson County on the coldest nights and, since opening in December, has served 50 to 100 people a night. Many volunteers live in nearby Josephine County and would be willing to expand the diner to the Grants Pass area.
“There needs to be a wider variety of options for people that are houseless,” Tinnin said.
And while the new temporary shelter opening in Grants Pass is a triumph for Rogue Retreat, Hassett acknowledged that much more needs to be done to tackle the housing and homelessness issues in the region.
“We’re facing an economic and housing crisis in Southern Oregon and all over the West Coast,” Hassett said. “The shelter is not the full picture, but it’s a piece of the puzzle that we can help with.”