Dan DeYoung, a Josephine County Commissioner, on May 13 in southern Oregon.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
Dan DeYoung was warned that his new office as a commissioner in southern Oregon’s Josephine County came with a view he might not enjoy. The plaza outside, with its picnic tables and places for people in the city of Grants Pass to read books or play chess, was “wall to wall homeless,” Mr. DeYoung said.
He was told it was a problem without a solution.
“I said, ‘Really? I’ll bet you I can fix it,’ ” he recalled. Even before being elected to the commission in 2016, he had a history of using unsparing measures to clear streets in Grants Pass, the pretty spot on the Rogue River where he grew up. In an earlier term on city council, he had pushed an ordinance that banned panhandling, one of a series of measures passed by the city that sought to keep homeless people from occupying public spaces.
At the county commission office, he asked the facilities manager to turn on sprinklers. Then he asked for the picnic tables to be replaced with thorny plants. The people in the plaza protested that they lived there. Mr. DeYoung’s response: “Not anymore, you don’t.”
Today, yellow and red blossoms dot the rose bushes in the formerly open space. Mr. DeYoung would rather create an outdoor space for homeless people somewhere else – like a more remote area outside of town.
The Grants Pass approach to homelessness has put the city of 39,000 at the heart of a social and economic crisis confronting much of the western United States. The U.S. Supreme Court is now preparing to rule on a case that questions whether the town’s penalties for camping in public spaces amount to cruel and unusual punishment. Under the town’s ordinances, homeless people who did so were ticketed, fined or jailed.
The Grants Pass dispute is now the most significant homelessness case in decades, one that stands to define the rights of those without homes and reshape the legal landscape for authorities as they mediate between society’s most deeply impoverished and the taxpaying landowners who want to enjoy the parks and homes they pay for.
Last year, the U.S. counted a record 653,100 people experiencing homelessness, a rise of 12 per cent in a single year. Across the Pacific seaboard, tents dot parks, underpasses and industrial districts from San Francisco to small Oregon centres, like Grants Pass, where dozens have been pitched in the city’s Tussing Park.
One belongs to Amber Rockwell, her possessions arranged neatly on plastic shelving while strawberry plants grow outside in a small container. Ms. Rockwell has lived in Grants Pass for more than three decades, and first became homeless 15 years ago.
“They treat us like street trash,” she said. “They don’t want us out here. They don’t want to look at us.”
But she knows well the risks of leaving town. For nine months, Ms. Rockwell camped on a hill more than 10 kilometres outside of Grants Pass. At night, a cougar often prowled nearby. “I’d see her in the distance, her eyes glowing, stalking my camp,” she said.
“It’s safer in the parks.”
Amber Rockwell has lived in Grants Pass, Oregon, for 32 years and cycled through homelessness for roughly half that time. Photographed May 14.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
Whether homeless people can occupy parks – and whether cities can use legal tools to drive them away – has for years been a central legal question. In 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals barred cities from enforcing anti-camping ordinances if they did not have sufficient shelter space. Soon after, a suit was launched against Grants Pass that was ultimately appealed to the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments earlier this year and is expected to rule by the end of June.
If the court rules against Grants Pass, “that would spur communities across the country to get serious about addressing the dire lack of affordable housing,” said Jesse Rabinowitz, the director of campaigns and communication at the National Homelessness Law Centre in Washington, D.C.
But if Grants Pass prevails, the future could be very different. Last year, Donald Trump released a homelessness plan that promises, if he is elected president, to place some people in “mental institutions where they belong,” ban urban camping where possible and arrest those who do not comply.
Some states are already taking action. Florida has passed a law to ban homeless people from camping in parks or sleeping on sidewalks. A similar law in Kentucky effectively criminalizes homelessness, critics say.
The future of those laws depends in part on how the Supreme Court rules in the Grants Pass case.
“This has to do with those that cannot or will not utilize shelter and what we do to regulate those folks,” said Aaron Hisel, a lawyer with Capitol Legal Services, which represents the Oregon city. A former police officer, he added that “there just needs to be some stick” to prod homeless people into accepting help.
Brian Bouteller, executive director of the Grants Pass Gospel Rescue Mission, agreed. Allowing people to live in parks, he said, is harmful to them. Some, he argued, need to be saved from themselves.
The number of people served by the Gospel Rescue Mission has fallen by 40 per cent since a court-ordered injunction suspended some of the Grants Pass anti-camping ordinances. The mission, the only significant provider of shelter space in Grants Pass, imposes strict rules on participants, who must attend services, stop smoking, find employment (and agree to other religious provisions, like dressing and behaving “according to their birth gender”).
It’s all for a reason, Mr. Bouteller argued. “We want you to focus on getting out of homelessness,” he said. “I want you to not need this place.”
Grants Pass embodies many of the characteristics that have contributed to homelessness across the western U.S. Its population has nearly doubled in two decades, but housing supply has not kept pace. Residential vacancy sits at 2 per cent – and even the city’s mayor lives in a home owned by her parents. Nearly a third of renters in southern Oregon spend more than half their income on housing.
“Homelessness is a housing problem. Period,” said Julie Akins, senior director of housing at All Care Health, a health care provider in southern Oregon.
Since 2017, she has interviewed 600 homeless people across southern Oregon. Nearly three-quarters lost housing for economic reasons. “They’re economic refugees,” she said.
Among them is Deseree Lucero, 46, who broke a hip while giving birth to her son and never fully recovered. She moved from a rental home to an RV, and then to a van.
“Now I’m here, broken,” she said on a recent morning. She had just received a ticket banning her from a city park for 30 days. Even under the current injunction, such exclusion orders are used to keep people from camping in Grants Pass parks for more than a few days at a time. Armed citizens have mounted their own patrols.
Helen Cruz hands out lunches to homeless people in a park in Grant Pass, Oregon, on May 14.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
Helen Cruz, who recently found a home in Grants Pass after years of homelessness, travelled to Washington, D.C., for the Supreme Court hearing.
She doubts the case will change much.
“There’s not going to be any solution to this unless people have a safe place to stay – to be able to lay down and feel okay and not to be harassed every day,” she said.
In Grants Pass, there is little immediate prospect of that. Amid squabbles with the county, the city failed to secure affordable housing funding from the state. Efforts to find space for a shelter, or even an urban camping area, have to date yielded nothing.
Some people didn’t want such a facility near their home. Others opposed “helping people who are perceived as not helping themselves,” Grants Pass Mayor Sara Bristol said.
The rise in homelessness, she has come to think, represents a death of the American dream, and is part of a much broader set of social changes that have eroded opportunity and shared prosperity. “We don’t take care of each other anymore,” she said.
“The huge growth in homelessness that we’re seeing across the country is a reflection of the worst of all that,” she said. “But I can’t fix that.”