A group of Portlanders experiencing homelessness filed a class action lawsuit Friday in Multnomah County Circuit Court challenging the city’s homeless camping restrictions.
The lawsuit alleges the city’s camping restrictions violate current Oregon law and the state Constitution because they subject people who are involuntarily homeless to unreasonable punishments – including potential fines and jail time – for engaging in unavoidable activities such as sleeping and staying warm and dry.
The Portland City Council approved the time, place, manner restrictions in early June. The ordinance severely restricts where and how unhoused individuals can camp, particularly during the day.
The city has not started enforcing those rules, though leaders had said they planned to do so in the fall. Cody Bowman, a spokesperson for Mayor Ted Wheeler, declined to comment on the lawsuit but said the city still plans to start enforcement of the city ordinance in the coming weeks.
The city is “focused on education and outreach efforts with the intention of starting enforcement in the coming weeks,” he said. “The city will provide two weeks’ notice to the community before enforcement begins.”
Lawyers at the Oregon Law Center, which is representing the plaintiffs, asked the court to issue a temporary restraining order to prevent the city from enforcing the restrictions until the lawsuit is resolved.
“The ordinance subjects the approximately 10,000 Portlanders living outside every night to 30 days in jail for violating a law that is impossible to understand or comply with,” the lawsuit alleges.
The ordinance forbids camping in public parks and near schools and outlaws camping in any public place between the hours of 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. Once the city begins enforcing the rules, campers would receive two warnings if they break the regulations and a third violation could result in jail time or a fine.
The city’s rules “will exacerbate our city’s problems, not solve them,” said Ed Johnson, the Oregon Law Center’s litigation director, in a statement. “We all want to end homelessness. But this is not the way to do it.”
Johnson said the city instead needs more supportive housing, rent assistance, tenant protections and supports to stabilize unhoused Portlanders so they can better access housing and services.
“This ordinance is a huge step in the wrong direction,” he said. “It criminalizes our neighbors living outside and it wastes money that could be spent on proven solutions.”
Given that there is a lack of affordable housing and there are more unhoused Portlanders than there are shelter beds, the city’s rules are unreasonable, the lawsuit alleges. Service providers and people with lived experience have said it is often not safe for homeless individuals to sleep at night and instead many sleep during the day.
The ordinance, which lists myriad places people cannot camp, is difficult to navigate as there are not maps detailing where people can and cannot be, the lawsuit states.
“While it is being called, by the city, a daytime camping ban, the reality is that it is also a nighttime camping ban,” the lawsuit states. “The ordinance effectively bans universal, unavoidable human survival conduct … 24 hours a day on most or all public land in the city.”
The lawsuit also alleges the phrase “involuntarily homeless” is impossible to define and imprisoning people for living outside “will further disrupt their lives, making it more difficult for them to obtain work or housing and thereby increasing homelessness.”
Shannon Singleton, the former interim director of the Joint Office of Homeless Services, who wrote a declaration that was submitted with the lawsuit, said the murky definition of involuntary homelessness will “lead to racism, sexism and other discrimination” because it leaves it up to the enforcer to decide who is involuntarily homeless and who is not.
Nkegne Harmon Johnson, director of the Urban League of Portland, who also submitted a declaration, said the camping ban will “create a streets-to-prison pipeline for people experiencing homelessness.”
The city passed the ordinance in an effort to comply by July 1 with a state law that requires local governments to write “objectively reasonable” rules to allow people to sit, lie, sleep and keep warm and dry on public property in places like Portland that don’t have enough shelter beds to serve all unhoused individuals.
There are more than 6,000 people experiencing homelessness in Multnomah County, according to this year’s federally required tally of unhoused people. Of those, nearly 4,000 are unsheltered. The number of people experiencing homelessness in the county has jumped an alarming 57% since the 2019 count that occurred just before the start of the pandemic.
The county has around 2,000 shelter beds, according to county data.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated.
Nicole Hayden reports on homelessness for The Oregonian/OregonLive. She can be reached at nhayden@oregonian.com.