Keep Homeless Law in Place, and Focus on Housing

Over the last several years, much has been said about homelessness in Oregon — and everyone has an opinion. Lock them up, some say. Allow them the small dignity of sleeping on the street when they find themselves down on their luck, others say. In the midst of public dismay over visible camping on the streets of Portland, Bend and elsewhere, lawmakers in 2021 aimed to come up with a solution that would give local governments the ability to remove unsafe campsites, while also providing some type of protections for people living unsheltered.

Just a few years later, some in the state are talking about clawing that solution back.

That 2021 bill, then-legislator Tina Kotek’s HB 3115, was created at a time when the federal court ruling, Martin v. Boise, hung over the heads of governments all along the West Coast. Under that ruling, cities could not remove people from campsites unless that city had adequate shelter capacity for the removed people to go to. But this summer, a new Supreme Court ruling, based on a case out of Grants Pass, effectively did away with the mandates of Martin v. Boise, and made it ostensibly easier for cities to clear camps that are unsafe or involve lawless behavior — except, as we pointed out in an earlier opinion, that HB 3115 codified some of the same protections from Martin v. Boise into state law. Whatever the Supreme Court had decided, we opined, our own state law would serve to protect the vulnerable people with no other place to go, while also giving local governments some leeway to develop their own time, place and manner restrictions on things like clearing camps.

That’s exactly what Bend did, and, while clearing a camp is never an easy task, it’s the opinion of this editorial board that those time, place and manner restrictions have struck a fine balance. People are given notice when a site is deemed unsafe and will be cleared. Service providers and representatives from the City and Deschutes County are on hand to offer help finding shelter or meeting other needs. And while these processes locally have not resulted in a radical elimination of homelessness in our community, they’re striking that difficult balance.

So, why are some, including the League of Oregon Cities and some Democrats in the legislature, advocating for a repeal of the 2021 law that struck that balance? A pair of words in that bill appear to be at issue: the words “objectively reasonable.” The language of HB 3115 allows people to sue local governments if they are affected by local policies around camping that are not “objectively reasonable.” The bill’s language was kept intentionally vague so as to allow each local government to craft policies that fit its needs. The needs in Portland, which continues to experience some of the most visible effects of homelessness on the streets and neighborhoods of the city, are very different from the needs of Bend, where many of the most populated areas for unsheltered camping lie on public lands on the outskirts. The term “objectively reasonable” seems reasonable here for that reason.

Given that the incoming Trump administration has promised to develop federal policies around incarceration of people experiencing homelessness, it’s not shocking to learn that a more hardline stance is being proposed by some at the state level. But we tend to agree with homeless advocates who say that the current state law is working, and that every hour we spend on an issue like this is one less hour spent on building the housing the state needs to address its decades-long period of under-building that got us in the housing crisis we see today.

This article appears in Source Weekly December 19, 2024.