It’s been less than a week since the city behind last year’s landmark Supreme Court ruling on camping bans stopped allowing unsheltered people to camp during the day, and now Grants Pass, Oregon faces a lawsuit alleging its new camping policies discriminate against people with disabilities.
“Sweeping someone or forcing someone to relocate if they are living outside does not stop them from being homeless—it just disrupts their access to services and further destabilizes them,” said Allison Nasson, legal fellow for Oregon Law Center and an attorney representing the unsheltered plaintiffs. “For people who are older, ill or disabled, forced relocation can exacerbate existing health conditions, so for all those reasons, making it so that people who have been forced to live outside have no place where they can safely, legally rest and exist with their belongings in a city is really harmful and dangerous.”
On Thursday, five unsheltered residents and Disability Rights Oregon sued Grants Pass in Josephine County Circuit Court, claiming the city’s camping ban, which leaves unsheltered people without a place to rest during the day and requires people to move each morning with their belongings, targets people with disabilities.
“That means that before dawn you need to get up, break down your campsite and pack up all your gear,” said Tom Stenson, deputy legal director for Disability Rights Oregon and an attorney for the plaintiffs. “Then you need to carry your gear around for 10 hours, which is hard for a person who is healthy and doesn’t have any disabilities, but if you’re a person with significant physical disabilities carrying 50 pounds of gear around, it is pretty challenging.”
Three of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit use a wheelchair or cane, court records show, and Stenson said they have trouble carrying much weight.
“That means they’re functionally excluded from the only place where it’s theoretically legal for them to be,” Stenson said.
Lawsuit claims Grants Pass’ new camping rules violate Oregon’s law requiring local camping bans set “reasonable” restrictions
Grants Pass City Manager Aaron Cubic didn’t respond to a message seeking comment on Thursday.
In response to an interview request, Mayor Clint Scherf said Grants Pass hadn’t been served the lawsuit and the city would provide a statement “as soon as we are properly informed” about it. Streetlight emailed Scherf a link to the complaint, and he declined commenting again until the city has consulted with legal counsel.
Mark Bartholomew, interim city attorney, advised the council earlier this month not to approve the camping ban changes until he’d had a chance to review them. The updates were initially supposed to go into effect three days after the city council approved them, but Grants Pass staff postponed making the changes for about two weeks while studying potential liability from enforcing the rules and if they comply with a state law restricting local camping bans.
Bartholomew didn’t respond to an interview request on Thursday.
The lawsuit, which also alleges the camping policies violate the state law setting limits on camping bans, asks the court to block the city from enforcing its camping ban.
“The people are in a pretty dire circumstance because of all these factors coming together,” Stenson said. “It’s much colder, it’s much wetter, conditions have been bad for a long time, and now they can’t even stay in the places where conditions were pretty bad, so they’re just scattered to the winds.”
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Service providers have said many of the people using the campsites are older adults or have disabilities.
“There are plenty of housing resources for people with substance use and mental health (issues),” said Cassy Leach, executive director of homeless service provider MINT, short for Mobile Integrative Navigation Team. “But no one’s really addressing our aging population, the generalized poverty they’re facing and (that they’re) being forced out of their homes. Really, the elderly and disabled need to have a place, space and advocates, as well.”
The city’s lone campsite isn’t accessible to people who use wheelchairs or canes, lawsuit says
Last June, the Supreme Court gave the green light to camping bans in Grants Pass v. Johnson. Two months later, the Grants Pass City Council restricted camping to two city-owned properties. The idea was to push unsheltered residents out of the city’s parks as soon as possible, but after voters elected a new mayor and four new councilors to take office in January, the incoming leadership approved scaling back the campsite program and other housing initiatives in a meeting held with 24 hours’ notice.
Before the campsite program changes this month, people staying at the city’s camps had to move each week. Unsheltered people with disabilities said they received unlawful camping citations despite being unable to move on their own. Dr. Bruce Murray, a community physician and former chief medical officer for MINT, wrote about 25 doctor’s letters for medically fragile people and people with disabilities that said moving would put their health at risk.
“This is something that’s been concerning to every physician and nurse that we work with,” Murray said. “We just feel that they were harming people, and particularly the elderly and disabled, which are the people who take the bulk of our time, work and love.”
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According to the lawsuit, the Seventh Street campsite is inaccessible to people who use mobility aids like wheelchairs, walkers or canes because it’s covered in gravel, making the ground uneven and unstable. The complaint said one of the plaintiffs in the case uses a cane, but after someone stole it, he had trouble getting around the Seventh Street lot and fell multiple times into the gravel lot.
Stenson said the gravel surface has forced people who use mobility aids to be strategic and cautious while moving through the lot.
“A lot of our clients have been kind of stranded in their tents once they get to them because it’s so hard to move around that they can only do the absolute minimal amount of movement,” he said. “They may need someone to help them move around, push their wheelchair or hold their arm.”
Older people are the fastest-growing group of adults experiencing homelessness, but most communities have a scarcity of shelter and housing programs tailored to their needs.
“The homeless population is increasingly aging,” Nasson said, “and so it’s really important to provide stable surfaces so that people can navigate spaces without the risk of falling and injuring themselves.”
Grants Pass’ remaining campsite is underused, service providers say
Last Tuesday, Grants Pass stopped allowing people to camp during the day at its campsite on Seventh Street, and on Friday at midnight, the city shut down its campsite on J Street.
Leach said it was hard to know the full impact of the changes because since the campsite shut down, MINT’s warming shelter has been open. The warming center, which is open on nights when temperatures drop below freezing, was available from Friday to Wednesday night.
“This is the first (night) where we’re not going to be open again,” Leach said on Thursday. “That’s at least 49 people that were staying at our facility that I’m not sure where they’re going to go.”
Very few people have been camping at the Seventh Street camp, Leach said. Service providers predicted requiring people to move with all their stuff every morning would be not only challenging but a disruption to gaining housing stability.
“I don’t think that’s going well,” Murray said of the policy on Thursday. “Within the last couple days, I went over there and there were only a couple tents because it’s an unreasonable expectation when there’s nowhere for them to go during the daytime.”
Unsheltered residents and homeless service providers have asked repeatedly where people can go during the day under the new camping ban rules. Grants Pass doesn’t have a low-barrier shelter, and the lawsuit said several of its plaintiffs couldn’t stay at the city’s main homeless shelter, Gospel Rescue Mission, because of their disabilities.
Service providers have wondered if the purpose behind the camping rules is to pressure unsheltered people to leave Grants Pass.
“I don’t think people realize how hard it is to leave Grants Pass,” Leach said.
She said Greyhound buses running through the city are headed to just a few destinations, adding that she had recently driven a family of three two hours away so they could catch a bus to Colorado, where MINT and another nonprofit found a shelter where they could stay.
“Finding something that would accommodate all three of them was just darn near impossible,” she said, in part because one family member has disabilities and because they’re part of the LGBTQ community. “They felt really unsafe in Southern Oregon so they reached their breaking point of trying to find somewhere where they were a little more accepting.”
Contact Streetlight editor Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@streetlightnews.org. Follow her reporting on Bluesky or by joining our newsletter.
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