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Judge Pauses Enforcement of Camping Rules in City at Center of Supreme Court Homelessness Ruling

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An Oregon judge on Monday ordered Grant’s Pass, the city at the heart of a major U.S. Supreme Court ruling on homeless encampments to pause enforcement of its camping rules for 14 days, in response to a lawsuit filed by advocates against the city, the AP reports. During those two weeks, city cannot cite, arrest or fine people for camping anywhere in the city, nor force a person to leave a campsite. The temporary freeze in enforcement was in response a lawsuit filed against the city last week by Disability Rights Oregon, which accused the city of discriminating against people with disabilities and violating a state law requiring cities’ camping regulations to be “objectively reasonable.” Grants Pass — a small city of about 40,000 people located along the Rogue River in the mountains of southern Oregon — has struggled for years to address a homelessness crisis, and encampments in its parks had become a flash point.


After last summer’s high court decision, Grants Pass banned camping on all city property, except where allowed by City Council. Councilors designated two areas where the town’s hundreds of homeless people would be allowed to stay, in a bid to move people out of the parks while still giving them places to sleep. Those sorts of bans also happened nationally as a result of last June’s Supreme Court Grant’s Pass ruling, which ushered in a new era of homeless policy by allowing cities across the country to ban sleeping outside and fine people for doing so, even when there aren’t enough shelter beds. It overturned a ruling from a California-based appeals court that found camping bans when shelter space is lacking amounted to cruel and unusual punishment under the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment. Officials from across the political spectrum filed briefs in the case, urging the justices to overturn lower court rulings they said hamstrung their ability to deal with encampments. Grants Pass has become emblematic of the national homelessness crisis gripping cities large and small — and the debate over how to deal with it. Last year, homelessness in the U.S. increased 18% in a dramatic rise driven mostly by a lack of affordable housing as well as devastating natural disasters and an increase in migrants in several parts of the country.

 

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