A group of homeless Portland residents are suing the far-left Oregon city claiming that new camping restrictions approved by city leaders earlier this year are illegal and are “impossible to understand or comply with.”
The class-action lawsuit was filed on Friday by the Oregon Law Center, according to the Oregonian newspaper, which first reported on it.
The lawsuit is challenging an ordinance approved by the Portland City Council in June that prohibits people from camping on public land during the day, and bans camps altogether in a variety of places, including on sidewalks, in parks, and near schools and construction sites. The council passed the ordinance as part of an effort to stem the growing number of homeless encampments — tents and wooden structures, often surrounded by garbage and drug paraphernalia — that have popped up around the city in recent years.
According to the ordinance, people who violate the rules more than twice could face fines of up to $100 or up to 30 days in jail. City leaders intend to begin enforcing the new rules this fall.
Oregon Law Center lawyers are requesting a restraining order to prevent the city from enforcing the restrictions until the legal challenge is resolved, according to media reports.
City leaders approved the restrictions in part to comply with a new state law that requires cities to make “objectively reasonable” rules about when and where people can sit and sleep in public. But Oregon Law Center lawyers argue that the city’s anti-camping rules violate the state law and the Oregon constitution because they subject people who are involuntarily homeless to unreasonable punishments. The lawsuit alleges that the camping restrictions in the city’s ordinance are “impossible to understand or comply with” because there are no maps indicating exactly where homeless people are allowed to be.
“The ordinance effectively bans universal, unavoidable human survival conduct … 24 hours a day on most or all public land in the city,” the lawsuit states, according to the Oregonian.
Attempts by National Review to reach the Oregon Law Center were unsuccessful. On its website, the non-profit says its mission is to “achieve justice for the low-income communities of Oregon by providing a full range of the highest quality civil legal services.”
In July, the Oregon Law Center sent the city a notice that it intended to sue.
“The thing that everyone agrees on is that we want fewer people to be forced outside and we want to end homelessness,” Ed Johnson, the center’s director of litigation, said in an Oregon Public Broadcasting report. “The question is how to do it. And the worst way to do it is through criminalization.”
Portland’s unsheltered homeless population has exploded in recent years. A federally-required tally earlier this year found more than 4,500 people living outdoors in the metro area. Portland has about 2,000 shelter beds, according to the city.
In addition to passing camping restrictions in June, city leaders also agreed to settle a lawsuit that claimed that the city was violating the rights of disabled residents by allowing homeless camps to clog sidewalks.
According to the agreement, the city must spend at least $20 million over the next five years on an “Impact Reduction Program” to address homeless camps in the city, and it must: prioritize removing homeless camps from sidewalks, establish a system for reporting problematic amps, and cease distributing tents and tarps to people living on the streets.