A county judge in Oregon has blocked the city of Portland from enforcing its restrictions on homeless camping until a class-action lawsuit challenging the new rules is resolved.
The city was set to begin enforcing its new camping restrictions on Monday, with the goal of keeping homeless encampments off sidewalks, out of green spaces, and away from schools. But Multnomah County judge Rima Ghandour issued a restraining order on Thursday, putting the restrictions on hold until a class-action lawsuit filed by the Oregon Law Center is settled.
After oral arguments on Thursday, Ghandour wrote that the plaintiffs in the case “made a sufficient showing to warrant preservation of the status quo.”
In a statement following Ghandour’s ruling, Portland mayor Ted Wheeler wrote that the “status quo is not working” in the left-wing city, where squalid homeless camps, often surrounded by garbage and drug paraphernalia, have proliferated. A federally-required tally earlier this year found more than 4,500 people living outdoors in the Portland metro area.
“The City will abide by the Court’s preliminary order while continuing to fight in court for the City’s right to adopt reasonable regulations on unsanctioned camping,” Wheeler wrote. “The Court’s decision today makes the City’s work harder, but the City is going to continue this fight and we hope to get a better understanding of the Court’s reasoning during this litigation.”
The Oregon Law Center’s lawsuit, filed in late September, 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. People who violate the rules more than twice could face fines of up to $100 or up to 30 days in jail, according to the ordinance.
Prior to Ghandour’s ruling, Portland leaders had intended to start issuing warning to campers on Monday, according to the Oregonian newspaper.
City leaders approved the restrictions in part to comply with a state law that requires cities to make “objectively reasonable” rules about when and where people can sit and sleep in public. But lawyers for the Oregon Law Center say Portland’s new 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 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 says.