Small town, big issue

Oregon homelessness case before top court could reshape policy nationwide

GRANTS PASS, Ore. — It was moving day, again, for Brenda Daigneault.

Police officers in this small city about an hour’s drive north of the California border visited her tent in a local park. They came to order her to leave, she said, posting the same notice that every homeless person living in one of Grants Pass’ public spaces gets every 72 hours.

If she didn’t move in three days, she would get a $295 ticket — and perhaps see her belongings confiscated. Again.

But Daigneault couldn’t get a ride from her son, who is homeless too and whose truck wasn’t working. So, despite her chronic respiratory problems, she walked a mile from Tussing Park to the next closest park.

Daigneault, 62, is part of an endless choreography that law enforcement officers and the unhoused perform in Grants Pass — one that could soon reverberate far beyond Oregon.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case brought by unhoused residents here who say the city’s broad anti-camping rules violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Legal scholars and advocates on both sides of the case say the court’s decision could reshape homeless policy across the nation.

The saga began to take shape in 2018, when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that local governments could not make it a crime to sleep on a public street or sidewalk when, simultaneously, no homeless shelters were available. The court in 2022 went a step further and said Grants Pass could not prohibit simple self-protective measures for the homeless, like using blankets, or punish them by imposing civil fines that turn into criminal penalties when unpaid.

Grants Pass appealed, and the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in the case.

A host of states, cities and politicians have weighed in, arguing that the 9th Circuit’s ruling handicaps local governments’ ability to protect residents, keep public spaces clear and address homelessness. Many contend that the ruling is flawed because the unhoused are often resistant to intervention, or even homeless by choice.

And even though the Supreme Court will be reviewing Grants Pass’ anti-camping ordinance, San Francisco looms large in the case.

Mayor London Breed, backed by neighborhood and business groups, has urged the court to allow cities to cite residents and force them to move. Other current and former city officials, including former District Attorney Chesa Boudin, are backing the unhoused residents’ position. Both sides say the other’s position is not only untenable but lacks compassion.

Even outside entities have included San Francisco in their briefs to the court, holding it out as a bleak example of how street homelessness can ravage a city.

A separate lawsuit against San Francisco’s enforcement efforts is on hold, pending the Oregon ruling.

Regardless of what the court decides, it likely will do little to immediately improve life for those living on the street.

“We need a place in Grants Pass where unhoused people can go,” Grants Pass Mayor Sara Bristol, who hasn’t taken a position on the case but wants to create a low-barrier homeless shelter in town, told the Chronicle. “Because they’re going to exist, no matter what the Supreme Court decides.”

Lots of growth, little new housing

Earlier this month, police in Grants Pass recorded 100 tents in the city’s public spaces, the most ever, said officer Tim Artoff, a member of the team that patrols the parks.

Grants Pass’ population has doubled to about 40,000 people over the past two decades, but the city is still so intimate that service providers know just about all the homeless folks here. So do the cops who give them tickets. The mayor is married to the city editor of the local newspaper, and a leader of a group that wants to “take back our parks” has a son fighting drug addiction who occasionally sleeps in a park.

Despite the growth, the city — like many others across the West — has done little to build more affordable or multifamily housing.

“There’s a perfect storm that’s happened,” said Doug Walker, a retired residential homebuilder who serves on the city’s Housing Advisory Committee. “The city has had a strong cultural attitude that makes it hard to build. Sort of a ‘We don’t want to have that sort of thing here. They can live in Medford,’ ” he said, referring to the larger city 30 miles away.

Then-City Council President Lily Morgan said during a 2013 meeting on “community vagrancy”: “The point is to make it uncomfortable enough for (homeless people) in our city so they will want to move on down the road.”

The only shelter in town is the Gospel Rescue Mission, but it’s only 40% full. Exposing another layer of the national debate, many of the unhoused in Grants Pass bristle at the four pages of house rules they must agree to obey before being admitted. They include no smoking, drinking, pets, daytime sleeping or “socializing between members of the opposite sex except at approved Mission events.”

The Christian organization requires clients to “dress and behave according to their birth gender” and attend chapel services twice a day. The 9th Circuit court found the restrictions so onerous that it wrote off the shelter as a legitimate option for homeless residents.

On Wednesday, the City Council approved a specialuse permit for a navigation center serving unhoused residents. Organizers say it could be operating by May. It will also include tiny homes on pallets that could house 15 people.

But in other ways, political forces remain resistant to change. Last year, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek issued state of emergency orders with the hope of directing funding and other resources toward homelessness. But Josephine County, where Grants Pass is located, refused to apply for funding, even though the homeless rate there is triple the statewide figure. One commissioner called it “a political setup.”

As a result, Grants Pass, with a 1% rental vacancy rate, has few options for the unhoused. When the pandemic hit, many of those living on the margins were forced onto the street — like Daigneault, who has lived here since 1985, mostly working as an in-home caregiver.

She was housed until three years ago, when she said her landlord refused to address mold issues in her unit. She stopped paying rent and was evicted. She has a federal housing voucher, but hasn’t been able to find a place that will rent to her after looking for a year and a half.

“It’s waking up every day and seeing where I’m at,” Daigneault said in an interview April 9 in Tussing Park, her eyes filled with tears. “I’m just tired. I need to get in one place to nest and be good. You know, just be comfortable and happy like it used to be.”

In the tent next to Daigneault was 29-year-old Ashley Hanson. She grew up 2 miles from the park and played in it as a child. But she has been on the street for much of the past five years, also after being evicted. She said she had recently overcome colon cancer.

Hanson was also preparing to move. Her husband of eight years has a separate tent, “because we have so much stuff,” she said. He already had moved to Riverside Park, a mile away.

It was a similar scene at Riverside Park, where a different set of the unhoused were preparing to move.

“I thought maybe I’d get a place, but I can’t with all the fines and stuff that have been ordered on me,” said Mark Lyon, 64, who has lived in Grants Pass since he moved here with his parents in 1972. He worked in the lumber mills around the region until he got laid off roughly two decades ago, and he has been living on the streets on and off since then.

Lyon doesn’t want to leave Grants Pass because “my mom and dad are buried here. And I

felt like I had a right to be here.” He said homeless advocates are trying to find him a place to live, but that the task is next to impossible. “My credit is shot,” he said.

Daigneault, Hanson, Lyon and many others here have something in common, aside from sleeping in the parks: They’ve been trying to secure stable housing — for years, in some cases. Their efforts challenge perhaps the most pervasive argument made by the cities and politicians urging the Supreme Court to side with Grants Pass: that unhoused residents could go inside, but choose not to.

The 9th Circuit rejected similar arguments, writing, As “long as there is no option of sleeping indoors, the government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors, on public property, on the false premise they had a choice in the matter.”

But the Supreme Court might be compelled by cities’ testimonies that some unhoused residents refuse services, including offers of shelter.

Glenn Miller, a 52-year-old former forklift operator who has been on the streets for much of the past six years, is one of those who say they can’t find a place to live inside. He has been through detox programs, but said he hasn’t been able to find a sober living facility to stay clean.

“I’m not leaving,” Miller said on April 10 in Riverside Park, as he held the orange “public notice of illegal camping” that was posted that day. “It is about making a paper trail for them to say, ‘Hey, look, we’re doing our best to get them out’ ” of the parks.

“No, they’re not,” he said. “They’re doing their best to keep us right where we’re at.”

Neighbors are fed up

The people living in neighborhoods around the parks are frustrated, too.

Brock Spurgeon, 58, is a tile setter who was born in Petaluma and is married to his childhood sweetheart, Stacy, a Novato native. Tall, with a gray ponytail and muscular arms, Spurgeon recalled working at a beautiful home on 5 acres in Sonoma County, and realizing he wanted that kind of place for himself.

“One day it just hit me. If we moved, we could have a big place like this,” Spurgeon said.

The couple bought a 4,600square-foot home on 5 acres in Merlin, eight miles from Grants Pass. After their two children grew up, they downsized to a smaller house in Grants Pass, near Riverside Park.

A few years ago, though, Spurgeon found “the problems we had left in the Bay Area had followed us here.” Unhoused people had begun camping in the parks. Some left trash and drug paraphernalia.

Spurgeon and others formed Park Watch Grants Pass. Today, the group has 273 members. Many were behind an unsuccessful effort to recall Bristol, the Grants Pass mayor, last year.

Spurgeon walks through the parks filming drug debris and trash piles. He posts the videos on social media, similar to several people in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, and shares them with the police. More recently, members of the group have begun holding signs saying, “Parks are for Kids” and “Drug Free Parks” at busy intersections.

Bristol finds the residents’ activism unproductive. “The solution is to provide another place for the homeless people to go,” she said. “So just complaining about the situation in the parks isn’t particularly helpful. What we need to do is work on the solution.”

Amid the tension, two teenagers walked through parks last month and whacked homeless people’s tents with tree branches. One homeless woman was injured when she was hit in the face. Grants Pass police arrested an 18-year-old man and said they found no connection with the park watch group.

“Some people say we’re vigilantes,” Spurgeon said. “I’m not anti-homeless. I’m anti-drugs.”

Research has shown that two-thirds of the homeless population does not have problems with drugs or alcohol, but for Spurgeon this issue is deeply personal. Spurgeon said his father wrestled with drug addiction until he died at 48. His brother died at 49 six years ago, his body found in a creek in Medford after he had been reported missing from a homeless encampment 200 yards upstream.

One of the people who sometimes sleeps in Grants Pass parks is his son, J.D.

“The hardest thing in my life is just thinking about him,” Spurgeon said. “And every night I go to bed, I hold my breath a little bit hoping he’s gonna make it and I’ll see him again.”

While Spurgeon and his wife want to keep an eye on J.D., who is fighting an addiction to fentanyl and methamphetamine, they say he can’t live inside their home anymore because he is too disruptive. They allow him to pitch a tent on the hard gravel space outside their garage.

“It’s not nearly as comfortable,” J.D said, “but my dad’s not up my ass as much.”

Another member of Spurgeon’s group, Del Aldridge, said, “I want to see a low-barrier campsite somewhere where someone (who is homeless) can go,” as he held signs that read “Drug Free Parks” and “Parks Are For Kids” at an intersection in Grants Pass.

He has lived in the city for 35 years and said he wants to be able to take his grandson to local parks without seeing people use drugs there. He would be open to a shelter being created in his neighborhood, unlike many others in Grants Pass. “If there’s a place for (the unhoused) to go, then parks should be banned. If there isn’t, then that’s on the city,” he said.

Spurgeon and Aldridge’s complaints are echoed by politicians and resident groups in other cities, in briefs urging the court to allow ramped-up enforcement.

“In many parts of the City, it is impossible to walk down the sidewalk or enter buildings because of homeless encampments — collections of tents and other personal belongings where homeless people congregate to live and sleep,” wrote the nonprofit group Neighbors for a Better San Francisco. “Encampments are frequently sites of drug use and violence, endangering both passersby and homeless people themselves.”

A constant shuffle

“We need a place in Grants Pass where unhoused people can go. Because they’re going to exist, no matter what the Supreme Court decides.”

Sara Bristol, mayor of Grants Pass, Ore.

For Artoff, the Grants Pass police officer, visiting homeless camps next to pickleball courts and playgrounds is a routine, and he often encounters familiar faces.

“You’re killing me, Shana,” Artoff, who grew up in a small town a few miles away, told a woman as he stood outside her tent April 11 in Fruitdale Park, a leashed dog barking loudly nearby. “You’ve got to keep this dog quiet. I got a call from a neighbor.”

“OK, OK,” came the response.

Artoff, 46, has been assigned to the police team dealing with the homeless for five years. Every Wednesday or Thursday, officers distribute the orange “illegal camping” notices. While people have 72 hours to leave, Artoff said officers don’t check for compliance until Monday mornings. “So really they have four or five days to move,” he said. He figures he issues about 100 citations a month — and far more warnings.

Stocky, with close-cropped blond hair and colorful tattoos covering his forearms, Artoff wove among the tents and exchanged small talk, petted the dogs and traded tidbits of information. He checked to see if the campers’ possessions fit inside an 8-by-8-foot square and that they had left 6 feet between tents.

“Your tent stakes are in the ground. You’re not supposed to have the stakes in the ground,” he told one woman.

“Sorry, sorry,” she said, hurrying out of her tent.

“I’m not gonna cite you now,”

Artoff said. “Can we fix it? Oh, and that girl you know? She got out of jail.”

The woman nodded. “I’m stern,” Artoff said as he walked through the park. “And you can talk to a lot of people out here that will say, ‘Artoff’s an asshole,’ or whatever. But for most people that I feel are honestly giving a good effort, I appreciate the effort.”

He sees the same faces rotating from one park to another. Recently, he saw a young woman in Morrison Park. The day before, he’d cited her for fentanyl possession in Baker Park. When someone gets kicked out of a park for 30 days, he said, he’ll see them pitch their tent in another. If they get tossed from there, they’ll move to a third, and so on.

“By the time they get trespassed (kicked out of) the fourth one, they can now go back to the first one because their 30 days are up there,” Artoff said. “So it’s just a lot of that.”

Perhaps if the Supreme Court sides with the city, he said, Grants Pass could toughen its rules, upping park suspension from a month to a year.

‘We are pretending that homelessness doesn’t exist’

Cassy Leach also makes regular rounds through the parks.

She is co-founder of MINT, for Mobile Integrative Navigation Team. A nurse who grew up in Grants Pass, she later worked on medical and relief teams in Haiti and Africa. After returning to her hometown, she began to interact with the homeless while trying to get them vaccinated in the early days of the pandemic.

What she found in the city’s parks, she said, were people living in conditions reminiscent of developing parts of the world.

In February 2022, she and another volunteer started distributing vaccines, dog food and water to the campers.

Now, 14 agencies visit the parks weekly to provide medical outreach, hot meals, clothing and about five days’ worth of groceries to 80 to 100 people. MINT has 10 volunteers, half of them medical professionals, who do outreach in the parks every day.

The annual point-in-time count of the city’s unhoused population recorded 600 people. Leach estimates it’s more like 1,000.

“A quarter of them are lost in addiction, like, you know, truly lost,” she said.

On a recent Thursday, she glided through dozens of people who had come to Riverside Park to pick up a box of groceries or meet a caseworker offering a connection to housing or health services.

“Hey, are you still in your RV?” Leach asked an older woman.

The woman replied that the vehicle was in Selma, 21 miles away.

“We go out there on Wednesdays,” Leach offered. “We can get you a ride there at least.”

“Somebody stole my dog yesterday,” the woman said.

“Was it the one-armed dog?” Leach said.

“Yup.”

Leach doesn’t expect much to change for the people she serves after Monday’s Supreme Court arguments and

a likely summer decision by the justices.

“We are pretending that homelessness doesn’t exist in rural America,” she said. “I think that we’ve always just assumed it’s a big-city problem, but it’s not. Grants Pass is a tiny town that’s really expensive to live in, and homelessness is going to happen.”

Photos by Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle A community service officer clears a tent from Riverside Park in Grants Pass, Ore., after the tent’s owner was arrested. The small city is at the center of a pivotal case on homelessness policies that is about to be taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Brenda Daigneault lies in her tent in Tussing Park in Grants Pass. “It’s waking up every day and seeing where I’m at,” Daigneault said. “I’m just tired.”

Photos by Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle Ashley Hanson, 29, sits in her tent in Tussing Park in Grants Pass, Ore. She has been on the street for much of the past five years after an eviction.

At the Gospel Rescue Mission, the lone homeless shelter in Grants Pass, Kemario Adams exercises as Paul Allyn looks on. The shelter requires its clients to obey a long list of house rules.

Brock Spurgeon gets a thumbs-up as he holds up signs at a busy street corner to protest the homeless tents and trash in Grants Pass parks.

During his daily rounds of homeless encampments, police officer Tim Artoff checks on Cat and her dog, Sugar Mama, in Morrison Park.

Photos by Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle Right: Spurgeon uses fentanyl in a tent on his parents’ property in Grants Pass. At other times he sleeps in a city park.

Above: Grants Pass resident J.D. Spurgeon, who battles drug addiction, gets emotional as he thinks about his sick girlfriend.

Spurgeon eats in his parents’ kitchen near his father, Brock Spurgeon. “The hardest thing in my life is just thinking about him,” Brock Spurgeon said.

Bryan Huntley, 11, sits outside his tent in Riverside Park in Grants Pass after getting in a fight with one of his sisters.

Photos by Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle People stroll through downtown Grants Pass, Ore. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case brought by unhoused residents here against the city’s anti-camping rules.