Over the summer, Portland passed a new camping ban was designed specifically to pass muster with the courts. As we’ve discussed before, west coast cites are stuck with a 9th circuit decision (Boise) which made it unconstitutional for them to remove homeless campers from the streets unless they had a shelter bed to offer them. But Portland’s ban was only in effect from 8am to 8pm. In other words, you could still pitch a tent on the sidewalk in the evening if you had nowhere else to go but you couldn’t leave the ten up all day.

Even once the law was passed, Portland chose not to enforce it. Instead the mayor announced a “summer of education.” Back in July when I wrote about this plan I was pretty skeptical.

The courts have already said you can’t prevent camping overnight unless you can offer people a sanctioned place to sleep. Portland has adopted this 8am-8pm ban as a way to get around that ruling (the Boise decision). But the moment they start enforcing this someone will sue and a judge will decide that expecting indigent drug addicts to pack up their tents during the day and pitch them again at night is too much to ask. My guess is the city will use this new law sparingly in hopes they aren’t sued but long term this either won’t be enforced or it won’t survive.

Here we are three months later and, as I predicted, the city is being sued.

Even though the city has yet to launch enforcement of the ordinance, word of the ban has reached the streets.

Clyde, who is homeless in Old Town, now moves his tent every day. Joshua, a Street Roots vendor, carries his bedding and hides.

“I try to find somewhere out of the way that I’m not going to get rained on or kicked or maced,” Joshua said.

Late last week, a group of homeless people filed a class action lawsuit against the city’s camping ban, alleging the restrictions violate the Oregon Constitution and the penalties — which can include jail time and a $100 fine after three warnings — are unreasonable, since homelessness is unavoidable for thousands of people while Portland lacks adequate shelter capacity.

“I am not even a second-class citizen … I’m a third-class punching bag,” said Joshua.

The lawyers behind the lawsuit are seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent enforcement of the ban which, at this point, has not been enforced anywhere in the city yet.

What’s interesting about this story is that although the ban isn’t operational (and may never be) it seems to be working. This KGW story opens with an interview with a Portland resident who recently noticed she wasn’t seeing as many tents on the streets as usual. So it seems just the promise that the ban was coming was enough to improve things and also enough for homeless activists to want to shut it down permanently.

There’s a woman interviewed in this story below who runs a non-profit called PDX Saints Love. She tells KGW, “We’re seeing a lot of reactionary ordinances come into place and we want everyone to stop and pause and take time to figure out the complexities and the nuances behind this ordinance and how does it affect people rather than, ‘We don’t want to see homelessness anymore, let’s make it go away.'”

How many years has Portland been dealing with this problem? Now the city tries to do something and her response is to “stop and pause” to figure out the complexities?

The situation isn’t really that complex. The city has a homeless problem, a drug problem and a crime problem. All of those problems have been getting worse so long as the city has turned a blind eye to them. I came across this letter in the Portland Press Herald which was published earlier this week.

I have lived in downtown Portland for over 10 years, and I am a compassionate, caring person. During that time, the homeless population grew from a couple of people sitting on the bench outside Gorham Savings to a daily expanding tent city that has reached alarming proportions under the Route 77 overpass.

I am outraged and frightened. I visited my daughter in the San Francisco Bay Area and watched its rapid decline to wall-to-wall tent cities under every overpass, needles and bloody pads scattered about on sidewalks, and people shooting up on the streets regularly during the day.

When I moved to Portland, I thought I had chosen a friendly city that had vision and growth potential. I’m finding it’s a city that cannot seem to make necessary and hard choices about what to do about the homeless population. We cannot enable the current situation and cannot afford to become a lawless society. We need a legally enforceable set of rules in place before we become another San Francisco.

We need to have rules! Rules that apply to homeless people as well as everyone else. It’s really that simple. Right now most cities on the west coast don’t have rules for people living on the street. They can and do get away with anything and everything from fires to rapes to violent attacks to open drug use, shoplifting, etc. Progressives have decided police should not be involved in dealing with these problems but that leaves all the decisions up to the addicts who are often content to stay on the sidewalk so long as they can get the drugs they want several times a day. As long as the law is not enforced and offers of shelter remain completely optional, nothing is going to change.