The Portland attorney who took a landmark case on homelessness to the U.S. Supreme Court calls fining people for sleeping outside “the leaf-blower approach.”
Ed Johnson, director of litigation for the Oregon Law Center, was one of the panelists for “Beyond the Verdict: Criminalization of Homelessness,” hosted by homeless services nonprofit Share on Thursday at the Kiggins Theatre in Vancouver.
“Leaf blowers don’t solve leaves,” Johnson said. “They just move them somewhere nearby, and it becomes somebody else’s problem.”
Johnson joined Vancouver Housing Authority CEO Andy Silver and Assistant Vancouver Police Chief Erika Nilsen for the discussion.
The panel reflected on the implications of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in a Grants Pass, Ore., case that challenged camping bans in jurisdictions where shelter beds weren’t available. The Supreme Court’s June ruling gave cities the green light to arrest and fine homeless people for sleeping outside.
In the wake of the ruling, Vancouver officials said they would not alter the city’s approach to its homeless residents — an estimated 8,752 people, according to the Council for the Homeless.
“I can tell you from talking to hundreds of people, it’s hard living outside, and if you have to hide from the police, it becomes harder,” Johnson said. “What that means, usually, is that people are putting themselves in unsafe places, and it’s harder for people to stay in touch with service providers that are helping them survive and helping them get into housing.”
The Vancouver Police Department’s Nilsen agreed that warrants and fines will not alleviate the crisis.
“We will never arrest our way out of homelessness, nor should we,” Nilsen said. “That is not the way that we should deal with it as a society, and it’s definitely not the way we deal with it as a city.”
Safety and perception
Nilsen said although the crime rate has increased in the past 10 years, homelessness is not necessarily to blame.
If neighbors call 911 because they feel unsafe around nearby homeless people, police officers will focus on actions and behavior, not housing status.
“It’s my job to take care of them and make people feel safe. But it’s also my job to show up and say, ‘Just because they’re living in a tent doesn’t mean you’re not safe,’ ” Nilsen said.
Silver said misconceptions that homeless people are criminals makes it challenging to find sites for housing or services for that population.
“People have a lot of fear about who’s going to live there, and what their behavior is going to be like,” Silver said. “Sometimes people are quick to assume that anything negative going on in an area might be related to low-income housing or affordable housing or some program nearby, when, again, some of these are big societal issues that affect lots and lots of people across different housing statuses.”
Solutions
The need for more resources was a recurring theme of the discussion.
Silver pointed out that while the current crisis demands immediate action, sometimes the best solutions are long term, such as building more housing.
“I’ve been in some form of this conversation for 17 years, and if we had just done the long-term solution 17 years ago, we wouldn’t have had the conversations anymore,” he said.
He said if housing supply is the problem, it must be tackled at the root — zoning and land use. Silver also called for more variety in the housing market.
Nilsen echoed the need for more housing and resources, so that responding police officers can help homeless people go somewhere besides jail.
“We have to have something on the other end,” she said. “If a neighborhood calls us when somebody is camping in their front yard … or somebody’s using drugs, and there’s needles around … we don’t have any resources for that person, or housing for that person to go to.”
Johnson said there’s no one-size-fits-all way to alleviate homelessness in every community, but he knows punishing people living outside only makes the problem worse.
“This is a solvable problem,” Johnson said. “We have the shared goal of ending this, no matter what direction you’re coming at it from. Nobody wants there to be a million homeless people sleeping in the United States tonight.”
