Oregon’s housing woes have been great at attracting attention to the plight of renters, but that hasn’t always translated to compassion for the folks who’ve already lost their homes.
Consider: As the state was in the teeth of a widely acknowledged housing crisis last year, the city of Roseburg adopted a new “exclusion zone” policy that critics say allows officials to ban people cited for homelessness-related crimes from setting foot downtown.
And in the Central Oregon town of Prineville, leaders took steps in September to more easily exclude homeless campers and others from city parks.
Of course, similar laws—Portland’s camping ban comes to mind—have been on the books for decades. Now, with legislators in Salem promising to drill down into the housing crisis during this year’s new legislative session, advocates for the homeless see an uncommon opportunity to give those policies the boot.
“Sitting down, sleeping—these are minor fucking crimes,” says Paul Boden, executive director of the San Francisco-based Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP). “The history of local governments using and criminalizing the presence of people they don’t like and discriminatorily enforcing laws against people is as old as this country is.”
For the second time, WRAP this year has convinced Oregon legislators to consider the Oregon Right to Rest Act, a multi-pronged piece of legislation that would bolster protections for homeless Oregonians and effectively roll back local laws that can criminalize people for not having homes