- [Reporter] The homelessness
epidemic is inescapable enforcing its ban on homeless people. - Is there nowhere else to go or is there just nowhere
else that they want to go? - Our city deserves to
hold people accountable to bad behavior. - [Speaker] Voters fed up
with rising homelessness. - [Speaker 1] Clear them out. - [Narrator] The push to ship out arrest and get homeless people out of sight is gaining alarming support across the US. - Criminalizing sleeping in public spaces. - [Narrator] And in the coming months, protections against criminalization may be overturned in the Supreme Court. - Do I protect myself from the elements and risk going to jail or do I not and risk hypothermia and dying. - [Reporter] So is it cruel
and unusual punishment? The Supreme Court will
tackle that question. - [Narrator] At the center
is a small town in Oregon. - [Speaker 2] Grants Pass.
- [Speaker 3] Grants Pass. - [Speaker 4] Grants Pass.
- [Speaker 5] Grants Pass. - [Narrator] Invisible
People founder Mark Horvath investigates what's really going on in Grants Pass right now. - We get a ticket just for trying to live. - 30 citations in a year and a half. - I've been to jail five
times just this year. - [Cassy] So this park is
probably the most controversial. - They hit me with a stick. They wanted to drag him out and beat him. - Families out here sleeping in tents. - [Narrator] Because this
ruling will determine whether cities can arrest homeless people across the country. - If that's allowed, many
cities will try to run all of the homeless people
out of their community. - The stakes can be higher. - We will ban urban camping. Violators of these bans will be arrested. We'll then open up large
parcels of inexpensive land where the homeless can be relocated. - [Narrator] Rather than addressing the structural inequities
causing homelessness, many politicians from both
parties and at all levels ignore proven solutions to homelessness opting instead for a punitive response that will only make homelessness
worse and hurt all of us. Criminalization punishes
the one group of people who have no power to fix the crisis. - The DPPD had my stuff thrown away and in one of my totes was my son's urn. My son's forever gone and
I only have a piece of him, a urn necklace that I
keep dear to my heart. You know, like that's
things I can't get back. It makes it really hard
to want to keep going on. All I can say to people is don't forget what it
is to be human, be kind. We're all just trying to survive. - [Eric] If your issue is
that Black Lives Matter, if you care about the
experience of LGBTQ people, if you care about people
living with disabilities, if you care about the elderly, all of these traditionally
marginalized communities are gonna be impacted. If those are your issues,
this is your issue. - [Narrator] We knew we had
to go where it all started and with the boots on the ground, we met up with co-founder of MINT, the Mobile Integrative Navigation Team who does outreach and bridges the gap for the houseless in Josephine County. - [Cassy] Good morning, sunshine. Did you take your medicine? - [Speaker 6] I've had without water. - [Cassy] Do you need water? I'll grab you some water, okay. - [Speaker 6] Thank you.
- [Cassy] You're welcome. Homelessness in Grants Pass. We're seeing new people
each week out here. A lot of elderly who are being
forced out of their home, foreclosures, et cetera. A lot of them have been
out here for a long time. There are people out here being ticketed to move their tent site when the city hasn't given
them an alternative solution to be able to be that's safe. There are no affordable
housing or low barrier shelters and rent keeps going up and up and so we're seeing more and more folks having to live in the parks or in parking lots with their cars. That's where the city's kind of designated places for 'em right now. - [Narrator] But even in
these designated areas, they must move to a new park
every three or five days. And even then, once they settle back in, they're often still not left in peace. - [Amber] The cops give us tickets for any reason they can find. Scattering and rubbish,
being in the buffer zone, tent being too big, like you name it, I've
gotten a ticket for it. I got my notice this
morning, I have to move. Having to move every week
is ridiculous in itself that you have to pack up your whole camp, everything, your food,
your clothes, your bedding, and it doesn't matter if it's
raining, snowing, whatever. We have to move. If we're there when we're
supposed to be moved, we get a ticket for being there. It's hell to move from park to park. It seems like every single
time you get to your tent or get your camp set up and start getting things livable again, it's time to move again. They have made it impossible to feel human just because we're homeless, like we're not supposed to exist. We get a ticket just for trying to live. - Where are you staying at?
- Right over here. This is the home for the week here at what we call Tent City. I'm hoping that my 30 day
kickout is gonna be over so I can go to the park down the street 'cause it's easier to move a few blocks than it is like clear across town. My bike, trailer and wagon have flat tires and I can't afford tubes, so that's that. It makes it difficult to move for sure. I have food stamps, but they don't give us
enough to last a month, especially when we can't cook food. We have to go buy things
we can eat in the microwave at the store. I do what I can, make the best of it. - Amber has received over 30
citations in a year and a half. Each one is $295. She has no way of paying them. I can't imagine any community having a response to homelessness, just pushing people from park to park. It makes no sense. The only solution to tents
in a park is housing. Criminalization will just
make these encampments grow. More people will end up in the park. - [Narrator] And we
wondered where is this push for criminalization coming from? So we asked an expert from the National Homelessness Law Center. - [Eric] Our organization
has been tracking the criminalization of
homelessness for the past 20 years. We found these ordinances
have been growing as visible homelessness
continues to expand in our communities. So Grants Pass, like much of America is experiencing a homelessness crisis caused by the lack of affordable housing. Since the early 2000s, Grants Pass has more than doubled in size, but it hasn't doubled its
affordable housing stock. The vacancy rate is less than 1%. Meaning if you lose your apartment, it's basically impossible
to find a new one. As landlords have continued
to raise the rents, we see residents who have lived there for a long time becoming homeless. There is no emergency
shelter in the community that's accessible to everybody and so once people lose their housing, they're out on the streets. - [Mark] The way the law is being written, if police see a pillow or a blanket, doesn't even have to be a tent, that a homeless person can
be cited for illegal camping. - [Eric] That's what the Supreme Court's gonna be deciding is, is it cruel and unusual punishment under our Eighth
Amendment to punish people and enforce these laws even when there's no
adequate alternative place for them to go. - [Mark] How long have you been out here? - Five or six years. I didn't go to jail or
have any criminal charges until I was 35 years old. I've been to jail five
times just this year. - Is there any shelter beds? - Yeah, there's places
that if you are a Christian and if you're not under the
influence of anything at all, they'll test you for a cigarette. - [Cassy] We do have one
shelter, Gospel Rescue Mission, but it would be high barrier and a lot of the people that we serve don't really meet the
criteria to be admitted there or deny wanting to go there. - It's like being in jail. You can't talk to anybody, you can't leave and it's being locked up in there doing nothing but chores
and pray to the Lord and you can't have your animals. There's a lot of people that have dogs and it's comfort zone for
them, same with my cat. - [Mark] You would go
into a shelter or housing if there was provided dignity and you could take your cat? - Yeah, I would, yeah. - [Mark] One newspaper article said there's 27 rules for the Gospel Rescue. - [Cassy] For example, I had a family that was new to being out here. Two young kids, mom and dad, mom and kids had to go separately. Dad had to go to another place and they couldn't see
each other for 30 days. No smoking, no dogs, no drugs whatsoever. They also have to be
physically able to work. So if they have a disability that prevents them from
being able to work, then they aren't qualified
to go to the shelter. - [Laura] Gospel Rescue Mission has never been an option for me. I was on the phone with a woman and it was practically like, well, come in and fill out the paperwork and we'll give you a key and then I told her that
I used a cane and a walker and it would be great if I
could work in the kitchen because that's what I do and she's like, "Wait a
minute, wait a minute. You use a cane and a walker?" And I'm like, yeah. "Hmm, that would mean that she wouldn't be able to do the chores we would need you do, so yeah, right now we haven't
got any room for you." And I was like, oh, five
minutes ago you had room for me. You were happy to have me there. - [Mark] And they force
religious programming. - [Cassy] Yeah, so I think
it's an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening of daily religious church
services that they need to attend. - [Amber] For those of us who
aren't in organized religion, that's against my religious beliefs to be forced to go worship something that isn't necessarily my higher power. - [Mark] How long have you been out here? - I've been on and off for
about the past 15 years. But this time around I've
been out the parks past three. I used to clean houses and because of the covid, I
had lost my job and here I am, like still trying to find
work, still trying to survive and yeah, barely doing that. So I'm on the HUD list. It's like a six to
eight month waiting list and that's if you can find
a place that accepts HUD once you get the voucher and you have to have some kind of income to pay your part of the rent. It's hard to go looking for a
job when you don't feel human 'cause you haven't showered in a week. You know, like it's pretty bad. And people in this community
treat us like we're garbage. They drive by honking their horns like wee hours of the morning,
they yell at us get jobs and it's just, it seems
like you get a step forward and get knocked back 10 steps. - [Mark] So how long
have you been homeless? - Six months. - [Mark] Six months, what happened? - [Kim] Me and my boyfriend,
we lost our property because we didn't play property tax. So I lost my calicos and my dog and my garden for 13 years. So it's been pretty rough. - [Mark] What is homelessness
like here in Grants Pass? - Well, it sucks. I like to cook and bake and
I can't do that out here and it's wet a lot. It's kind of sad too when you're out here and it's raining all the time and I'm blind and I trip
over a lot of stuff. As old as I'm getting, its
getting up there in age. You don't move around that easily or get up that easy anymore. - [Mark] That's your home?
- [Kim] Yep. - [Mark] At 62 years old?
- [Kim] Yep. - [Mark] That's your home.
- [Kim] Yes, it is. It's not real good for me to be out here. I have a real hard time from getting upper respiratory stuff. - [Narrator] And Kim's
story is not uncommon. We met Carilyn Hill to
hear about her experience. - [Carilyn] I'm a mother of
four and I have 18 grandkids. I've been homeless off
and on a lot of my life. But the most recent, it's been almost seven years
since my house burned down. I have COPD, so I have
to be on a concentrator. I just got told by the
lung doctor in Medford I could get a transplant, but
I can't get the ventilator 'cause we can't run it outta the van. We're working on getting housing. The MINT angels are helping me. They help me a lot, actually
they got me my phone, they paid for the service. We work with the Alliance for treatments and they give us a Fred
Meyer card for gas. Basically we just live day to day. I've been out there,
I've been in Tent City, but sometimes it's way hotter in here and we don't have an air conditioner and sometimes it's way colder. We don't have a heater
but it could be worse, jails, institutions or death sounds worse than being stuck in here. - [Mark] How did you survive the winter? - [Laura] Lots of blankets. Half of the winter I was
on the floor in my tent, curl up on top of a nice warm
blanket and under five more. And I've got socks on. And then sometimes I've
got the hand warmer thing, pajama pants, and then
like three or four shirts and a sweater and then a
beanie hat when I go to bed. - [Narrator] These people
are just trying to survive. But as is becoming more and
more common around the country, some of their loudest housed neighbors aren't looking for true solutions to bring these humans inside. But instead will do anything to get them out of their sight. - [Eric] The president of the
city council literally said their objective was to
make it so uncomfortable in Grants Pass that people would be
forced to move elsewhere. - [Carilyn] I mean, I've
seen cops break tent poles, just go and jerk on the doors
and break the whole doors. And I've seen people's
everything get taken. I had an officer actually
asked two different women and I heard it myself. "Why do you have salt and pepper shakers?" "'Cause we like to season our food." And that officer told both of
them, "Well, I have a house. That's why I have salt
and pepper shakers." I just don't understand some of them. Some of them don't really
understand that we're human too. - [Laura] I am 55 years old, almost 56. I became homeless two
years, nine months ago because my husband had just
passed away August, 2021. My brother-in-Law laughed at me, told me, "Well, this way it'll
get you outta the house." Like, I didn't really feel comfortable and safe going back to the
house that I'd lived in with my husband for 25 years. In the first six months that I was out here from June 30th on, I received probably
about a dozen citations. I tried very hard to follow
all the laws and all the rules. At one point I had a small grocery bag of cans and bottles that I collected and I had a five gallon
bucket outside of my tent with a bag in it that
had my garbage in there. Food garbage, that kind of thing and they came up and they cited me for scattering rubbish, and I said, "Do you keep
your household garbage in your bedroom?" And he says, "No, but I have a house." I was like, wow, that's cruel, rude. I couldn't think of enough names for it. - So what are the new rules and regulations of the city parks? - You've gotta be 50
feet from any playground, 20 feet from any fence
line, athletic field, sidewalk, driveway and residential area. A drainage ditch or a manhole cover. No open flame source whatsoever. Oh my, there's so many. - We can't keep ourselves
warm, we can't cook food. There used to be barbecues in
the park, they took those out. They have cut all the electricity to any of the gazebos in the park. It's impossible to get
a charger on our phones. They've made it nearly impossible for us to even like, have
contact with our families or job search, anything. - [Narrator] The hostility is
potent city and countywide. But one park has particularly
angry house neighbors and the people sleeping in this park were violently attacked
while we were in town. - Where are we now? - [Cassy] Okay, so Tussing
Park, no running water here. One outhouse, no place
to wash their hands. So we have to bring
water in for the folks. They're neighbors over here
that are profoundly unhappy that people camp in the park. So this park is probably
the most controversial because the neighbors have a very loud voice of opposition. - [Mark] And they're the ones complaining and saying, bust 'em out.
- Yep. - [Kim 1] They're trying to
say that all homeless people are either alcoholics or drug users. All homeless people are not
alcoholics or drug addicts. I can say that because
I'm not a drug addict. I'm not an alcoholic. - How do you survive out here? - Day by day, it's a constant struggle on where we're gonna get our next meal. Medical attention, shelter,
it's a constant struggle. The MINT program has actually stepped up and they're trying to
help as much as they can. The city doesn't want to recognize the fact that we've got a serious problem. I've actually seen regular families, women that have got kids
out here sleeping in tents. - [Dr. Kahn] Josephine
County had the opportunity to declare our county a
homeless state of emergency and get funding from the state and our county decided that
there wasn't an emergency. I think they're realizing
that they were wrong. - Well, if you had the
funding, what would you do? - Low barrier shelters, urban campgrounds. I mean, I think that's the first foremost and navigation centers. They need a place to go
alternative to the parks where they can get wraparound services and I do believe I'm pretty
in tune with this community and I think they'll use it. I'm confident they'd
use an urban campground or a low barrier shelter. When we opened our emergency shelter, we had max capacity of 49
and it was full every night. So that speaks to the
desire to be indoors. - [Mark] We are in
Medford, a neighboring city right next to Grants Pass. Medford has partnered with nonprofits to create solutions to get
people out of the parks and on a path out of homelessness. - [Sam] So we started with apartments. We have some group housing,
we low barrier programs, including a congregate shelter,
medical respite program, both in the congregate
shelter and also at a hotel. The idea is to meet people where they are and then help them take that first step in the direction that they want to go. Everything's optional and
then bring those barriers down and then offer people support. So it's site management 24x7, case management and peer support specialty to help people connect
the dots in their life according to their plan for success. I've seen what happens when
a community embraces change and looks to have kind
of progressive tools to give people those
steps out of homelessness. Because you can't criminalize poverty away and you can't criminalize
homelessness away. Recognizing that the lowest
point in someone's life doesn't define who they are and depending on the program
level that we're looking at, we've got between a 25
and a 65% success metric for people who are progressing to the next step of independence. We've looked at other
communities that are showing, especially when somebody's
unsheltered homeless that go into drug and alcohol treatment. If they're discharged back
to the same environment that they were in before, you see metrics ranging from zero to 2%, maybe 10 or 15% depending on the program and so even our low barrier program is showing 25, 35% success
rates, that's tremendous. - [Mark] And you allow dogs. - [Sam] And we allow dogs.
- [Cassy] All animals. - And all these units have
heat and AC and lights and a power outlet and all that fun stuff. Grants Pass is in the same place right now I think that Medford may have
been in 10 or 15 years ago. A decade ago, Medford
was very concerned about what would happen if a
program like Rogue Retreat opened something like
a transitional housing, tiny house village. - [Mark] I'm driving up and
it's a pretty residential area. - [Sam] Yeah. - [Mark] And I'm like, no
way, we're in the wrong place. - [Sam] Do you know what's
across the street from us? Preschool.
- [Mark] Wow. - [Sam] The darnest thing happens once you give people
hope and a place to live. People really aren't homeless anymore and it changes the conversation. It changes the circumstances. People want to take those
steps forward in their life and they wanna be good neighbors too and what we found is
that we are integrating really well into this community and being more in a residential community is more dignified for our guests and we're seeing people take
up case management quicker and take steps from
the low barrier program into the transitional
housing program a lot faster than we were seeing at the old place. And I think that that has to
do with being in a neighborhood that's more conducive to those changes. - [Mark] Grants Pass is
criminalizing homelessness, moving tents every five days. How do you get your life better? And here in Medford, they're actually working to help people. The Medford solution saves
lives and saves taxpayer money. - [Laura] I like staying in this area because this is where I raised my kids. My son played little league
on this baseball field, this is my 25 years or more
history is in this neighborhood. I was a stay at home mom because basically any job that I had, every bit of money was going to childcare. I have never been arrested. I don't have a criminal record. I am out here due to unbelievably
uncontrollable circumstances and I never expected to be homeless. I never expected to lose my husband. Suddenly I get my first
widows benefits check here. Oh, it's supposed to be today
but I'm not holding my breath because I've had too many letdowns. First thing I'm doing is
booking an airline flight and a motel down in Arizona to go see my kids and my grandkids. It's been the hardest thing of all and it's been the only thing that I haven't been able
to have control over and I miss my kids so
much and my grand babies. - [Mark] Over that way? It's starting to rain again. It's been raining off and on. There's a woman that has to
relocate to another park. Volunteers are now going to help her move. Can you imagine having
to move from park to park to park to park? - [Cassy] She got trespassed from here. She was supposed to move at
a certain time and didn't and so when they came through today, they were gonna arrest her. When I found her, she was tearful. - [Mark] They don't have really any idea where they're gonna go. It's musical parks. - [Cassy] Yes, and then sometimes there's
a handful of people that they're trespassed
from multiple parks and so then it gets really challenging. And then they gotta remember
which park is 30 days, which one's 21, but yeah. - [Dr. Kahn] Criminalization
does not solve the crisis. I mean, one penalizing someone because they have had bad
times or fallen out of luck. That's not a crime and the fact of the matter is, especially for Josephine County, where we do not have a lot of funding for our police and sheriff's department. I mean, at one point, we only
had three sheriff's officers for all of Josephine County, which is about the size of Rhode Island. Those officers, they
have other things to do and by criminalizing the homeless, that's putting a larger burden on them when they could be working on real crimes. - [Narrator] With Samantha
all packed up to avoid arrest, we head over to Tussing Park where we hear about a brutal attack that happened during the night. - Someone started rattling
our tent and shaking it and saying, "Come out
here, come out here." They came over to this side
and they swung on my boyfriend and I didn't know he was coming 'cause I said, "Wait, wait." And I just barely stuck my head out and he was standing right
there and he just hit me. They hit me with a stick across the face. Yeah, my face and my inside
of my mouth was all torn up and my tooth went through my face. They wanted to hurt someone. They wanted to drag him out and beat him. Like I thought they were gonna kill him. - But people like us,
we don't bother nobody and they're sitting here
attacking us this way and this is ridiculous. There's no reason for this to happen. - [Marcy] We've been out
here about a year and a half. I have a trailer, I was
on the streets with it and ran into getting tickets
for (indistinct) parking. And people have a different
impression about everybody. We're not all homeless
'cause we want to or on drugs and we all come from somewhere and there's a reason we're like this. It's not just 'cause we choose, we don't need to tear up the
parks that are for our kids and have picnics in. It's just this is where they designated for people to be able to go. - [Mark] We've spent a
few days in Grants Pass. We've met some wonderful people who are out here living in tents and others that are working to help them. Sadly, the city doesn't have shelters or housing to get people out of the tents actually solve homelessness. The city's response is criminalization. People here don't want to camp. They don't have any other choice. - The only reason you
wanna overturn this law is if you wanna be able to
continue punishing people and not even bother to have an adequate alternative
place where they can be. These laws are essentially
banishing people from communities forcing people out of the public eye in the same way that in the past we've seen communities use similar laws. The most extreme, the
Japanese internment camps and one of the reasons that
this case is so important is because right now we have folks like former President Trump
actually campaigning on a platform that says, we want to create a national camping ban and relocation camps for
homeless American citizens. More than half of Americans are paying unaffordable levels of rent. That means they're just
one missed paycheck, one broken down car away from
experiencing homelessness and so this case is what could stand in between us and a world where just because somebody
can't pay the rent, they are vanished to some
far off relocation camp for the quote unquote crime of not being able to pay their rents. The stakes can be higher. That's a really frightening future and I don't think that's
who we are as Americans. - Reach out to your legislators and fight the growing
criminalization of homelessness. For more information about
the Supreme Court case, visit JohnsonVGrantsPass.com
and wherever you live, criminalization will make
homeless encampments grow. We need to get people
the support they need and that is housing.
