Supreme Court decision in Oregon camping ban case could shape homeless policy in WV, advocates said

Many of Wheeling, W.Va.'s unhoused population have been staying in an encampment on a state-owned parking lot across the street from the Catholic Charities Neighborhood Center. The city exempted the site from its ban on public camping, but with the state planning to close and clean the camp, people are being forced to move. (Daniel Finsley | Finsley Creative for West Virginia Watch)

A decision this summer by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case about an Oregon city’s public camping ban will shape the policies and laws state and local governments throughout the country — including in West Virginia — make in response to homelessness, advocates say.

The high court this month will review a decision from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Gloria Johnson vs. Grants Pass, Oregon .

The case centers on the city’s ordinance prohibiting people from sleeping in public when there are no accessible shelter beds available. The case has been called the most significant case concerning homeless people in decades .

The lower court ruled that states are not allowed to make it a crime to sleep outside if there’s no room inside for people to be sheltered. The Supreme Court will decide whether generally applicable laws regulating camping on public property constitute “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibited under the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.

Four West Virginia groups — SOAR, Project Rainbow, the Kanawha County Collective and Morgantown RAMP —  have signed on an amicus curiae or “friend of the court” brief in support of homeless people in the case. West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrissey signed onto an amicus curiae brief on behalf of Grants Pass. Altogether, more than 100 amicus curiae briefs are on file for parties in the case.

Lesley Nash, a staff attorney for legal advocacy organization Mountain State Justice, who helped prepare the organizations’ amicus brief, said a court decision in the favor of the city would “greenlight” similar bans, especially in larger West Virginia cities that have larger populations of homeless people.

The Ninth Circuit court case in favor of homeless people does not have binding in West Virginia, she said, but it is a persuasive piece of case law that organizations use to push back against camping bans, she said.

“It is something that we know that municipalities and cities and law enforcement are aware of, they’re keeping an eye on this,” Nash said. “Cities understand that if the Supreme Court rules against the plaintiff in Grants Pass, it’s — I’m not going to say open season, I think that’s a little too extreme for this point, but I do think it sort of gives a green light for cities to really move forward with more prohibitive camping ordinances.”

In West Virginia, Wheeling and Parkersburg have recently enacted public camping bans that target homeless people.

In Wheeling, which enacted a ban on “camping” in public earlier this year, homeless people are having to move to another location along a trail after the city established a new area that will be exempted from the ban.

Jesse Rabinowitz, campaign and communications director of the National Homelessness Law Center, called Johnson vs. Grants Pass “the most important case about homelessness in the past 40 years.”

“[It will] ask the fundamental question: Does the constitution protect people experiencing homelessness?” he said. “The fact that we even have to ask that question is a damning indictment of how we’ve addressed homelessness as a country, but we’re hopeful that this will be an opportunity for not only the Supreme Court, but for Congress and for the White House to say punishing homelessness doesn’t work. And we can end homelessness by finding the housing and services that people need.”

In a statement Wednesday, Morrissey said state and local governments should have the power to choose the solutions to homelessness that work best for them.

“Instead, as we’ve pointed out in our amicus brief, decisions like Grants Pass effectively turn federal courts into homeless czars, stripping away traditional state authority over criminal law and making the problem worse,” Morrissey said. “As the brief said, that’s the wrong approach — this issue is a matter of local concern.”

Traci Strickland, director of the Kanawha Valley Collective, a homelessness continuum of care that serves Kanawha, Clay, Boone and Putnam counties, said her organization signed on to the amicus brief because homelessness has been a “hot button” issue in Charleston for the last few years.

Charleston does not prohibit camping in public, though such a ban was proposed in 2021. Strickland said she thinks the questions about the legality of camping bans are part of the reason why the city hasn’t passed a camping ban.

“So to me if we actually have a court case that says, ‘hey, this is really legal and you can do it,’ it really just opens up a door that I think has only been cracked until now,” Strickland said. “I’m here to end homelessness, and criminalizing people because they’re not sleeping in a shelter or criminalizing people because they’re not in housing, is just unthinkable to me. Creating criminal records for people that are suffering from mental illness or suffering from substance use disorder or experiencing homelessness or two of those three — I don’t see how it solves the problem. I see how it makes problems worse.”

Advocates for homeless people say camping bans not only do nothing to address homelessness, they make it worse by imposing fines, potential jail sentences and criminal records on homeless people and making it more difficult for them to get into permanent housing.

Nash said regardless of the outcome of the Grants Pass decision and how cities respond, people without a home will still need to sleep and stay somewhere.

“If there’s a camping ordinance, will some people move to outside of city limits? Certainly some people will do that” Nash said. “Will some people just be fined for camping within city limits? Some people will do that… depending on how that ordinance is set up, is there a potential jail time? It depends on how the ordinance is written. The act of banning camping is not going to stop people from needing to sleep somewhere.”

Oral arguments are planned for April 22 and advocates expect a decision in June.

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