The city of Portland will begin enforcing its scaled-back homeless camping ban Monday, nearly two months after the City Council unanimously approved the new ordinance to replace a more stringent measure tied up in court.

The new rules require people who are offered shelter to accept it or face penalties, and it directs homeless individuals that they must keep their camping area tidy if they can’t access shelter. The ordinance scales back the potential of a 30-day stint behind bars for violators to just seven days and emphasizes a preference to offer offenders diversion.

The city will narrowly focus enforcement at first on camps that it believes “present the greatest health and safety risks” based on assessments by outreach workers, Cody Bowman, Mayor Ted Wheeler’s spokesperson, wrote in an email Tuesday.

A small two-person outreach team from the Street Services Coordination Center, a city-county partnership that conducts outreach to homeless individuals, will be tasked initially with making all referrals for enforcement under the camping ban to the Portland Police Bureau, according to the city. Portland police will need to receive a referral to initiate any enforcement efforts, Bowman said.

Bowman said the city waited to begin enforcement to have time to educate community members about the new ordinance.

Last summer, the Portland City Council set restrictions on when and where unhoused people could place their belongings, sit or sleep, forbidding unhoused Portlanders from camping in any public place between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. Violators would have faced fines of up to $100 or 30 days in jail.

But the city’s plans to enforce that ban were stopped short in November when a Multnomah County judge issued a temporary injunction until a class action lawsuit brought by the Oregon Law Center on behalf of a group of Portlanders experiencing homelessness is resolved.

With that ban tied up in court, Wheeler proposed the scaled-back ordinance that the City Council approved in May.

State law, passed by majority Democrats in 2020, requires cities to “ensure the most humane treatment for removal of homeless individuals from camping sites on public property,” including providing 72 hours of advance notice. It also requires that any rules limiting the time, manner or place where homeless individuals can sleep and stay warm and dry be “objectively reasonable.”

Homelessness experts, service providers and advocates say it is inhumane to criminalize homelessness when there are not enough shelter beds to serve all who need one.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case out of Grants Pass, testing whether it is constitutional for cities to ban camping on all public property if the city doesn’t have enough shelter beds for homeless individuals. A majority of justices on the high court appeared inclined to give cities more leeway to restrict camping restrictions. The court is expected to issue its decision this week or next.

Most of the reporting for this piece was performed by Nicole Hayden, The Oregonian’s homelessness reporter from January 2021 to May 2024.

— Jamie Goldberg oversees The Oregonian/OregonLive’s politics, education and homelessness coverage. She can be reached at jgoldberg@oregonian.com or 503-221-8228. You can find her on X at @jamiebgoldberg

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