(C) Common Dreams
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The New Sundown Towns [1]

['Tracy Rosenthal', 'Jess Bergman', 'Richard J. Evans', 'Hannah Zeavin', 'Adam Nayman', 'Photographs Jordan Gale For The New Republic']

Date: 2024-04-30

The concerns echo in Grants Pass. The Sobering Center that the city planned in its vagrancy roundtable opened its doors in 2016. The facility consists of 12 locked rooms, where people can stay for up to 24 hours. Almost half of its nightly inhabitants are placed there by the police. The town’s only shelter, the Gospel Rescue Mission, has a zero-tolerance approach: sobriety from drugs, alcohol, even nicotine; residents have to quit smoking to qualify for one of the 138 beds. The “pray-to-stay” facility’s 29 rules also include attending church services that follow the dictates of the “Apostles’ Creed,” not interacting with members of the opposite sex, and presenting oneself in line with one’s “birth gender.” (I am personally out on three counts.) Residents must work 40 hours a week at the mission and can’t look for a job elsewhere. Executive director Brian Bouteller defends his shelter’s strict rules and advocates stricter enforcement at parks. In a recent video, he describes people living in the parks as “can and won’t”: They can leave homelessness but won’t, because they are receiving “free needles,” meals, and medical care.

According to the courts, only “low-barrier” shelters, which don’t require employment or sobriety, count as “adequate” alternatives to sleeping outdoors. (“I read the lawsuit,” Bristol said.) Grants Pass’s one low-barrier facility, Foundry Village, opened in 2021. It was paid for and constructed by volunteers. Doug Walker, a bald and bespectacled retired developer who chairs the city’s Housing Advisory Committee, helped locate the land, raise the funds, and build the site. I interviewed Walker at his home, where I was greeted with the classic yard sign, WE BELIEVE BLACK LIVES MATTER, NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL, LOVE IS LOVE… “I wouldn’t say I am super passionate about homeless people,” Walker told me. “I agree with the idea of taking back our parks. But we still have to find a place for these people to be. They’re still human beings.”

Walker’s four-person group found a parcel of land a few blocks from the Gospel Rescue Mission and paid the $70,000 to buy it themselves. “The city didn’t have to do a damn thing other than be difficult,” Walker said. The group constructed 17 bedrooms of duplex sheds, with shared bathrooms and kitchens, using a tiny-home village in nearby Medford as a model. Walker stressed the importance of management at the facility. Residents “have to learn to cooperate and function in society … and that does not work if you just give somebody a place.” The problem, he said, is what’s waiting for residents on the other side. They “address their issues and they’re ready to move to an apartment or move somewhere. But there is no somewhere. There are no apartments.... There’s no place for them to go.”

At Baker Park, a person pulls a suitcase that holds all their belongings.

The injunction made Grants Pass’s ability to move people dependent on places to put them. Like Walker, Mayor Bristol described low-barrier shelter capacity in expedient rather than humanitarian terms: It creates “a place where people can go that is not the parks, so that we can have clean, safe parks again.” In 2022, when the city received almost a million dollars from the state’s Department of Administrative Services, Bristol campaigned to open a sanctioned encampment in Grants Pass. She was impressed by Medford’s “clean and orderly” facility. Medford police even supported the place. She related the idea to a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.: “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” But other officials bristled. Dwayne Yunker, a Republican real estate broker who serves on both City Council and the state legislature, joined the mission’s Bouteller in a conversation entitled “Low Barrier = Low Safety.” (Yunker has also suggested that the city privatize all its parks, so police will be free to remove people.) Fearful for their safety and their home values, locals resisted each site proposed. “There’s always a school or a day care or a playground,” Walker said. “It’s always near people.” They almost had a deal with one prospective landowner, who pulled out when the community intervened.



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[1] Url: https://newrepublic.com/article/181036/new-sundown-towns-grants-pass-v-johnson

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