CINCINNATI — The Greater Cincinnati Homeless Coalition has reached an $83,000 settlement with the City of Cincinnati stemming from how former city officials handled a large camp of people living in tents on Third Street in 2018.
The group called itself "The Colony" while others referred to it as "Tent City." Cincinnati police officers kicked them out for trespassing, sparking a year-long federal lawsuit over whether the city violated the homeless camp's 8th Amendment rights regarding "cruel and unusual punishment."
Those who were part of the settlement feel it won't solve the homeless problem in the city, but they said homeless people will have more protection, and won't be criminalized.
"Now we have to have the response of where's the housing?" said Josh Spring, executive director of the Greater Cincinnati Homeless Coalition. "The big difference here is the city is now supposed to come with a tone of caring."
Under the new policy and settlement, Cincinnati police are no longer the first response to a complaint about a homeless camp. Instead, someone from the city manager's office has to go to the encampment, where a social worker will try to connect them with housing options.
The new policy says, "Proceed with the following notice of trespass process only after the city manager's designee has confirmed that each individual residing in an encampment has access to housing or shelter."
"If they can't show that then they cannot issue a notice to leave," Spring said.
We reached out to the city manager's office to clarify that policy. A representative told us what Spring said wasn't entirely accurate. In a statement, the city said:
"The City has agreed that where individuals do not have access to shelter (meaning being inside), that we will not charge individuals sleeping outside with criminal trespass charges. But this does not mean that people will be permitted to stay in the same place night after night, and it does not apply to all types of publicly owned land.
"For example, all parks close at 10 and people are not permitted to sleep inside recreation centers, which is all public land. While we have agreed to not criminally charge individuals, we may still require them to leave if we need to access the public land for any number of reasons, including cleaning or maintaining it."
Nonetheless, the new policy has some people confused and worried about homeless camps downtown if people aren't eligible or can't find housing options. Last week, we spoke with Jackie Bryson, the president of the Cincinnati Downtown Residents Council.
"We don't want the police to not have an active role because they're the ones who keep us safe and clean to a certain degree," Bryson said. "For how long, are we saying forever, more, are we saying for ten years, are we saying for two weeks, are we saying do they get on a list when housing becomes available that all bets are off. I think that there's a very delicate balance there that we have to think about to accommodate all people and again, I have absolutely complete compassion for the person who does not want to be outside and has no other options."
Bryson remembers what it looked like on Third Street during the summer months of 2018.
"To walk through a tent city, to go to the ballpark, to go down to The Banks, that can be awkward and uncomfortable," said Bryson.
We spoke to "Sunshine" and "Darkness," a couple who was living in the camp in 2018.
"We had made some poor choices and we did lose our home," Sunshine said. "We were going through recovery."
They're now living in central Kentucky, and are no longer homeless, dedicating their lives to helping people who are vulnerable.
"People can get out of that situation but many of them haven't had a chance," Darkness said.
Sunshine said she's hopeful this will give them a chance.
During Tuesday's press conference, a man who calls himself "Bison" apologized for setting up homeless camps downtown.
"It wasn't me trying to make nobody mad, I just happened to see something that was wrong," he said. "I do apologize but at that time, and the people who was around me, who were my family, and who I was literally taking care of, I had to do what I had to do to make a statement. A lot of those people are no longer here, nowhere, they literally passed away. Some of them are still walking around as we speak. I myself am still homeless."
Both Bison and Allen Howard say they still need help, like many others who are still homeless.
"I just want affordable housing for everybody who need it," Howard said.
A lengthy legal battle over the rights of unhoused people
On August 3, 2018, people on Third Street were re-pitching their tents after Cincinnati police officers spent an hour dismantling and cleaning up the camp.
This was after weeks of unhoused people shuffling from location to location after the city began issuing a series of 72-hour notices requiring the tent cities be moved.
"It was very uncomfortable back in 2018, it grew exponentially," said Jackie Bryson, president of the Cincinnati Downtown Residents Council.
Bryson remembers what it looked like on Third Street downtown during the summer months.
"To walk through a tent city to go to the ballpark to go down to the banks that can be awkward and uncomfortable," said Bryson.
City officials — including then-Mayor John Cranley and then-Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters — had announced plans to clear out the tent city permanently, but a federal lawsuit filed that same day stopped them. People staying there packed up their belongings ahead of the city's 2 p.m. deadline, but some of them just moved around the corner and set up on Walnut between Third and Second while city workers removed trash and cleaned the sidewalk.
Three days later, on August 6, Deters filed a civil nuisance action against the city and then-Common Pleas Judge Robert Ruehlman issued a temporary restraining order that ordered the city clean up the camps.
Deters and other city officials said in the nuisance action that the camps were a public health issue that contributed to an uptick in public drunkenness, felony drug abuse, public acts of defecation and urination and damage to public property.
On August 9, Ruehlman banned outdoor homeless camps from public places throughout Hamilton County with the qualification that local homeless shelters must have room to accommodate people for the ban to be in effect.
RELATED: Cincinnati's tent city: What have we learned?
Ruehlman's condition would be more complex than it first seemed.
Shelterhouse, which operates the largest emergency homeless shelters in Hamilton County, told WCPO in 2018 that their biggest facilities — the David and Rebecca Baron Center for Men in Queensgate and the Esther Marie Hatton Center for Women in Mount Auburn — had been over capacity for months.
However, both shelters were able to accommodate people in "overflow" spaces, so the shelters didn't have to outright turn people away. The day Ruehlman filed his ban on outdoor camps, The Barron Center — a 150-bed facility at the time — had housed 196 men. The Hatton Center had been equally overpopulated, housing 80 women in a 60-bed shelter.
Then, in October of that year, the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio filed a lawsuit against Ruehlman. It claimed advocacy groups and shelters — specifically, New Prospect Baptist Church — were not given opportunities to participate in the case that led to Ruehlman's ban, nor were they able to address the court.
The case then stretched into 2019, as Ohio's First District Court of Appeals ruled the church and the ACLU could proceed with its legal challenge to the ban. The court’s decision paved the way for legal arguments to continue in the case — and continue they did.
Phillips and the Homeless Coalition's lawsuit also argued Ruehlman's ban violated homeless plaintiffs' constitutional rights of free speech and protection from unlawful search and seizure, among other rights. Phillips's lawyer, Bennett Allen, asked to add the mayor as a defendant in the case and, in May 2019, a judge ruled that could be done.
In December 2019, an appeals court finally overruled Ruehlman's ban — not because he didn't have the right to ban the camps on public property, but because he couldn't also ban private property owners from hosting them as one Over-the-Rhine park had attempted to do in 2018.
Then, in 2020, U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Black declared that jailing people for living in homeless camps when no shelter was available constituted "cruel and unusual punishment."
Some of Black’s determinations mirrored the findings of a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in September 2018. That court ruled in favor of plaintiffs, who argued that the city of Boise, Idaho, violated their constitutional right prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment when the city issued citations against them for sleeping outside.
While Black's order didn't end the case, it did pave the way for the lawsuit filed by the Homeless Coalition and Phillips to continue.
