CINCINNATI — The City of Cincinnati has settled a lawsuit that stemmed from the way former city officials in 2018 handled a large camp of people living in tents on Third Street Downtown.
In the settlement, the city agreed to pay $83,000 to the Greater Cincinnati Homeless Coalition and Patrick Chin, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
The suit was initially filed by Joseph Phillips, one of the people who'd been living in the encampment, but the lawsuit says he was dismissed from litigation in December 2023 for failing to participate in the prosecution of the lawsuit.
Phillips filed the lawsuit on August 3, 2018 after then-Mayor John Cranley and then-Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters announced plans to "pursue all strategies to end" the tent cities in the city for good.
Phillips himself had struggled with homelessness for years, unable to find affordable housing that would rent to a three-time felon.
"I've been told specifically, 'Hey man, you seem like a good guy, I'd live to rent to you, but you have a record, which means trouble, so I can't rent to you,'" Phillips told former WCPO reporter Lucy May in 2018.
Josh Spring, spokesperson for the Coalition, said the organization will likely hold a press conference about the settlement at a later date.
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.
Homelessness, challenges persist amid inflation and housing crisis
While a settlement has been forged between the Homeless Coalition and the City of Cincinnati to end the lawsuit, homelessness hasn't magically gone away in Cincinnati in the years since it was filed.
In 2019, 1,700 families experiencing homelessness called the Strategies to End Homelessness helpline looking for assistance — a 20% increase over 2018.
Then, the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 created new discussions surrounding the need for shelter and aid for those living unhoused.
And while tent-filled encampments like those seen in 2018 around Cincinnati have not returned to public spaces, the pandemic and skyrocketing costs for basic necessities like food and housing haven't allowed those struggling with homelessness to easily rebound either.
In February 2023, additional benefits that had been provided to SNAP recipients throughout the pandemic were halted, just as inflation and the cost of food climbed significantly. In 2022, Freestore Foodbank said it was seeing skyrocketing demand at its food pantry.
Carrie Simon moved into Bethany House in October 2022 — and was still living there in May 2023, when WCPO spoke with her, because there simply wasn't any housing available for her and her son, who lives with disabilities. The pair were at the shelter for more than 200 days before they were able to claim the keys to a space all their own.
Despite Bethany House's housing program that's connected to both the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Strategies to End Homelessness, families are staying at Bethany House for longer as available affordable housing in Cincinnati has slimmed.
At the start of 2024, Our Daily Bread, Cincinnati's largest soup kitchen, said meal numbers needed from the organization are 30% higher now than they were before the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2019.
According to the Cincinnati Homeless Coalition, one in three Cincinnatians cannot afford their current home. The release cited an article from WVXU reporting the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University found in 2022 that renters in the U.S. were forced to pay more than 30% of their income to rent.
That same report says homelessness rates in the entire U.S. hit a record high in 2023.
Still searching for solutions
The settlement itself is a step forward for advocates, however, despite the challenges facing unhoused communities remaining.
The settlement outlines that police should no longer be the city's first response to any complaints about homeless camps. Instead, someone from the City Manager's Office will be dispatched to determine if the reported camp still houses any people.
If they do, the city can give them a three-day warning to vacate, because setting up camps on public property remains illegal in Cincinnati following the events of 2018.
However, that's still a difference between now and 2018: Those living in an illegal camp won't immediately be cited or arrested before getting a chance to move. Instead, they can be cited for trespassing if they're found to still be occupying a camp past the three-day warning period.
The settlement also forges the way for anyone arrested for living in an encampment on public property to apply for the charge to be expunged from their record "provided that the individual applying for relief would not have been charged but for their status as an individual experiencing homelessness, or but for the fact that the individual was living, resting or seeking respite on the trespassed property at the time the charges were initiated."
Still, scattering the camps entirely means people are spread out more — and that can be more unsafe for them.
"When you de-centralize where people are sleeping and when they are hiding, when they are fearing for their safety, then it's that much harder to find them and offer services that they might be willing to accept," said Georgine Getty, with Our Daily Bread. "I think the tent city was a very visible representation of how many unsheltered people we have in our city right now."
On Tuesday, Getty told us 70% of their clients are homeless. In 2019, that number was 50%. Right now, Our Daily Bread serves 500 meals a day, and demand is also up 30% from 2019. In 2024, there's now about 20 people every day who come there to cool off and sleep in the former game room, from 8:00-11:30 a.m.
"Because they are sleeping out in places that are not safe for them they are too hot they are too cold they are wet, they are not sleeping well, and they just come in here and crash because they finally feel safe," said Getty.
"This settlement will not solve all of our problems by any means," said Bryson.
She also has questions about what happens to people who aren't eligible for temporary housing or can't secure permanent housing, and whether or not they can stay downtown.
"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," said Bryson. "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."
"Our shelters are consistently full and the ultimate solution is going to be permanent supportive housing so that people aren't in shelters that long they can move out into an apartment of their own and unfortunately, some of the most innovative creative affordable housing projects are getting shut down by people who don't want that housing in their neighborhood," said Getty. "I think there's room for all of us here we just need to really challenge our stereotypes and stop actuating homelessness with criminality and just really work on solutions together."
WCPO reached out to Josh Spring, the executive director from the Greater Cincinnati Homeless Coalition. He declined an on-camera interview Tuesday, but said the organization is planning on holding a press conference later this week to discuss the next steps with the former plaintiffs now that the federal lawsuit is over.
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