To our esteemed judges,
We are a tiny newsroom, just five city desk reporters, a photographer and two editors, in Oregon. But we recognize that pivotal moment when the law meets (or even creates) crisis, when policy impacts the people it is supposed to be helping in unexpected ways. We seized that moment by spending weeks overnight with our communities’ most vulnerable residents: those without housing.
Some background. Since 2018, states inside the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals must abide by an appellate decision which ruled criminalizing sleeping in public places is cruel and unusual punishment if people have nowhere else to go. With cities unable to “move people along,” the visible homeless population has grown considerably, especially in West Coast states, these last five years.
As a small Oregon town awaited to see if the U.S. Supreme Court would accept its writ of certiorari (spoiler alert, it did), state legislators decided they would not wait. They enacted a law that took effect July 1, 2023, forcing cities to designate areas where unsheltered individuals can legally set up for the night – so that cities may enforce anti-camping ordinances elsewhere in their jurisdictions.
Local cities devised a variety of rules with a lot of consternation from housed constituents. Each city’s solution was unique and, in most cases, not well communicated to the people it was ostensibly helping.
A seed of a story idea was planted: What if we went there ourselves?
The end result was unique among all Oregon journalists, whose reporting stayed at the policy-level. By taking time to get to know our neighbors without addresses, they opened their lives to us and helped us show how heady, complicated legal decisions/jargon/state code were playing out in the real world.
Building trust with our sources over dozens of nights of pre-reporting, reporting and post-reporting, we were able to to capture the sounds of what life is like on the streets, whether it was a man being Narcaned back to life, sirens of a fire truck arriving at a site or a mom watching over her sleeping son.
Our podcast is not quite like any other. It’s both simultaneously raw and polished.
Thank you for your consideration.
penny
Penny Rosenberg, Albany Democrat-Herald editor
The “A Place to Sleep” podcast seems like a perfect example about how a small but ambitious newsroom can step up and try to cover and tackle and critical story that started in their local community but became national news.
