A new class action lawsuit accuses the Portland-area county that oversees one of the nation's worst homelessness crises of steering public resources to people based on their race, a practice the plaintiffs say violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The suit targets Multnomah County's Joint Office of Homeless Services, which administers shelter, housing, and outreach programs across the Portland metro area. Plaintiffs allege the county adopted explicit racial preferences in deciding who gets access to taxpayer-funded homeless services, prioritizing certain racial groups over others regardless of individual need.
The complaint, first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, alleges that Multnomah County built race into the architecture of its homeless services system. The plaintiffs contend that the county's policies channel benefits to individuals based on racial identity rather than on severity of need, effectively creating a two-tier system for people living on the streets.
Class action status means the case could represent a broad group of individuals who were allegedly denied equal access to county homeless services because of their race. If certified, the class would include anyone in Multnomah County who was subject to these race-based criteria when seeking shelter, housing assistance, or related programs.
The legal theory is straightforward. Government agencies cannot distribute public benefits on the basis of race absent a compelling governmental interest and narrow tailoring. The plaintiffs argue that Multnomah County's homeless policies fail both prongs of that test.
The lawsuit lands in a jurisdiction already under intense scrutiny for how it handles homelessness. Portland has roughly 800 homeless encampments spread across just 146 square miles, a density that has turned sidewalks, parks, and public spaces into de facto campgrounds.
Multnomah County's Joint Office of Homeless Services distributed 6,550 tents and 27,000 tarps to homeless individuals in a single year, as the Washington Examiner reported. Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler has called the situation what it is.
"The magnitude and the depth of the homelessness crisis in our city is nothing short of a humanitarian catastrophe."
Wheeler eventually announced a plan to consolidate hundreds of street encampments into at least three sanctioned campsites with access to city services. But the sheer volume of county-supplied camping gear already on the streets made that goal an uphill fight.
The fiscal picture is even uglier than the policy picture. Fox News reported that the Joint Office spent $2 million in taxpayer funds on 22,000 tents and 70,000 tarps with virtually no accounting for who received them or where they were set up. Portland then spent $26.6 million over four years on a contract to clean up the encampments those tents helped create.
Attorney John DiLorenzo, who has represented disabled Portland residents in a separate lawsuit alleging the city violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by allowing encampments to block public sidewalks and parks, captured the absurdity in blunt terms.
"The taxpayers are paying the county to put tents in place, which the city is in turn charging the taxpayers to sweep up."
DiLorenzo compared the cycle to "trying to walk up the down escalator." The ADA lawsuit alleged that unchecked encampments made sidewalks and public spaces impassable for residents with disabilities, a concrete harm layered on top of the policy failures.
That a county could spend millions distributing camping supplies with no tracking system, then spend tens of millions more removing the camps those supplies enabled, speaks to a level of institutional dysfunction that invites legal challenge. The new class action adds a constitutional dimension: not just whether the county managed its homeless programs competently, but whether it managed them lawfully.
Multnomah County is not the only progressive jurisdiction facing legal consequences for building racial preferences into government programs. The Trump administration recently moved to block Evanston, Illinois's race-based reparations program in federal court, arguing that the city's plan to distribute housing grants based on race violated the Equal Protection Clause.
The legal landscape has shifted sharply against race-conscious government action in recent years. The Supreme Court's 2023 decision striking down race-based college admissions sent a clear signal that racial classifications in public programs face the highest level of judicial scrutiny.
Since that ruling, federal enforcement agencies have moved aggressively. The DOJ found that UCLA's medical school used illegal race-based admissions criteria even after the Supreme Court's ban, and the EEOC sued the New York Times for allegedly passing over a White male editor to meet diversity targets.
Multnomah County's homeless services program now joins a growing list of blue-jurisdiction policies being tested against constitutional limits. The common thread is straightforward: the Equal Protection Clause does not contain an exception for good intentions.
The homelessness crisis has already reshaped Oregon politics. Republican Christine Drazan led recent gubernatorial polls despite Oregon's deep blue lean, driven in large part by voter frustration over encampments, public safety, and the perception that Democratic leaders had lost control of the streets.
Wheeler's own pivot toward consolidating camps into sanctioned sites reflected the political pressure. But the class action lawsuit raises a different kind of question, one that cannot be solved by relocating tents. If the county's homeless services system was designed around racial preferences, no amount of campsite reorganization addresses the constitutional problem.
The case also highlights a tension familiar to cities where DEI-driven policy priorities collide with basic governance failures. When a county cannot track where it distributed 22,000 tents but can build a race-based prioritization system for shelter access, voters and courts alike start asking hard questions about what the government is actually optimizing for.
The class action will need to clear several procedural hurdles before it can proceed on the merits. A federal judge must decide whether to certify the proposed class, a determination that hinges on whether the plaintiffs can show that Multnomah County's race-based policies affected a sufficiently large and identifiable group of people in a common way.
Investigators and litigants will also need to determine the scope and specifics of the county's racial preference system. Authorities have not publicly confirmed how the race-based criteria were applied in practice, how long they were in effect, or how many individuals were affected.
If the class is certified and the case moves forward, Multnomah County will bear the burden of proving that its racial classifications served a compelling government interest and were narrowly tailored to achieve it. Under current Supreme Court precedent, that is a standard very few race-based government programs survive.
The county has not yet filed a public response to the complaint.
When a government agency cannot keep track of tens of thousands of tents but builds a system to sort the homeless by skin color, the question is no longer just about policy. It is about whether the law still means what it says.
