Gov. Gavin Newsom will order California officials on Thursday to begin dismantling thousands of homeless encampments, according to officials in his administration, calling on government leaders to act on a recent Supreme Court decision “with urgency and dignity.”
The executive order, which is expected to affect tens of thousands of people, represents the nation’s most sweeping response to a June ruling that gave governments greater authority to remove homeless people from their streets.
Homeless encampments have vexed California, where housing costs are among the nation’s highest, more than any other state. An estimated 180,000 people were homeless last year in California, the most in the nation, and about 123,000 homeless people on any given night were unsheltered, according to the most recent count. Unlike New York City, most jurisdictions in California do not guarantee a right to housing.
Governor Newsom will instruct California cities and counties on how best to ramp up enforcement on a signature issue of his administration. He also will mandate that state agencies not simply move campers along, but also work with local governments to house people and provide services into which the state has pumped billions of dollars.
“The state has been hard at work to address this crisis on our streets,” Mr. Newsom said in a statement.
“There are simply no more excuses,” he added. “It’s time for everyone to do their part.”
Mr. Newsom, who is widely viewed as having presidential aspirations, has channeled about $24 billion into homelessness since he took office in 2019. His administration says it helped move more than 165,000 homeless people into temporary or permanent housing two fiscal years ago, the most recent period for which data is available.
The governor’s directive this week follows a Supreme Court decision on June 28 that upheld an Oregon city’s ban on homeless residents sleeping outdoors. The Court of Appeal for the Ninth Circuit had found in earlier opinions that it was unconstitutional to punish people for sleeping in public spaces when they had no other legal place to spend the night.
Encampments spread as the Ninth Circuit, which covers nine Western states, limited the ability of cities to tackle homelessness with arrests and citations. Many politicians from both parties blamed the rulings, even as cities spent heavily on homeless services and affordable housing to address a suddenly visible problem. Mr. Newsom was among a host of leaders who begged the court to intervene.
The justices granted their request, taking the case that originated in Grants Pass, Ore., and subsequently ruled 6 to 3 along ideological lines that the city had not violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment by ticketing homeless campers. Advocates for homeless people denounced the decision as cruel and predicted that it would incite a “race to the bottom” as cities cracked down.
Some local leaders, including Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles, have echoed that opinion. But others have welcomed the decision.
In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed, a Democrat, said last week that city officials planned to become “very aggressive and assertive in moving encampments” starting next month and might start citing homeless people who refused offers of shelter. The Republican mayor of Lancaster, Calif., said after the ruling that his community was eager to get moving. “I’m warming up the bulldozer,” Mayor R. Rex Parris said.
Most local governments, however, have been torn since the decision over whether to aggressively enforce laws against homelessness. The Supreme Court ruling left many civil protections intact, including prohibitions on excessive fines and violations of due process, and civil liberties groups have warned local governments that they would sue over mistreatment of vulnerable people living on the street.
Research also indicates that clearing encampments may be of limited value. One recent study, by the RAND Corporation, found that dismantling them had little or no long-term effect on a city’s homeless population. Another survey, conducted last year by the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco, found that 75 percent of homeless adults in California were local residents who had become homeless in the county where they had last been housed.
Administration officials, who spoke on background because the executive order had not yet been issued, said it had been drawn up as a regulatory template for government entities that still must deal with encampments, which continue to sprawl across sidewalks, peek from rural wild lands and crop up nightly along beaches and waterways.
So many people have sought shelter near freeways, for example, that the California Department of Transportation has developed its own protocol and dedicated employees for clearing encampments. From one-person pup tents pitched near offramps to large encampments sheltering dozens of people beneath overpasses, Caltrans, as the department is known, has cleared more than 11,000 campsites since 2021, removing more than 248,000 cubic yards of debris, Newsom administration officials said.
The governor’s directive will order other state agencies — including California State Parks and the Department of Fish and Wildlife, both of which oversee immense tracts of land — to adopt versions of the approach being used at Caltrans. Under that approach, the departments will first target encampments that pose a health and safety risk. The state will provide 48 to 72 hours of advance notice, and state officials will work with local service providers to connect homeless campers with services and housing. Personal property collected at each site will be bagged, tagged and stored for at least 60 days.
Administration officials said that Caltrans could immediately accelerate enforcement and that other state agencies should have the new rules in place within a couple of weeks.
The state cannot legally force cities to adopt the Caltrans system. But Mr. Newsom and state lawmakers can pressure local leaders because they control billions of dollars of funding intended to address homelessness.
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