The recent ruling by the US Supreme Court gave California Gov. Gavin Newsom hope. On Thursday, he signed an order telling state officials to start tearing down homeless camps.
It is now time to start tearing down thousands of camps across California. This comes after the high court sided with an Oregon city that ticketed homeless people for sleeping outside last month. The decision didn’t agree with the claims that these “anti-camping” ordinances were unfair because they were “cruel and unusual.”
In a statement, Newson said, “This executive order tells state agencies to act quickly to remove dangerous encampments and support and help the people who live in them. It also tells cities and counties how to do the same.” “There are no more excuses at all.” Everyone needs to do their part.
Officials in the state are told by the order “to adopt humane and dignified policies to urgently address encampments on state property.”
A 2023 report to Congress from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development says that California has more than 180,000 homeless people, more than any other state in the country.
The study says that there were about 653,100 homeless people in the country, which is about 12% more than in 2022.
Other cities and states are paying close attention to California’s actions after the Supreme Court ruling. Newsom’s order has angered some homeless advocates and elected officials.
“This order could have been made by Newsom before the Supreme Court decision.” “The only difference now is that states and cities can jail and confine people even when there is no shelter available,” said Chris Herring, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Before the Supreme Court decision, towns had to offer shelter to people who were camping there before they could clear them out. Now… they will be able to do these encampment sweeps with the real fear of fining people very large amounts of money that people can’t pay, which often leads to arrest, a warrant, or jail time.
Herring said it wasn’t a surprise that the order came at this time because Newsom wants to “politically clear his name of the homeless crisis, especially since he’s in the national spotlight right now because of the election.”
President of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation Michael Weinstein said that Newsom was “criminalizing poverty” and “doubling down on failed policies.” The AIDS Healthcare Foundation is the parent group of the Housing is a Human Right initiative.
“Gov. Newsom, where do you want people to go?” He said in a statement Thursday, “This is a shameful time in California history.”
A lawyer says the order is “a punch in the gut.”
A spokesman for Mayor London Breed in San Francisco said the city had already begun to move.
Someone from the group said in a statement to CNN, “Our city encampment teams and street outreach staff have been going out every day to clean up and clear encampments and bring people inside.” “This is why the number of tents on city streets is at its lowest level in five years.”
But Jennifer Friedenbach, who runs the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco, said that Newsom’s order was “a punch in the gut.”
She said that thousands of people are already waiting for housing and that all of San Francisco’s shelter beds are taken.
It sounds like they want to punish people who have no other choice, she said.
A study shows that cleanups don’t change the number of homeless people.
The number of homeless people in Los Angeles dropped for the first time in six years, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s point-in-time count that was done in January. The results came out at the end of last month. Overall, the number of homeless people and the number of homeless people who did not have a place to stay went down in both Los Angeles County and the city. The count showed that the number of homeless people in Los Angeles was down 2.2% and in the county it was down 0.27 %.
The authority said that there were still 45,253 people without homes in the city and 75,312 people without homes in the county.
“Unsheltered homelessness has gone down in Los Angeles for the first time in years,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said Thursday. “This is due to a comprehensive approach that leads with housing and services, not criminalization.”
“It doesn’t work to just move people from one neighborhood to another or give them tickets instead of housing.”
A new study from the Center on Housing and Homelessness at the Rand Corp. found that efforts to clear out Los Angeles’s homeless camps did not have any long-term effect on the number of people living on the streets.
The study looked at cleanups of encampments in Venice, Hollywood, and Los Angeles’s Skid Row. It said that they “observed temporary declines in the unsheltered population that lasted two to three months on average” before going back to normal levels.
The study found that when encampments were taken down in Venice, “the share of unhoused people living literally unsheltered (e.g., without a tent) increased from 20% to 46%.”
Last month, Newsom said that the high court’s decision was good because it “gives state and local officials the definitive authority to implement and enforce policies to clear unsafe encampments from our streets.”
Newsom said, “This decision gets rid of the legal ambiguities that have held local officials back for years and made it hard for them to take commonsense steps to protect the safety and well-being of our communities.”
The case was the most important one concerning homeless Americans to come before the Supreme Court in many years.
Barger, who is the supervisor of LA County, said that Newsom “rightly points out that local government remains in charge of removing homeless encampments.”
Barger said in a statement, “Cities have an obligation to come up with housing and shelter solutions along with the support services that County government offers.” “This method, which is mainly based on partnerships, is the only way to get long-lasting results.” That can’t be done by a single thing.