California Gov Newsom issues executive order for removal of homeless encampments
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kcra.com
That unyieldingness, in the case of homelessness, has led to ridiculous asks, e.g. treating any law enforcement against anyone homeless as criminalising poverty. Given the bloc is unwilling to compromise, it’s not a surprise that the centre is now shifting to those on the right. Hence, the policy whipsaw from focussing on there being homeless people to the problems that causes.
A person is defined in effect by someone who has a permanent address, a government issued I.D, birth certificate, social security card, and a bank account with money.
If you lack any of those you are "sub citizen" status and you must go through a broken by design process to try to reacquire any of them. If you have lost most of them due to theft or otherwise no direct fault of your own you are now the same as any other "illegal citizen".
You are required to prove to your own country you are a citizen. Unconstitutional and fascist it may be, that's what your politicians have done.
Combine this with the general socioeconomic failure of large cities, combined with the gamified system of capital held in speculative markets, combined with social media technology that has destroyed culture - you get exactly what you'd expect.
It's the system working as intended for the wealthy. There's plenty of solutions but people are comfortable to not bite the hand that feeds them, even if it means living in fear as a slave to their whims.
It used to be that people were self employed. They owned their own business's. Until the rules were changed and scale became optimal.
The primary solution is to nullify the rules that optimize for scale and make it optimal for individual small domestic business owners.
Nullify most taxes, completely remove Medicare and other "old people" funds. The standard stuff every economist has been saying to do but the game players don't like.
Sure, the authorities can force all the people off their "campsites" and send all their belongings to the dump. But you've still obviously got the homeless person there, in a more vulnerable position than they were before.
Most will hopefully wind up in shelters.
It’s not like they get their own little studio apartment, and even then most would forbid illicit drugs.
Given that many homeless are also dealing with addiction, there may be sufficient shelter space yet still they choose the freedom of a tent or street life.
That all said, I would be surprised if there is enough capacity, but that is a solvable problem, probably not cheap.
It'd be possible to build tiny/modular complexes, which would be very expensive (but CA spend tens of billions with nothing to show), that could stem some of the tide with a bit of effort. But it needs to be located close to reasonable public transportation to other areas where work can be found if/when people are ready to get off the drugs or otherwise get life together.
That doesn't even begin to cover psychological and police needs. The amount of assault, rape and theft in homeless communities is massively disproportionate to the general public. There's also the medical needs, which are significant.
I mean yes, a lot of those people were literally shipped there from the rust belt or southern states. Famously Texas and company paying to bus or fly people to California and Massachusetts. I believe several of them were major press events etc - not a secret either.
You are correct.
They are small, you cannot keep stuff there, and you have to follow rules.
Camping represents the middle class of homelessness and is seen as a step up. It fulfills the desire for autonomy and is often the most comfortable long-term situation for people engaging in it.
It also has negative externalities which cannot be ignored.
> you cannot keep stuff there
If you are already low on belongings, having the rest of your stuff be stolen is not worth sleeping in a shelter
Pets often cannot be kept in shelters. This is huge, give up your dog just to stay in a shelter for one night?
> homeless or otherwise people do not like staying in shelters
They are unpleasant and often unsafe. Theft & violence are common. Many have really gnarly intake processes where you wait in line for hours to only find out after nightfall if you are going to have space or not.
I know the foster care system is terrible, but certainly better than the streets.
I think it's normal to want to the kids provided for even if the parents can't be helped. I just don't think the foster system could handle them all. I'd much rather see the problems leading to homelessness addressed than see the US try to get the foster system prepared to deal with the massive number of kids who don't have a stable home. It's hard to get numbers for homeless populations in general, but roughly, each year one out of every 30 children in the US is homeless.
Fortunately, a lot of that is short term homelessness. A family might only need a few weeks of living in a shelter or out of their car to get back on their feet. I'm not sure how much it would help in a case like that. If we had a better handle on homelessness in the US though, I'd agree that in many cases it would be better to take the kids into foster care.
Sadly, homelessness is at an all time high in the US. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rent-homelessness-harvard-repor...) and I don't see that changing any time soon. Evictions are at record highs in many cities and counties too and that's absolutely going to put more children out on the street.
I wouldn't expect a city or state to have shelters on the level of a Ritz, but I wouldn't consider anything with fewer basics than a state penitentiary to count either.
If you can't keep belongings there, that doesn't meet the bar of "better than a prison". Having to follow the rules seems reasonable, but the rules similarly should meet the bar of not being worse rules than we force on inmates.
No. In 2023, California had about 180,000 homeless people [1] and fewer than 140,000 beds [2].
[1] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2023-...
[2] https://homelessstrategy.com/how-many-total-temporary-and-pe...
Unfortunately, we've now learned the 'most right' (or, alternatively, 'least wrong') answer to your question of "what happens to the people" probably should be different for each locale. There are only a few places that tried some things which seemed to maybe move outcomes at least in the right direction. These usually involved unique combinations of different things which were highly localized and specific to the context of that city and determined in near-real-time by people working that locale's specific set of challenges hands-on every day.
Bottom line: currently there is no set of state-wide (or even county-wide) policies that work across all locales. Persistent long-term "Homelessness" is a broad symptom with a wide variety of different possible root causes. Frankly, the best thing to do at this moment is stop trying to solve it with state-wide policies and instead empower cities and their local agencies to find the most effective approaches for their unique local causes.
It's a "kick-the-can-down-the-road" solution either way. Can you enumerate other strategies that are part of the bold new thinking?
My estimation, the real bold new thinking are things like universal housing, UBI, and/or even more basic things like expanding shelters & making those reliable and safe places to be. All of these things require funds, and seemingly West Coast Americans don't want to pay for it. And so, the can is kicked.
I'm aware of a few things that were attempted in Seattle. Notably 'tiny-home-communities', which had some success. Though the rising land value where they were built displaced those communities and they were never rebuilt [1].
Which goes to my point, the real "bold" thinking was hardly ever truly attempted anywhere. Pausing sweeps is just kicking the can down the road, and I don't think many people were pretending that was an actual "bold solution." Arguably just a best of worst-options.
Though, while we differ in our perceptions of what has been attempted, and how sincerely those efforts were made - we agree on solutions. The solutions require serious efforts from a very empowered local community (which would imply state funding to support those efforts).
[1] https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/what-happened-to-south-lak...
The level of addiction is crazy. I think a lot of people should volunteer a few times with a feed the homeless or similar charity and actually talk to some of these people before suggesting definitive answers. Most solutions simply won't work with the strings often attached.
I don't think shipping people all over the country is a good solution... I do think that building a lot of cheap housing (the projected costs someone mentioned, like $1.4m per dwelling seems insane). Modular construction designs should be possible to deliver 1br or studio homes with a 3/4 bath and kitchenette for under $150k each relatively easily, including transport and final assembly.
It is really hard for me to understand that level of addiction or dissociation, but I've definitely seen it.
So for a local government that had the money in hand, it has built 4 highly contested tiny homes after 4 years that the people moving in will have to pay rent on. This, proclaimed by the mayor, will really help get people off the streets in our city. It feels like la la land.
I live in Northern California in the middle of ground zero for this issue. Ten years ago I would have agreed fully with what you wrote. But since then I've been paying very close attention to how this has all unfolded at the state, regional and local levels. I also happen to have a lot of social contacts who work at the city and country levels in the agencies directly responsible for dealing with homelessness, ranging from social workers to funding agencies to law enforcement.
Based on what I've seen in my community, in the media and what my friends who are directly involved have told me privately (which is more frank and somewhat different than what their agencies say publicly), my opinion has changed. Most fundamentally, I now understand that "homelessness" shouldn't ever be thought of as a single issue because there are vastly different kinds with different causes, consequences, costs and possibility of remedies. Most of the serious societal problems related to homelessness come from the particular subset which are chronically unhoused and treatment resistant, primarily due to chronic substance abuse and mental illness. Sadly, for many of this type, there are no consistently effective solutions - and no amount of funding can reliably solve it at scale - because any lasting solution requires first solving the underlying chronic addiction and/or mental illness. Unfortunately, these are wickedly complex, deeply individual problems and lasting solutions require making difficult "no win, lesser of evils" choices more related to morality than politics. Respecting an individual's right of self-determination can quickly conflict with their right to choose self-destruction.
I now understand that there ARE no "good solutions" to this type of chronic homelessness. Even if you or I were anointed "king of the world" and given virtually unlimited funding, at best, things might be a little better but the fundamental underlying causes would still remain unsolved. All solutions which might make a substantial, long-term improvement on chronic addiction and mental illness at scale involve moral positions I could not personally enforce on other people, such as forced treatment, conditionally withholding treatment or actively enabling essentially "slow-motion suicide" (as a social worker friend of mine called it).
He also told me the number one source of calls they get reporting homeless trouble come from their "regular" long-term homeless calling the police because a new homeless person is causing trouble like stealing from or fighting other homeless people or committing crime or perhaps behaving erratically due to mental illness. These "regular" homeless call and report this because they know sufficient disruption brings "heat" down since the police will have to respond. In fact, the "regulars" have the direct mobile phone numbers of officers on the homeless team just for this purpose.
I asked my friend about the scenario where a single-mom loses her job suddenly, can't make rent and ends up sleeping in her car with a kid. He told me when that happens, his officers have a budget to put that newly homeless, non-violent, non-addicted person up in a local hotel and they do it immediately, that night. No paperwork, no trip to the station. They get them off the street ASAP and then coordinate with local halfway houses which have dedicated family space and specific programs to put these at-risk people back in jobs and get them on a path to stability again. They act quickly because they've learned there's a limited window of time where they can get a newly homeless person turned around with high probability of success.
I can't speak to every locale in California but in our region at least, I now understand the primary issue behind persistent, problematic homelessness is not lack of beds or lack of funding. Non-violent, non-addicted people here have options and if someone wants help and is willing to abide by a few minimal rules (primarily to prevent harm to others seeking help), there is ample help available.
The flip side is, a significant majority of the issue comes down to drug addiction, from which any prescribed solution is likely to fail.
I'm not sure what the best answer is... but even relatively low cost studio apartments may be an answer. Something between a dorm and an apartment. Even then, the costs are extremely high, and in areas of excess NIMBYism and legislation regarding any construction both of which are heavy in California, it's harder still.
There's a pilot program by DignityMoves consisting of pre-fabbed tiny homes, but it has only a handful of units.
The other side, is even in clearing out parks, and encampments it would help if there were a place to go. There are a lot of issues, and having worked with homeless charity groups, drug addiction is at the center of most of it... you can't really force someone to get and stay clean... The system needs some form of outlet.
So, clear out the parks and the streets if you want. Where are they going to go?
(But of course it's not that simple, because even if you have an idea of where you want them to go, they may well choose to go somewhere else. So what you really need is to have somewhere for them to go, and for that somewhere to be perceived by them to be better than where they are now.)
And I didn't suggest that you did.
What I was trying to say is, if you (some "you", not you username tracker1) advocate for clearing out the encampments but don't have a clear idea of where they're actually going to go, you're going to be unpleasantly surprised by what happens.
Note the word "actually". Not what you want them to do in some idealized world. What the actual homeless people we have are going to actually do.
Other place they might go is prison. Which is a shame because the nature of socially reforming a non-homed person is not the same as socially reforming a non-non-crime committing person.
Thing about homeless and drug use is dopamine rewiring. Hard drugs hit dopamine hard. A warm house, fresh cup of coffee, warm clean bed and blanket, that sounds nice, but if your dopamine requirement is 9999999 only more hard drugs will give joy. Part of me would love to see a drug that reset dopamine, part of me would hate it because it might make the ultimate drug.
Of course the other disease with homeless is hard psychiatric illness, and we have medicines for it.
Surprised by how brazen the message is.
1. California was ground zero for some of the more supposedly 'enlightened' approaches to the homelessness problem with both substantial, sustained funding and strong local political support for non-enforcement. After nearly a decade of such experiments, the evidence they've made the situation dramatically worse is obvious and undeniable, even to those who were open-minded and supportive of trying these approaches.
2. Newsom clearly has national political ambitions as the next step in his career and much of what he does lately is in service of optics in that direction.
Homelessness has been polling as urgent in California for over a year, particularly among Democrats [1]. It's why Prop 1 narrowly passed despite being a bond measure [2].
[1] https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3868
[2] https://calmatters.org/politics/elections/2024/03/election-r...
Most European countries have worse homelessness rates than California but you would never believe it because they heavily police camping in major cities. In comparison, San Francisco used to be an international gem but its reputation is too well known.
I'm particular curious how really large European cities compare to their west coast equivalents and also the midsize equivalents compare.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/they-have-homelessness-in-europ...
It's hard to put a number on how much reputation damage the homelessness issue has caused California, but it's probably some amount over $1.
The city-by-city comparison I think is really the interesting metric. Homelessness is not equally distributed in America and I to my understanding European countries as well.
Paris: 150,000 (~8%) homeless people [1], total population: 2.161M (2019) [2]
Berlin: 30,000 (~1%) homeless people (with about 6k living in the street unsheltered) [2] , total population: 3.645 million (2019) [3]
Los Angeles: 75,000 (~2%) [4], total population: 3.822 million (2022)
New York: 350,000 (~4%) [5], total population: 8.336 million (2022)
San Francisco: 8,000 (~1%) [6], total population: 808,437 (2022)
San Luis Obispo: 1,175 (~2%) [7], total population: 48,341 (2022)
Rome: 8,000 (~0.2%) [8], total population: 2.873M (2017)
SF & LA are both well below NY & Paris, even as a rate; yet seemingly LA & SF have a worse reputational problem. I was told the big difference in NY vs West Coast is that NY has made a lot of shelter space and has a more functional shelter system. I suspect this is perhaps the big difference - adequate and a functional shelter system, rather than enforcement & sweeps. The two perhaps go hand-in-hand, sweeps are not effective if there is nowhere to go. If there are lots of shelters, a functioning shelter system, then sweeps conceivably have a chance to have a lasting (and positive) impact.
I'm having a tough time finding good counts of available shelter space.
Rome is for sure a standout. Trying to find shelter space counts there, there are lots of hits for things like "A new shelter for the homeless in the heart of Rome" [9]
I think overall there is evidence here to suggest it is more a functioning shelter system that has a bigger impact on homelessness compared to sweeps. What is more, there is evidence as well that homelessness rates are a function of both sweeps and the shelter system.
We're still also not getting into some other variables, like healthcare costs (a big driver for homelessness in the US, per my understanding), social safety nets, etc..
Overall, given this data, I don't think it is just a matter of enforcing sweeps/camping vs not. Do you still hold that opinion? If so, what function do you think shelters have in the equation? (The biggest problem with the data I presented is teasing out how much of that homeless population is sheltered vs unsheltered. It appears that places in Europe, like Berlin & Rome that have large shelter systems, fare the best. If it were a matter of just sweeps, then seemingly Paris would do much better than it does)
[1] https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/social-cleansing-to-make...
[2] https://www.german-times.com/with-the-us-as-a-role-model-ber...
[3] Google search: Berlin population
[4] https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/2024-greater-los-an...
[5] https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/basic-facts-about-ho...
[6] https://www.sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-populat...
[7] https://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/article289037219.ht...
[8] https://www.feantsa.org/download/it-proof-read-new-template1...
[9] https://www.orderofmalta.int/news/new-shelter-homeless-heart...
It's not about the absolute number of homeless as it is about the public perception of homeless. The reason California has a "homelessness" crisis and France does not is that France keeps it at the periphery and tourists never see it.
Paris homeless point in time count of 4,227 in January 2024 [1] France for individuals living rough 141,500 [2]
[1] https://www.sortiraparis.com/en/news/in-paris/articles/24790....
[2] https://redcross.eu/projects/mobile-teams-assisting-homeless...
My understanding is that a number of jurisdictions saw no point to round up a person's few possessions and put them in jail for a month. Places that have paused and/or resumed that model (and many places on west coast never paused sweeps at all)- all really saw no difference. The people are going to be somewhere. My perspective, few root cause solutions were even attempted and the problem has just gotten out of hand. Which is to say, the enforcement is a surface level action, experimenting with pausing that was also a superficial experiment as well.
San Francisco has open hard drug use. There was a time when suggesting that at some point in the intervention chain arrest should be at least be considered was treated as abhorrent.
One correction if I may, SF had open hard drug use - that policy was reversed. Is that correct? I'm looking at: [1]
> There was a time when suggesting that at some point in the intervention chain arrest should be at least be considered was treated as abhorrent.
I acknowledge this. I think I understand the perspective. I would tend to agree too. It's one thing to say "hey, criminilization is a whack-a-mole game, we're really just wasting money and not helping anyone" vs a very extreme version of that with zero enforcement in-all-cases no matter what.
One thing I've learned recently though is that CA has dumped some pretty serious money into the problem. It reads as those attempts were ineffective for a number of other reasons.
My perspective, from Seattle, where the whack-a-mole policies have been lessened & there has been no serious money to back a sustained solution. It's seemingly a very different situation.
Though, even still, we may have the possible biggest difference in perspective in viewing the desired intent from whack-a-mole criminilization. I don't think anyone was really calling the pause of that type of enforcement as an actual solution. Yet, CA was backing up the rhetoric with money for other programs.
So, namely, putting a person in jail does not really alter behavior & a criminal record arguably worsens the situation. I'm not aware of anyone claiming that to be a true solution. Yet, to your point, an extreme view of no-enforcement I would agree has unintended consequences.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-crac...
"53 people were arrested for public drug use. Eleven were cited for misdemeanors and 42 were booked into jail for temporary detention. The mayor's office said none of them accepted offers of treatment upon their release."
> CA has dumped some pretty serious money into the problem
It's terribly tracked [1]. Like, the transient homeless population is both sympathetic and solvable. They should be the priority. Unfortunately, it's been impossible to say that until recently because you'd get shot down for leaving the drug addicted and mentally ill homeless behind. So you wind up with processes and facilities that are all hardened for the 10% most extreme, expensive and damaging homeless. (Plus, of course, corruption.)
[1] https://calmatters.org/housing/homelessness/2024/04/californ...
Can you give references/citations and/or examples of these programs? Particularly the ones that received sustained funding and how much funding that was per person? I'm aware of small anecdotal examples, but the funding was always just minimal. My understanding is it requires at least around $10k/person/year, a couple hundred per person does not move the needle.
My 2 cents, I feel like the West Coast could solve the problem if there were appetite to raise & spend the money. A 1% wealth tax on the value of cars over 100k and homes over 10M likely would solve the problem overnight - but is there political appetite to do that? No.
The 10B number is even low! It appears that CA spent 20B over the last 5 years [2], $42,000 per homeless person. [1]
The part I find really interesting, is the per-capita spend amount. California has a population of 39M, and spent 20B per five years, that is a $1000 per capita (per year) amount. In contrast, that number in Seattle is a meager $148, and across the lake from Seattle, in Bellevue that drops to $21 [3]
I'm really shocked at the per-capita spend difference. My impression was that in Seattle the policies don't work because there is no money behind it and an inadequate and broken shelter system. The data from CA - shows that money alone is not enough.
My takeaway, actual housing first, a well functioning shelter system do still seem to me to be biggest key to the problem. Clearly though, throwing money at the issue is not sufficient.
[1] https://calmatters.org/commentary/2023/07/something-clearly-...
[2] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-04-09/state-au...
[3] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/does-seat...
"More than 69,000 homeless residents live in Los Angeles County, for instance, but that county has just over 21,000 beds in shelters and temporary housing programs. It’s a similar story in Sacramento County, which counted nearly 9,300 unhoused residents in its last census, but has just over 3,000 shelter and temporary housing beds." (https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/05/california-homeless-h...)
I'm not sure what's 'enlightened' about not providing spaces for homeless people before you bulldoze over their tents and what few possessions they have.
He says "We’ve provided the funds." but clearly they were either inadequate or went into someone's pocket and not towards giving these people somewhere to go.
This is quite a bit of money -- about $1.47m per unit.
Anyway and finally, after metropolitan cities in California are now used to visually represent slums, this has been issued.
I hope that metropolitan cities in California can become clean and safe again.
The city is small and there are concentrations of dangerous/dirty that need to change, no question. We also have an organized crime problem with tons of car break ins. There is plenty that needs serious work (but that has been true everywhere I've lived as well).
I don't live downtown or in the tenderloin so I have a very different experience from someone living/visiting there but, anecdotally, I consider my experience living in this city both safe and clean.
Who is providing those near $1.5m/ea units?
Which is $500k/unit, which doesn't seem out of the question, given how expensive the Bay Area is.Though you'd hope with economies of scale you could get it down lower.
Peter Gregory seems to be the mannerisms of Elon and the outlook/values of Peter Thiel.
There's also Action Jack based off of Neutron Jack (Jack Welch) with a bit of Steve Ballmer.
Gavin Belson has to be based heavily off of Gavin Newsom's mannerisms and looks, along with being a mashup of other CEOs like Larry Page.
Mike Judge barely changes the names, I guess no-one was getting the references :)
The state is a patchwork of welcoming, and rejecting of the unhoused. Until there's a uniform policy in one direction or the other, the people affected by these policies, are just going to get harassed and chased around the state.
Nothing is going to happen.
But the worst part about homelessness is the quality of life for homeless people -- full stop. Framing the problem of homelessness as a financial burden of much wealthier property owners dehumanizes the people most affected by homelessness and perpetuates the lack of effort to address the problem.