Gov. Gavin Newsom plans to escalate California’s push to eradicate homeless encampments on Monday, calling on hundreds of cities, towns and counties to effectively ban tent camps on sidewalks, bike paths, parklands and other types of public property.
Mr. Newsom’s administration has raised and spent tens of billions of dollars on programs to bring homeless people into housing and to emphasize treatment. But his move on Monday marks a tougher approach to one of the more visible aspects of the homelessness crisis. The governor has created a template for a local ordinance that municipalities can adopt to outlaw encampments and clear existing ones.
California is home to about half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless population, a visible byproduct of the temperate climate and the state’s brutal housing crisis. Last year, a record 187,000 people were homeless in the state, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. Two-thirds were living unsheltered in tents, cars or outdoors.
Mr. Newsom cannot force cities to pass his model ban, but its issuance coincides with the release of more than $3 billion in state-controlled housing funds that local officials can use to put his template in place. And though it’s not a mandate, the call to outlaw encampments statewide by one of the best-known Democrats in the country suggests a shift in the party’s approach to homelessness.
Once a combative champion of liberal policies and a vocal Trump administration critic, Mr. Newsom has been stress-testing his party’s positions, to the point of elevating the ideas of Trump supporters on his podcast. The liberal approach to encampments has traditionally emphasized government-funded housing and treatment, and frowned on what some call criminalizing homelessness.
The model ordinance Mr. Newsom wants local officials to adopt does not specify criminal penalties, but outlawing homeless encampments on public property makes them a crime by definition. Cities would decide on their own how tough the penalties should be, including arrests or citations to those who violate the ban. The template’s state-issued guidance says that no one “should face criminal punishment for sleeping outside when they have nowhere else to go.”
Frustration with the persistence of homelessness has been rising, both within the Newsom administration and among many Californians.
Although California’s homeless population — like its overall population — remains the nation’s largest, federal data released in January showed an increase in 2024 of 3 percent in the state’s homeless numbers, compared with a rise of more than 18 percent across the United States. And the number of homeless veterans and chronically homeless people declined.
But encampments, which proliferated during the coronavirus pandemic as social distancing emptied public spaces, have remained a widespread problem in Southern California, the Central Valley, the San Francisco Bay Area and the Sacramento region. And an apparent disconnect has emerged between many of California’s elected officials and the state’s fed-up residents.
Nearly 40 percent of the state’s Democrat-dominated electorate said they were so weary of squalid settlements overtaking parks and blocking sidewalks that they supported the arrest of homeless campers if they refused shelter, according to a poll last month by Politico and the Jack Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of California, Berkeley. At the same time, a companion survey in the Democrat-led state showed that nearly half of California’s policy leaders and elected officials opposed addressing encampments with law enforcement.
Previously, federal courts had ruled that punishing people for sleeping on public property was “cruel and unusual,” and therefore unconstitutional. That legal landscape changed last year after a Supreme Court decision empowered governments to penalize people for sleeping in parks, on sidewalks and in other public areas.
The Newsom administration seized on the Supreme Court ruling swiftly, ordering state agencies to begin humanely clearing encampments from state parks and freeway underpasses, and urging cities to do the same in local jurisdictions.
Some did, addressing encampments with varying degrees of compassion and aggression.
Long Beach began clearing camps within weeks, urging homeless people to accept shelter and treatment but also threatening to cite and arrest occupants of recurrent encampments. Fresno made it a misdemeanor to sit, lie, sleep or camp in public places. The San Jose City Council is weighing a proposal by its Democratic mayor, Matt Mahan, to arrest homeless people if they refuse shelter three times.
But many California politicians have balked. Some worry about further traumatizing homeless people with citations, arrests and jail time. Some fear that a wrong word in a local law will still invite advocates for homeless people to sue them.
Some say a hard line is unnecessary. The Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, has pointed out that her signature program to move people voluntarily out of tent camps and into motel rooms and interim shelters has helped log the first double-digit drop in street homelessness in the city in nearly a decade.
Still, other policymakers — in Los Angeles County, for instance — note both the shortage of safe shelter spaces and the complexity of ramping up new programs. They contend that the state needs to fund even more housing and treatment than Mr. Newsom has pushed for. Until that happens, they say, arresting, citing and rousting people in tent camps only torments vulnerable people and moves the problem around.
Despite public pressure to address camps from San Diego to Eureka — and billions of dollars in state funding to do so — only about a tenth of the state’s 500 or so cities and counties have enacted new camping restrictions, according to data from the National Homelessness Law Center in Washington. And many municipalities have resisted adding shelter space.
The state funding the governor has released along with his initiative amounts to $3.3 billion in state-controlled money to expand local housing and treatment for homeless people with serious mental and behavioral health problems. The money, from a $6.4 billion state bond, was approved by voters last year.
“There are no more excuses,” Governor Newsom said in a statement accompanying the ordinance. “Local leaders asked for resources — we delivered the largest state investment in history. They asked for legal clarity — the courts delivered. Now, we’re giving them a model they can put to work immediately, with urgency and humanity, to resolve encampments and connect people to shelter, housing and care.”
The governor’s municipal template is based on the state’s protocol for deterring homeless encampments on state land and roadways. It would explicitly make it illegal “to construct, place or maintain on public property any semi-permanent structure.”
It also would outlaw camping on public property for more than three consecutive days or nights within 200 feet of a single location. And it would make it illegal “to sit, sleep, lie or camp on any public street, road or bike path, or on any sidewalk in a manner that impedes passage.”
The model ordinance requires cities to “make every reasonable effort” to offer shelter or housing and give homeless people at least 48 hours’ notice before clearing an encampment and to properly store any belongings that are moved.
Administration officials have said the California Highway Patrol, which enforces the state’s encampment cleanups, has rarely had to arrest recalcitrant campers. When it has, they said, it has generally been for an assortment of misdemeanor charges such as trespassing or obstructing or delaying peace officers who are performing official duties. The ordinance specifies that officers may also enforce other city or state laws, including laws governing the use of controlled substances or weapons, fire codes and public nuisance laws.
The accompanying state-issued guidance calls the ordinance “a starting point that jurisdictions may build from” and points out that it draws from an approach the state has used since July 2021. That approach, state officials said, has cleared more than 16,000 encampments and over 311,873 cubic yards of debris from freeway underpasses and other state property.
