After the U.S. Supreme Court granted cities sweeping latest powers to clear homeless encampments last month, Governor Gavin Newsom had a transparent message for local authorities: No more excuses.
Newsom is under growing pressure to make progress on homelessness. He ordered state agencies to work with cities and counties to shut encampments and threatened to chop funding to local governments that fail to get more people off the streets.
“This is a crisis,” he told local authorities. “Behave like it.”
In the Bay Area, public response to Newsom's order and landmark ruling has varied between full-throated support and guarantees to keep up the establishment. Yet across the region, where an estimated 37,000 people were homeless ultimately count, a shift in the way in which cities are addressing homelessness is already underway.
Days after the Supreme Court allowed cities to implement camping bans without providing shelter to the homeless, San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced a high-profile crackdown on the camps, ordering officials to supply homeless people in camps bus tickets out of the town before offering them shelter. The Supreme Court ruling lifted a brief restraining order that had partially limited the town's authority to clear camps.
“We're going to be very aggressive and forceful in moving the camps, possibly even with criminal consequences,” she said at a mayoral debate earlier this month. “Thank God for the Supreme Court's change of decision.”
Though he has made fewer headlines than Breed, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan made clear in an interview that his city can be working to ramp up raids with “the goal” of providing housing for encampment residents every time possible. His office said the town plans to rent 10 more people to interrupt up the encampments and recruit additional city employees to assist with a plan to maneuver 500 homeless people from local waterways to approved campsites.
“We will continue to aggressively clear out camps that are unsafe and unsanitary,” Mahan said.
In Oakland, nevertheless, Mayor Sheng Thao said in an announcement that the Supreme Court ruling “does not change what my administration has focused on and advocated for from day one.” Instead of clearing more encampments, she emphasized efforts to create inexpensive housing.
Still, Oakland homeless activist Talya Husbands-Hankin raised concerns concerning the city's plans to update its “encampment management” policies consequently of the ruling. Officials declined to supply details concerning the potential changes.
Husbands-Hankin argued that the town's ongoing raids are already traumatic for homeless people and infrequently accomplish little aside from moving encampments from one neighborhood to a different.
“I am extremely concerned because the city’s current encampment policies have caused great harm to homeless communities across the city,” she said.
In a recently cleared encampment beneath an elevated BART track in East Oakland, Luis Baillegas was digging through a tangle of copper wires to sell as scrap metal. He was told to pack up his blue canvas tent and move on, but work crews had to date spared his dwelling. He said nobody had offered him shelter.
“For now, I’m staying here because there’s no other place I can go,” Baillegas said.
The Bay Area's smaller cities, meanwhile, have remained largely tight-lipped about their plans for encampments. But this week, East Palo Alto Mayor Antonio Lopez announced he would introduce an emergency ordinance that, if passed, would direct officials to clear encampments after homeless persons are repeatedly offered a bed in a shelter. He called on cities across the peninsula to adopt similar plans.
“We have to respond in a unified manner, we have to take a unified stance,” Lopez told local news organizations.
In Berkeley, authorities look like taking a special tack, a minimum of publicly. The city may soon consider a resolution to forestall latest fines for the homeless, at the same time as it continues to conduct raids.
“The status quo before the (Supreme Court’s) decision remains,” said Stefan Elgstrand, assistant to Mayor Jesse Arreguin.
According to a Current survey According to the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, nearly 70% of Bay Area residents said homelessness is a “major problem” within the region. Although the poll didn’t ask about clearing encampments, they found that greater than three-quarters of voters statewide support measures that provide rental subsidies to homeless families and construct more tiny-home shelters.
Experts say while drugs and mental health issues are necessary causes of homelessness, the severe lack of inexpensive housing is the fundamental reason the crisis is way worse within the Bay Area and California than in other parts of the country. High housing costs mean that low-income persons are more prone to lose their homes in the event that they lose their jobs or experience a traumatic life event. They also make it harder for people to seek out latest housing after being forced out.
Jason McDaniel, a political science professor at San Francisco State University, said that despite widespread public frustration with homelessness, authorities' differing attitudes toward the encampments can have as much to do with politics as with what they consider is sweet policy.
Mahan, then again, was easily re-elected earlier this yr. His relatively restrained response to the Supreme Court ruling could also be an indication that he’s satisfied along with his progress on homelessness and sees no must “take a position that is changing,” McDaniel said.
Meanwhile, Thao is involved in a federal corruption investigation and must face a Intensifying recall effortsFor this reason, she could also be afraid of angering her core left-wing voters, who’re largely critical of the elections.
“If you lose your core support, you have no one left,” McDaniel said.
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