Homeless camps are dirty. And it’s ugly. And it seems unsafe to those who venture near them, and even those who live there.
They are also a last resort place for those who, sadly, accidentally, have not panned out. We tend to throw homeless people into soup pots along with mental illness and drug use, but the scary fact is that almost half of our streets were over 50 years old and got caught up in it.
“At the end of the day, we don’t have enough housing, so we have a homeless crisis,” Margot Kushel said. She is a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco and is director of UCSF’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. No one in the state has a better understanding of the camp and its residents.
That’s why I’m deeply disappointed in Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday encouraging cities and counties to ban camps. California is one step closer to criminalizing homelessness.
Or how politically convenient it is.
“It’s time to get back on the streets, it’s time to get back on the sidewalks, it’s time to bring in these camps and offer alternatives,” says Newsom. “It simply cannot continue. It becomes a street, sidewalk, almost permanent structure, blocking pedestrians, impeding children’s ability to walk on the streets and strollers, and to the ability of seniors with disabilities and wheelchairs to navigate the sidewalk. It cannot continue.”
From a political standpoint, that tirade becomes a spot. The clock is already inscribed in the midterm of 2026, coinciding with the end of his tenure as a California leader. Newsom, whether it’s the next move for the president, is not only focusing on the horizon, but also on the state of California, but also on whether it can be used once more as an example of all the wrong America, as Trump and his supporters did in both 2020 and 2024.
Even Kushel, who is near the Daily, hearing the heartbreaking reasons why people are homeless, knows that camp is not the answer.
“I think camping is a disaster,” she said. “I want to go away from them and me.”
But they’re not making the price of making things worse, and they’re destroying people without a place to put them. Newsom’s draft ordinance tells a great story about not criminalizing people, but it does not require more than “any reasonable effort” to provide shelter to those who are evacuated.
He also talks about good things about not throwing away someone else’s belongings. Perhaps unless they have insects or feces.
That constant loss, constant movement not only brings people back to their originality, but it breaks trust and drives people out of society invisible. So, by the time you have shelter beds and treatment centres, you have lost cooperation from the people you want to help. If it’s more invisible, the homeless becomes even more dystopian.
“I’m actually worried about making people move every day and blackmailing them with arrests. All of this makes the problem worse and doesn’t improve,” Kushel said.
This new era of compassionate repression may remind us that after the Supreme Court has ruled in grant pass and Johnson, it is not a cruel and extraordinary punishment to ban public camping. Newsom’s office has submitted a summary to acquire the city of Grants Pass Pass in Oregon and support more enforcement. Since then, Newsom has also led camera crews, but has cleared more than 16,000 camps on state land.
Several cities follow suit with their own strict laws, including San Jose. However, other cities have been greatly resisting Newsom’s disappointment.
With Grant Pass, things weren’t going as planned. Now, there is an injunction against enforcement of camp laws after the rights of people with disabilities that Oregon sued the city. Tom Stenson, the group’s assistant legal director, told me that the organization has seen how camping laws are difficult for people with physical or mental disabilities.
When the residential crunch crashed into the state, the low-rent location where his plaintiff lived, “it disappeared, but then there’s nowhere they’re going.
California’s struggle over homelessness has been a soft spot with black eyes and controversy for many years, and even the most sympathetic of Californians are tired of the squatter and pain. A recent poll by Politico and the Citrine Research Center in Berkeley, California, found that about 37% of voters would support arrests if they refused to accept shelter, and that number flew for male voters and Republicans.
The homeless man undoubtedly says, “the problem that defines Californian anger and frustration more than anything else.”
On the same day, Newsom unveiled his legal template for liquidating the camp, and announced $3.3 billion in funding for 124 mental health facilities in the state. Money from voter-passed last year’s proposal 1, adding 5,000 residential treatment beds and over 21,000 outpatient slots to the struggling system of mental health and substance abuse treatment.
The grant includes $65 million for Los Angeles to renovate its Metropolitan State Hospital campus in Norwalk into a psychiatric subacute facility for young people in the transition era.
To steal from the history lessons Newsom gave, the state in 1959 had 37,000 mental health beds in a facility that inspired him to “fly over a cuckoo’s nest.” Not ideal.
So the state left with them through a series of necessary reforms. But it never created a community-based system that was promised. California is now overcrowded, understaffed, outdated prisons and prisons with 5,500 locked beds and our de facto mental health treatment center and the streets. Not ideal.
This investment in a robust community care system that offers both substance abuse and mental health treatment in one place is a major victory for all Californians and will become a game-changer in about ten years. Newsom optimistically showed a substantial rendering of the facility being constructed with the funds. But people, buildings take time.
Still, Newsom should receive all the credits to take on issues that have been ignored for decades and are doing meaningful things around them. I have seen him act thoughtfully, discreetly and powerfully on the issue of homelessness.
This makes the camp more clearly political and makes the right-wing swing even more definitely political and unworthy of our policies.
Despite these camps, homelessness in California is actually getting better, but you have to get past the numbers to see it. Last year, there were 187,000 homeless people living in the state, according to federal government data. About 70% of those people lived unsheltered lives in Los Angeles with over 45,000 people.
The number of people living without a home is overwhelming, but represents an increase of about 3% compared to an increase of about 18% nationwide. Not in California, not nationwide, but families have increased by the largest year.
So what we do is work with a policy of prioritizing housing and meeting people where they are. What Newsom did to build a community care system is outdated and innovative.
However, the fact remains that there are not enough homes in California. Clearing the camp may be a political solution to an ugly problem.
But if there’s no place to move people, it’s just optical.
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