In Ordering Sweep of Homeless Encampments, Governor Newsom Is Making the Crisis Worse

By Piper French / Nation Magazine / August 1, 2024

California’s two most marginalized constituencies, its homeless and its imprisoned, each represent about half a percentage of the state’s 39 million residents. Both groups are vulnerable to abuse and untimely death, suffer from the deprivation of vital resources, and have little say in political discussions about their future. Black people are notably overrepresented in each category.

There is a reason the latter population passes basically unremarked upon and why the former is considered the marquee problem of the state, synonymous with the supposed crisis of California itself, mocked endlessly by the right, and invoked as a reason for the so-called “California exodus” of businesses and working residents. It’s quite simple: We can all see how bad it is. Most Californians will never set foot inside a prison or a jail, but the blunt reality of the homelessness crisis is in all of our faces; it testifies from our sidewalks and street corners, our underpasses and our parks. In a way, it’s fitting that those who have failed to meet the punishing requirements for even renting an apartment in this state should pitch their tents on public land. Their presence there attests to a communal failure that cannot be ignored.

Housing people is one way to remove them from sight, but it is slow, painstaking work, and officials’ preferred method has often been something brisker: the encampment sweep. This is magical thinking as policy—the idea that homelessness can be addressed by simply seizing unhoused people’s possessions, jettisoning their makeshift structures, and forcing them to move on down the road. Sometimes, sweeps come with civil or criminal penalties: San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria has made a policy of “progressive enforcement,” or arresting homeless people to compel them into shelter. “If they don’t want to use them, it’s a free country, I understand that,” he has said. “But it’s not without consequences.”

Sweeps happen every day, on streets across the state, as a matter of course. But last week, their flawed and brutish logic was ratified at the highest levels of California government when Governor Gavin Newsom used his executive power to order officials across the state to clear homeless encampments from public land.

Newsom’s order follows the recent Grants Pass v. Johnson Supreme Court decision, which held that citing homeless people for sleeping outdoors is not a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, even if those people have nowhere else to go. Some state agencies under the governor’s command are primed to act immediately. And while the governor cannot force local officials to clear encampments in their cities, his dictate heaps additional pressure on them. “No more excuses…. Now it’s time for locals to do their job,” Newsom wrote in a tweet accompanying the announcement. Certain leaders, like Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who has made a transitional-housing initiative her calling card, albeit with limited success, may be reluctant to ramp up removal and enforcement efforts. Others, like San Francisco’s London Breed, who has used her public position to realize what appears to be a personal desire to never cast her gaze upon a homeless person existing in public, will be eager to follow suit. “San Francisco is already doing what the Governor is calling for,” she wrote last Thursday.

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Piper French is a writer in Los Angeles.