From Governing / May 12, 2026
It’s a warm April day, bordering on hot, with the midday sun overhead. Still, Savannah Flores stays beneath a black tarp she has fashioned into a tent. If she tries to climb out, she says, it might collapse. So she agrees to talk through a small hole in the plastic.
Two or three days a week, she says, city crews sweep through this half-block stretch of 17th Street. The roughly two dozen people who usually camp there get 24 hours’ notice to pack up. Flores, 35, has been homeless for about a year. Whenever police come to clear out the area, she goes around the corner and returns later.
“They come and they treat us pretty much like we’re part of the trash,” she says. “They tell us to disappear somewhere, to be invisible.”
Valeria Burton, 66, who camps a few blocks away, moves her things across the street when crews show up. With the swelling in her feet, it’s the farthest she can go. It’s been nearly three years since the San Diego City Council narrowly passed its Unsafe Camping Ordinance, which bans overnight camping on public property when a shelter bed is available and sets rules for how the city can enforce and abate encampments.
The city has carried out more than 16,000 encampment abatements in the nearly three years since the law took effect. During that time, the city’s unsheltered population fell slightly, by less than 5%. The median monthly count of homeless people living downtown had fallen by half two years after the ordinance as hundreds of people moved into city-run secure sleeping sites. Now fewer are being counted as living in public areas.
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