Gov. Gavin Newsom appeared this week wearing work gloves and Ray-Ban sunglasses as he hauled a garbage bag from under a freeway overpass in California. His message was obvious: He wanted state and local officials to clear out homeless encampments, just as he was doing, and he had signed an executive order to spur them into action.
“There are no longer any excuses,” Newsom said in a video statement released Thursday and filmed at an encampment where everything from a box fan to a plastic kiddie pool had been stashed.
Hours later, the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, responded with her own set of visuals from a different encampment cleanup in the nation’s second-largest city. Bass pointedly emphasized that 15 residents whom the city had displaced from this particular encampment had been “brought inside.”
The clearing of encampments has long been framed as a partisan issue, with Democrats on one side reluctant to remove homeless people and Republicans on the other demanding citations and arrests. But in California, where Democrats dominate the state government and run its largest cities, the matter has become an intraparty dispute, especially after a Supreme Court decision last month gave local officials greater authority to crack down on encampments.
Nowhere was Newsom’s executive order met Thursday with more scorn than in Los Angeles, where the public defenders who serve homeless clients called his move “completely unconscionable.” Los Angeles County supervisors, who represent nearly 10 million people, intend to make it clear next week that the county’s jails will not serve as makeshift shelters for homeless people.
And Bass’ retort served as a statement that Los Angeles leaders believe they can handle the homelessness crisis in their city just fine, thank you, without interference from Newsom.
Democrats like Bass say a comprehensive response is needed to solve such a complex issue. Newsom is projecting himself as someone who is quite literally rolling up his sleeves to deal with a problem that is a symbol of California’s dysfunction, though he has also secured billions of dollars for homeless services and housing and established a judicial track that can force the most dire mental health cases into treatment.
With the issue now playing out in the home state of Vice President Kamala Harris, the likely Democratic nominee for president, the stakes have been raised even further as her record in California faces scrutiny.
Bolstered by the Supreme Court ruling, Newsom on Thursday directed California agencies to dismantle tents on state land, while also imploring cities to move more urgently against encampments. While Newsom cannot force local governments to enforce laws against homeless people, he can exert pressure through the billions of dollars that the state controls for homeless services that cities rely upon.
In Los Angeles, many city and county officials said they were concerned that his order signaled a change in political winds and an impatience with their strategies for clearing encampments, just as they were proving that their system could work.
“I don’t think that threatening funding at a time where we’re trying to get more people served and more people housed is a place that anybody wants to be in,” said Lindsey Horvath, a Los Angeles County supervisor who is also chair of the commission that leads the agency that coordinates county and city homeless programs.
Horvath also worried that the order could encourage more arrests of people who refuse to leave the streets. She said that she had asked Sheriff Robert Luna, whose department runs the jails, to clarify publicly at a meeting next week that the county could decline to jail people who had been arrested only for anticamping violations, even if any of the 88 cities in the county enforced such laws.
Members of the Newsom administration who spoke on background before the release of the governor’s order said that the intent was not to “lead with enforcement” but to strike a balance between compassion and public safety.
Other Democrats complained that Newsom’s order ignored the reality that once people were removed from encampments, most of them had nowhere to go.
As of 2023, there were approximately 16,000 shelter beds in Los Angeles for about 45,000 unhoused people, according to the city controller’s office. And even when there are available beds, the city’s “unreliable shelter bed data makes it next to impossible to find a bed,” the agency said.
“The City of Los Angeles must reject Governor Newsom’s inhumane, unproven policy,” Kenneth Mejia, Los Angeles city controller, said in a statement.
The Los Angeles pushback to Newsom’s order stood in stark contrast to the embrace of enforcement from London Breed, mayor of San Francisco, a city that has often been characterized as too compassionate toward drug users and homeless residents.
Breed said at a rally that San Francisco city workers, including police officers, would take a far more rigid approach in clearing camps starting next month. Homeless people will be offered shelter beds and not allowed to return to the sidewalks if they do not accept those offers.
“We’re excited about what this is going to do, and we’re hopeful we make it so uncomfortable for people that they accept our offer,” Breed said. “These are people, and they’ve got to go somewhere, but we are going to make them so uncomfortable on the streets of San Francisco that they have to take our offer. That really is the goal.”
She said that police would enforce existing, yet rarely used, laws banning sitting, lying and camping on sidewalks and that they would issue citations to people who refused to move after being offered shelter. She said repeat citations could lead to misdemeanor charges, and she remained open to jailing homeless people.
Breed’s harsh language comes as she is in a tough fight to keep her own job — facing four strong challengers in the November election, some of whom have vowed to clean up the drug use and encampments that have proliferated in certain parts of the city.
Homeless advocates have warned that clearing encampments without providing shelter would only make the problem worse and would simply move people to another area. They argue that the real problem is a lack of bed space and housing in a state that has an exorbitant cost of living. Breed said Thursday she was unsure if there were enough shelter beds available in San Francisco.
In Los Angeles, Bass, who does not face reelection until 2026, has said her mission has been to demonstrate that it is possible to end homelessness without punishing people.
Her signature program, Inside Safe, has relied on offering motel rooms to those living in the city’s most visible and stubborn encampments. She has also emphasized that city and county leaders in Los Angeles have been working well together to coordinate homeless services, as opposed to past years when their efforts were disjointed.
Bass and her allies felt vindicated last month when the annual homeless count in the city and county decreased for the first time in six years. But Bass knows that residents are eager for more results in a city where encampments are a fixture of daily life.
Along a stretch of Hollywood Boulevard, just east of where tourists take pictures on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a couple dozen tents line the pavement. Pedestrians amble by clusters of encampments and some homeless people who sleep outside in the sun.
Just last week, a homeless man wandered in without a shirt and demanded a drink at Palms Thai Restaurant. The man became upset and then attempted to grab customers’ drinks, said Tantita Wunder, the manager of Palms. Police officers happened to be eating lunch there that day and intervened.
Wunder, 53, said she tries to provide drinks or food to homeless people outside but worries about them entering her restaurant. The business had already suffered during the pandemic, and when homeless people come in and ask customers for money, it can make for an uncomfortable experience.
“When this happens, customers don’t want to come back,” she said.
But dismantling encampments may cause more problems than officials have anticipated, said Thomas Roseboom, 53, who camps at Venice Beach.
“We’re already down and out, so when you start throwing authority down our throat, we’re going to become resistant,” said Roseboom, a military veteran.
“Right now, this is working for LA,” he added, referring to the city’s approach under Bass. “Let it work.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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