On May 12, California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, demanded that cities throughout the state adopt anti-camping ordinances that would effectively ban public homelessness by requiring unhoused individuals to relocate every 72 hours.
While presented as a humanitarian effort to reduce homelessness, the new policy victimizes California’s growing unhoused population—approximately 187,000 people—by tying funding in Proposition 1 to local laws banning sleeping or camping on public land.
In his announcement, Newsom pushed local governments to adopt the draconian ordinances “without delay.”
Many of those people don’t start out as drug user or being mentally unwell, that’s what you get in a system where you are not safe in shelters, building for homeless people means adding spikes to benches and now you will be driven from the location that is now closest to “home” like some lepers being run out of town.
Housing and the cost of it is definitely a big part of the problem.
They did a large study of homelessness in California that ended a year or two ago and it concluded that it was mostly the price of housing.
Exactly. People of all income levels struggle with mental health and drug issues. The drug use and mental health struggles of the homeless are just much more publicly visible.