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.”
IMHO, there is a fair amount of misinformation floating around this issue.
Newsom hasn’t been pushing to blindly kick people off the street with no where to go. The draft ordinance is about filling unfilled shelter beds.
So if you had 200 beds and 1000 unhoused people, Newsom wants to be able to clear enough encampments to get 200 people into shelters. Cities wouldn’t clear all the encampments, only enough to get close to filling the available beds.
And that said, that policy doesn’t really account for the fact that shelters can be pretty dangerous and worse than the streets. So although this policy sounds compassionate, it’s actually quite flawed.
That’s an understatement the size of “Trump’s tariffs might not make eggs cheaper”…