Weeks after issuing an executive order to clear encampments on state land, California Governor Gavin Newsom made a public appearance in the Mission Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles sporting jeans and work gloves, ready to help clean up an encampment himself. The statement of the photo op was clear: government officials need to get serious about homelessness in California. However, this posturing rings hollow in light of the superficial solution that Newsom’s policy of clearing encampments offers to the problem of homelessness. In the absence of more effective programs transitioning individuals living on the street into permanent housing, encampment sweeps simply shift the problem of homelessness from one area to another. Furthermore, Newsom’s renewed emphasis on clearing these encampments, newly backed up by the threat of arrests, can be seen in the light of other ‘law and order’ shifts across California. From the loss of progressive Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón to the passing of Proposition 36, raising drug and theft penalties, there has been widespread disillusionment with progressive policies seen as too permissive and as enabling growing crime. In addition, along with most of the U.S., including blue cities, California shifted markedly to the right in the 2024 presidential election. In the wake of the election, observers are left with the task of interpretation: did the election represent a genuine rightward ideological shift among the electorate, the outcome of nominating an uninspiring Democratic candidate, or a referendum on Biden and the economy during his administration? Although surely the answer is all of the above and more, one piece of evidence in favor of a rightward trend is the growing ‘law and order’ backlash in California cities represented by homeless encampment sweeps. 

This summer, the Supreme Court issued its decision in the case of Grants Pass v. Johnson, paving the way for states to more easily implement policies criminalizing homelessness. The decision ruled that laws banning public camping did not constitute “cruel and unusual punishment” under the Eighth Amendment, overturning a previous Ninth Circuit ruling that such laws were unconstitutional because they punished a class of people—in this case, the homeless—who had nowhere else to turn [1]. Gavin Newsom was quick to praise this decision as “remov[ing] the legal ambiguities that have tied the hands of local officials for years and limited their ability… to protect the safety and well-being of our communities” [2]. Newsom consequently took the opportunity to issue an executive order for state agencies to begin clearing homeless encampments on state land and cutting funding from cities that did not follow suit [3]. Although Chris Herring, an assistant professor of sociology at UCLA, notes that “Newsom could have issued this order before the decision,” he says that government officials now have more leeway in punishing those on the street as the state is now “free to confine and arrest people even when there is no shelter available” [4]. This decision is unreasonable on its face: allowing arrest for public camping even when there are no shelter beds available means that those without the means for housing have no option but to be arrested. The decision thus illustrates how punitive responses to homelessness are especially cruel as people are living on the street as a last resort. 

Newsom’s executive order cites two main reasons for these clearings: health and safety concerns and a desire to usher the residents into social services [5]. These sweeps fail to produce effective results on both counts. First, dispersing the residents of an encampment only offers a temporary reprieve. A RAND study tracking homelessness in three areas of Los Angeles found that, after encampment clearings, rates of homelessness dropped for two to three months before returning to pre-clearing levels [6]. Herring found similar results in a 2019 survey of homeless individuals in San Francisco. According to the survey, only 9 percent of respondents moved indoors after receiving move-along orders from police, leaving 91 percent of respondents staying on the street, with 64 percent only moving a few blocks away [7]. Therefore, these sweeps cannot fix potential health threats because they do not truly stop encampments.

Second, encampment sweeps simply redistribute homelessness instead of getting people off the street and into shelters or social services—which themselves are far from silver bullets. First, California does not have enough shelter beds to take in all of its homeless population [8]. Los Angeles, for example, only has 34.9 beds per 100 homeless individuals. Although the strategy of dispersing homeless encampments existed before the Grants Pass decision, now California and its cities can back up sweeps with more force since the state or localities can arrest homeless people for camping violations even if the shelters are full. Even if there were open shelter beds, unhoused individuals often decline them for a variety of reasons. People living on the streets may prefer the privacy tents afford, may not want to part with pets when shelters preclude them, or may not have the legal identification required for accessing homeless services [9]. Furthermore, Herring suggests that encampment clearings can actually interfere with homeless individuals’ access to social services [10]. Herring observed that the looming threat of sanitation services arriving and disposing of their belongings at any moment made people in these encampments fearful to leave them for any amount of time, jeopardizing appointments with social workers, as well as other opportunities such as jobs or medical appointments. 

In this sense, even when the homeless individuals were not arrested or cited, the sweeps were still punitive. Although Newsom’s order maintains that city workers were supposed to keep people’s belongings for 60 days after being seized so that homeless people could reclaim them, Herring observed that having perishable items in one’s tent led to the whole tent being thrown away [11]. Herring labels the encampment sweep paradigm of policing “complaint-oriented policing.” Caller complaints prompted many of these sweeps, leading cities to move homeless individuals to another area before that new area’s residents can call in complaints. Therefore, even when people on the street are not being arrested, the “complaint-oriented policing” paradigm results in a perpetual cycle of harassment. Encampment sweeps represent the most facile form of short-term political appeasement, as they simply shift the problem of homelessness from one area to another rather than addressing the root causes of the homelessness crisis. 

Two of California’s largest cities, Los Angeles and San Francisco, provide contrasting examples of responses to Newsom’s order.  Mayor London Breed announced that Newsom’s direction was in line with her vision for San Francisco, saying “We’ve already been doing this work, so there’s nothing new that comes out of the Governor’s direction” [12]. This summer, Breed faced an uphill battle for reelection (which she ultimately lost to an opponent claiming to be tougher on crime) and sought to prove that, contrary to its popular image, San Francisco can be tough on homelessness. In August and September, the city of San Francisco offered more citations to people living on the streets than in the entire three previous years combined [13]. This reflected Breed’s stated goal to be harsher on penalties when unhoused individuals refuse shelter, saying “We’re hopeful we make it so uncomfortable for people that they accept our offer [of shelter]” [14]. In response to this statement, one San Francisco man in an encampment remarked that using the threat of jail to push people towards shelters is ineffective because a shelter “already feels like jail” [15]. Another of Mayor Breed’s tools for decreasing homelessness on San Francisco’s streets was adopting a relocation-first policy, where city officials offer bus tickets out of town to homeless individuals before resorting to other measures. Although Breed is correct that the number of unhoused people who come to San Francisco for its alleged leniency strains the services they can offer, the relocation-first policy simply represents the spatial reshuffling of homelessness on a larger scale. In Herring’s time observing police officers who offered this program in San Francisco, around a fifth of the homeless people that he saw receive  bus tickets had already used the program and then returned, sometimes using other cities’ programs for the bus ride back [16]. Cumulatively, many of these punitive measures make it harder for homeless people to escape poverty. Citations and arrests require money and harm their records, while seizures deprive them of their property and make them guard their tents. 

Los Angeles officials, on the other hand, have been more critical of Newsom’s order. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said the order was “unfortunate” and claimed that it “will usher in a new wave of criminalization” [17]. While Los Angeles still has a policy of clearing encampments, their Inside Safe program aims to move people living on the street into motel rooms before trying to help them find permanent housing. As of July, there had been no arrests during Inside Safe operations [18]. While this program is far from perfect, it is a crucial step away from the superficial shuffling that characterizes encampment sweeps. In its incipient stages, the program did not look altogether promising, as only 6 percent of those placed in Inside Safe housing actually found their way to permanent housing [19]. However, the program has proved more effective over time as this number has grown to 23 percent. More encouraging than this still low percentage is the efficacy of LA County’s own attempt at recreating the city of Los Angeles’ Inside Safe program. As opposed to Inside Safe, the county’s program, Pathway Home, makes sure the county has enough permanent housing rent subsidies to offer those living in an encampment before they clear it. This key difference has led to 63 percent of residents in Pathway Home leaving temporary motels for permanent housing, compared to only 36 percent under Inside Safe [20]. 

It is not surprising that ensuring people have access to permanent housing when they are removed from an encampment impacts their likelihood of returning to the street after the sweep. As Texas’ homeless population has shrunk, California legislators have sought to understand how cities such as Houston have approached the issue. In Houston, homelessness services coordinators have made sure they have permanent housing to offer before clearing encampments, similar to LA County [21]. Texas cities also spend comparatively less on temporary solutions like shelters and more on placing unhoused individuals directly in permanent housing. Overall, despite Texas spending an average of just $806 per homeless person while California spends $10,786, homelessness in Texas has fallen 28 percent since 2012 at the same time it has increased 43 percent in California [22]. One major reason Texas cities can afford this successful emphasis on permanent housing is that housing itself is far cheaper in Texas than in California [23]. Truly ameliorating homelessness rather than simply criminalizing it therefore must mean expanding access to affordable housing. 

However, criminalization evidently has political attractiveness. Even in California, this election cycle has shown backlash to the progressive governance of cities. For instance, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón, elected in 2020 in the wake of the George Floyd protests promising reform, was defeated by Nathan Hochman, an independent. Hochman, previously a Republican candidate, lost the election for Attorney General in 2022 by 20 points, whereas this year he won by a 20-point margin. This reversal can be attributed to a 9 percent rise in crime from 2019 to 2023 that many associate with Gascón’s policies, such as less punitive sentences [24]. Another sign Californians are concerned with crime in their cities and the leniency of progressive policies is the success of Proposition 36. Drawing 68 percent of the vote and passing in every county, this ballot measure raised penalties for repeated theft and drug crimes [25]. By all measures, Californians want policies that are tough on crime. 

The same logic undergirds both homeless encampment clearings and the larger trend of the law and order reaction in Californian cities: if an elected official cannot solve the underlying conditions of a problem, they must make the problem less visible to their constituents. Although penalties make crime less attractive, focusing simply on raising penalties ignores the material conditions that cause individuals to commit crimes. Just because the electorate has embraced punitive solutions, however, does not mean the underlying sentiment can be ignored. One of the many threads of the 2024 election was undoubtedly dissatisfaction with Democratic governance in cities. Liberals and progressives should not capitulate to punitive policies but instead must double down on effectively stopping these issues at their core by addressing the lack of affordable housing and poverty in U.S. cities.