California has seventy-one thousand shelter beds to serve a homeless population estimated at a hundred and eighty thousand. By basic measures, that isn’t the worst housing crisis in America—the state with the highest rate of homelessness is New York, followed by Vermont—but it means that California is the state where urban homelessness is most consistently visible, often as encampments, much in the way that utility poles are visible where cables are not buried underground. People with housing space need utility connections, and people without housing space need places to exist and sleep. Since 1967, Californians have invested in underground pathways for the grid, on the theory that being shaded by poles, wires, and other essentials is incompatible with the state’s promise of golden landscapes and good living, and much less safe in a storm. You can now walk through many California cities scarcely spotting a utility pole. Homelessness is different. In surveys over several years, voters have named homelessness and housing as the state’s most pressing problems, but a visible crisis of space remains. If all unhoused Californians sought a night’s emergency shelter, less than half of them could get it.
Late last week, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, issued an executive order for officials to start dismantling homeless encampments on state land. The order followed a U.S. Supreme Court decision in June, City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson, which upheld that city’s ban on homeless residents sleeping outdoors (a case that Newsom had pressed the Court to take up). It is presumed to supersede Martin v. City of Boise, a Ninth Circuit decision from 2018 that made it illegal to punish homeless people for camping if shelter beds were not available. Newsom, who is the country’s most powerful deep-blue governor by virtue of his state’s economic dynamism and his rising status within his party, has become one of the nation’s most active leaders in the fight against homelessness, and he presented his order in the terms of left-of-center concern. “This executive order directs state agencies to move urgently to address dangerous encampments while supporting and assisting the individuals living in them,” he said. He modelled his directive on the California Department of Transportation’s protocols for clearing encampments away from freeways.
The order travelled better than its pieties. “I’m warming up the bulldozer. . . . I want the tents away from the residential areas and the shopping centers and the freeways,” R. Rex Parris, the Republican mayor of Lancaster, a small Southern California city that consists almost entirely of residential areas, shopping centers, and freeways, told the Times. Across the partisan channel, London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, who is seeking reëlection in an incumbency weighed down partly by accounts of street homelessness and open drug use in the city, told the press, “My hope is that we can clear them all.”
The idea that leaders bulldozing tents—and the poor people who live in them—out of sight is now considered a winning political strategy might reveal the Swiftian level to which much social thinking has fallen. It is worth noting, then, that the project promises little success on its own terms. The Governor’s order, which amounts to uprooting encampments and their residents, “supporting and assisting” them through contact with outreach services, and most often sending them to something other than shelter or housing, is fated to be an expensive and labor-intensive project in reshuffling and buck-passing in the face of a problem that has seemed too hard for too long. The basic wish of the program—like many in America right now—is Please, Just Make These People Disappear. But, with no permanent solution available, homeless people driven from the north side of town land on the south side, still homeless. Chase them from a city, and they find themselves in the next town.
A few years ago, I undertook a months-long reported study of homelessness in San Francisco for the magazine. As I spoke with dozens of unhoused people, along with service providers, politicians, and community leaders, some of the most unsettling accounts I heard concerned displacements of camps. One young man dealt with upping and moving his life among tent encampments marked for clearance (dispersals are supposed to be announced in advance) while attending community college. Since unhoused people often carry everything they have with them, belongings that are removed can be an outsized loss. Officially, these belongings are supposed to be impounded, like a towed car—in street parlance, “bagged and tagged.” But the administrative burden of bagging and tagging is great, and one homeless person told me that, in practice, possessions were not infrequently classified as abandoned and then swept into the trash. I heard accounts of lost identity documents, family heirlooms and photographs, and medicines for H.I.V. One woman described a friend going through the formal recovery process for her belongings, including a trip to a remote holding site, without ever being reunited with them.
In studies, encampment dispersals, or “sweeps,” have repeatedly been shown to not just be ineffective, for the simple reason that people moved from here land there, but to exacerbate homelessness’s ill social effects. No one—or almost no one—dreams of living an adult life from a tent. But for many homeless people it can seem like the most tenable bad option. Some unhoused people with whom I spoke deliberately avoided shelters, which could mean trying to sleep beside a disturbed stranger screaming in the night. Shelters could also mean bedbugs, personal theft, and the looming threat of physical or sexual assault on one hand and infantilizing rules on the other: the hostel from hell. Some required residents to be drug-free at admission—a policy with obvious appeal, but hardly a feat that can be achieved on the threshold. (Even substance abusers in well-resourced lives work long and hard toward sobriety.) Some shelters, too, didn’t allow animals, and, for a person whose only devoted confidant in a life of instability is, say, a dog, abandoning this one friend for temporary access to a bed can seem an unthinkable exchange.
There is nothing like a sole or easy solution to the problem of housing the unhoused. But clearing encampments without anything like a requisite number of shelter or housing options subtracts space for the existence of the state’s neediest residents at both ends. Studies in California disprove the common false claim that homeless people travel to inflict their homelessness on distant, innocent communities. Migrants relocated by governors in Southern states aside, the vast majority become homeless in the place where they were last housed. The mayor there is their mayor; the governor, their governor; the city—even if they have no dwelling there—their home. These locals aren’t interlopers of the place but products of it as much as anybody else.
California is the country’s most prosperous and economically productive state, with a mean household income of a hundred and thirty thousand dollars. Its median household income is approximately a third less than that, and its Gini value for income distribution—a measure of inequality—is well above the national value and rising, indicating that prosperity flows disproportionately to the economic top. Housing, too: California’s housing prices are, on average, the highest in the nation, yet a quarter of its residents are said to be living with “severe housing problems,” a measure of unaffordability or lack of basic amenities. The rise in living costs in California, as in many other thriving states, has wildly outpaced growth in structures of access to available housing, generative income, and other basic measures of stability that make it possible for many people to keep up with and enjoy that prosperity. In San Francisco, whose housing shortage is notorious, the median rent for a studio apartment is currently two thousand dollars a month. Several of the homeless people I met were working full-time jobs and still could not find their way back into housed life.
An air of exhaustion surrounds the American homeless problem, and rightly so. Over the years, Newsom’s state has in good faith tried plausible-seeming solutions, including adding billions of dollars in new funds for health and housing programs, all without overwhelming success. A national election of unprecedented importance looms. The Presidential candidate now endowed with the task of preserving American democracy is a Californian, and vulnerable to attack as a proxy for the state. But it’s too early to give up. California’s problems are increasingly the nation’s problems. (New York City, which used to hold enough shelter beds for its homeless population, no longer does so, in the wake of refugees bused there from the South.) And progress is being made. In June, Los Angeles announced a ten-per-cent decrease in street homelessness compared with the previous year, the first double-digit decline in nearly a decade and a testament, perhaps, to efforts by its mayor, Karen Bass, to use motel housing for those who would otherwise live in tents. (Last week, Bass came out in opposition to the Governor’s encampment order; the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors this week passed a defiant motion preventing people in encampments from being taken to county jails.) In my reporting, I found evidence of remarkable success through advanced Housing First programs—nonprofits that set up unhoused people in subsidized apartments with professional counsellors and health resources to help them get back on their feet and gradually take over payment of their rents.
Such solutions take time to work: unhoused people are said to bounce out of housing situations several times before the problems in their lives, which tend to be complex and tangled, start to comb out, and they get back into the rhythms of a self-supporting life. But it does happen, and with time and smart spending, the best solutions, which involve multipronged counselling and persistence, do last. Looking out for the health, well-being, and the opportunities of the entire community is not a troublesome chore that people, their governments, and their enterprises get saddled with on the way to sealing deals for office towers. It is—or ought to be—the proudest work of a First World society. This country at the moment isn’t out in front. In a pinch, it has become clear, Americans will do the utmost to preserve our majestic landscapes. We should feel the same pride looking out across our population, too. ♦