The Daily - A Controversial Crackdown on Homeless Encampments

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

In the weeks since a landmark Supreme Court ruling opened the door for cities and states to crack down on homeless encampments, California — the state with the largest homeless population — has taken some of the nation’s most sweeping actions against them.Shawn Hubler, who covers California for The Times, discusses the race to clean up what has become one of the Democratic Party’s biggest vulnerabilities before Election Day.Guest: Shawn Hubler, a reporter covering California for The New York Times.Background reading: Gov. Gavin Newsom cleared homeless camps in L.A. county, where he wants more “urgency.”Mr. Newsom ordered California officials to remove homeless encampments.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. In the weeks since a landmark Supreme Court ruling opened the door for cities and states to crack down on homeless encampments, California, the state with the largest homeless population, has taken some of the nation's most sweeping actions against it. Today, my colleague Sean Hubler, on the race to clean up what has become one of the Democratic Party's biggest vulnerabilities before Election Day. It's Thursday, August 15th. So Shawn, you've been reporting on this really remarkable moment in the long story of California and homelessness.

Tell me about your reporting. Sure. So, California is in many ways the nation's biggest and most sort of wrenching example of homelessness. Something like 180,000 people are homeless in California, and most of them are living without shelter. Some live in cars. Of course, some are couch surfing,

some are in shelters, but a lot of people sleep outside in California. And the most visible aspect of homelessness in recent years has become these encampments. People who have pitched tents in all sorts of places in parks and on sidewalks and along river beds. Right. And it's a situation that's increasingly visible here.

So there are a lot of reasons behind it. Poverty, there's mental illness, abuse, addiction. And everybody's story is different, but the bottom line is that it has become a really defining characteristic of cities in California. So that's where things stood. And then came this political season. We've got a major homelessness problem and the very left leaning city council and mayor have the exact wrong

prescriptions for that homelessness problem. Which kind of intensified the challenge because these camps are not only a humanitarian issue, but they're also sort of a handy political tool for people who want to criticize the governance of California. Our failed liberal policies as well as our bad laws that we've passed recently are just simply encouraging the situation. And you'll often hear commentators talk about how San Francisco is poorly run. And here's an example of democratic governance.

The homelessness is completely out of control. They're not going to enforce the law. They're not going to keep the streets clean. They're not going to make it livable for me to allow my children to play outside of our front gate without adult supervision. Now, those cities are kind of hellscapes in a way, and that Democrats are the ones who are responsible for it. City after city facing these issues, they're all run by Democrats. Okay, so in many ways, this place is really the face of Democrats in control, and the homelessness

problem is right at the center of that. So let's dig into that problem. Why has homelessness become such a big issue in California? First of all, homelessness has been a big problem in California for a long time. I mean, it's an extraordinarily complicated issue. It defies simple explanations, but basically it really all begins in California with extreme income inequality and a severe lack of affordable housing. California is one of the most expensive housing markets really in the country.

On top of that, there are no right to shelter laws in California like there are in the East Coast. It's very difficult to force people into treatment if they're mentally ill on the street because commitment laws in the state and the weather is temperate so you can sleep outside. Local governments have a shortage of shelter beds. So a lot of reasons. But for a long time, government officials in California, just generally, have seen homelessness less as a problem that can be solved exactly than as a problem to be managed. Because solving it was going to be very, very expensive.

But in 2018, I've laid out a detailed homeless strategy. There's been no intentionality on homelessness in this state for decades. It's not been a focus of the state of California. It is a disgrace. It's the ultimate manifestation of our failure as a society, and that has to change with the next administration. Gavin Newsom was elected governor, and he made homelessness one of his central and signature priorities. As Californians, we,

we pride ourselves on our unwavering sense of compassion and justice for humankind. But there's nothing compassionate about allowing fellow Californians to live on the streets, huddled in cars or makeshift encampments. He called it an urgent moral issue. He said it was a public health crisis. No place is immune. No person is untouched. And he said he was going to really spend the amount of money that it was going to take

to finally fix it. I don't think homelessness can be solved. I know that homelessness can be solved. It's so hard. Then the pandemic hit, and the issue that he had brought all his attention to and that he had really promised to make better, exploded. Downtowns emptied out. Public health officials weren't sure whether it was safe to really bring homeless people inside. They didn't know how the virus spread. Cities more or less stopped sweeping,

just adopted kind of a hands-off policy. And when they did that, these tent camps suddenly became a part, not just of skid rows, but of everybody's landscape in California. So this kind of split screen emerged. The state was dumping the most money it ever has, really, billions and billions of dollars at this point, to get people into housing, to get them support for all of the various problems that had put them on the street in the first place. And yet the problem to people who lived here appeared the worst it has ever been.

The upshot was just this growing pressure on Newsom and on local politicians to clear these encampments. But until recently, there had been a handful of lower court decisions that limited just how far cities could go. And just remind us what those were. Right, so this was a ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers the Western United States.

It had found that if there was no shelter available, it was unconstitutional to punish people for sleeping outside if they didn't have any place else to go legally. And Governor Newsom gradually began to see these rulings as a real impediment to making progress on homelessness in California, and particularly on progress in encampments, because the ruling, in his opinion, was so broad that it was hamstringing cities, that they were so afraid of being sued that health and safety rules were going kind of unenforced.

And that was creating disease and predation and all sorts of problems for everybody, including people in the encampments. And so the governor, through his political might, really, into helping to get the Supreme Court to weigh in. And of course, the court did weigh in and, as we now know, reversed the status quo. What was the effect of that ruling? The outcome of this ruling is essentially that cities can enforce anti-camping restrictions

with less fear of being sued. No longer is their ability to cite people or issue tickets tied to the availability of shelter. They can issue fines, they can arrest people even who refuse to comply. That decision had major implications for the whole country, but in California in particular, it was seen as a game changer. So on July 25th, Governor Newsom issued a sweeping order. It directed state agencies to start

clearing encampments on the state property, which is vast. It includes all the land under the freeways, for example, and parks and so on. And the governor also urged cities and counties to do the same. He offered them guidelines that he said would be legal and efficient, and he said humane. The playbook would be legal and efficient. And he said, humane. The playbook would be to give two days notice to people who were camped outside, offer them services, connect them with outreach workers and shelters and housing providers before you move them, gather their belongings, offer to store them for 90 or 60 days so they could come back and retrieve them later on. But what was unsaid is that in a lot of jurisdictions, if campers didn't comply, they might now be subject to a citation and maybe even arrest.

Okay, so some pretty tough new tools, especially in a place like California that had traditionally been pretty lenient on this issue. Newsome orders this issue. Newsom orders this action. What happens? Well, for all the talk of compassion, right? You know, patience was thin and gloves were off. Some cities announced they were warming up the bulldozers. And San Francisco, Mayor London Breed, who is facing a very tough reelection, in part because of homeless encampments, went directly to an encampment that was outside of a DMV office in San Francisco and stood

there while city workers started to clear it. And she told local authorities there that she not only wanted these encampments cleared, she wanted them to start offering bus tickets to people who, if they had a connection elsewhere. Like bus tickets actually literally to ship them out of the state? If they have connections there, yes. Because as it stands, California still doesn't have enough beds for all of its homeless people. The shelters are stressed, permanent housing is often full. And so cities are looking for any measure they can take to try to ease the situation.

But not every place in the state reacted as quickly or as enthusiastically as Newsom's hometown of San Francisco. Most notably, Los Angeles County, which has a huge homeless population and tremendous sway in the state. And that put the largest metropolis in California, and California's governor, on a collision course. We'll be right back. So Sean, you said that the biggest city in the state, Los Angeles, was skeptical of Newsom's order. Tell me about that.

So Los Angeles County is an enormous place. The county has 10 million people, roughly, and the city of Los Angeles within it has something like 4 million. And they are in many ways, as an electorate, more liberal than the state overall. And the supervisors in Los Angeles County react to Newsom's directive by saying, we're not gonna change anything. And by the way, we're not going to criminalize homelessness. We're not gonna put anybody in jail. We're going to continue to do it our way.

We have a lot of homeless people here and if we dismantle these encampments, that's fine, but it doesn't do anybody any good to just move them down the street. We are not going to move anybody until we have a bed to put them in or a place to send them or a program to put them in. So their view is that they are slowly but steadily going to bring people in inside and they have been coaxing people in more with carrots than with sticks

to shelter. And they have made some progress. The city of Los Angeles has made something like a 10% dent in the number of unsheltered homeless people over the past year. And the county overall has made a dent of about 5% in the number of unsheltered homeless people. And made a dent of about 5% in the number of unsheltered homeless people. And that's a significant number of people and it's a significant dent, but it hasn't happened very quickly. And that is in direct contrast to what Newsom is trying to accomplish here. So what does Newsom do? How does he respond to this kind of intransigence from LA? So last week, roughly two weeks after the order is issued, Newsom goes down to San Diego to welcome some pandas to the zoo. And while he's in Southern California, a couple of hours later, he emerges

130 miles up the freeway in Los Angeles in a homeless encampment saying in so many words, you don't want to clean your house? I'll come to your house. I'll clean up this situation for you. The camp where Governor Newsom is coming today is under a freeway overpass, Interstate 10. So I went to the encampment knowing that he was going to be there, and we're walking in, we're looking around,

there's trash everywhere, strewn everywhere. It was just heartbreaking, actually. There was trash everywhere, rats, junk. And I'm seeing in the corner here a man who's asleep on what appears to be a trampoline. There was a man passed out in a corner and lying on what appeared to be

a broken trampoline that a kid might use, remains of campfires. Hello, excuse me. Hi. Wow. That is a cool looking car. And I spoke to the neighbors around, people who lived in the working class neighborhood,

kind of around there. I know homeless been around. Yeah, they've been around since forever. You know what I mean? Yeah, but. And they were really unhappy. I came to work in the morning, and then I just seen a whole bunch of fire, and I'm like, whoa, a whole bunch of smoke, so I had to call them.

And then once I was on the phone with them, they're like, oh, we already have three, four calls already about that. They said that the fire department was there all the time, that they felt very sorry for the people who were living in this encampment, but it was just untenable. It's just kind of like dangerous to walk in the nighttime, especially because I worked there. It was hard for them to feel safe walking down the street or let alone going out with their children. Governor, hello.

Hello, Swery. Sean will have an audio, so be careful what you say. Yes, I do have audio. Hi. So a few hours after I got there, the governor arrived with his crew of state workers, in their orange vests and their hard hats, and he began picking up trash. Hey, tell me what you're doing here. Just part and parcel of the work we continue to do to try to clean up the state.

He said that it was not just Los Angeles County, but counties all over California who needed to get serious now. Now that he had done his part, they needed to be good partners too. What I want now, I want to see results. It's not about inputs, it's about seeing, physically seeing the results. And he said that he was looking for accountability and that he wanted to see action, he wanted to see movement. Little County will be more determinative in whether or not we're successful than L.A.

County. What do you want from Little County? What is it that they are not doing? I think right now it's not an indictment of any one. I think perhaps that's the issue. There's no one. That's the issue of counties generally. Uh-huh. I think perhaps that's the issue. There's no one. That's the issue of counties generally.

It's abuse accountability, but for me it's about urgency. It's just a different level of urgency. And the governor also reminded county leaders throughout the state that they rely on the state for many, many billions of dollars of funding and that the state can give it and the state can take it away. The budget will reflect support for those communities

that really stepped up. And with respect to the others, more support for those that stepped up. And I think that's the spirit. And that he was planning to reward financially, counties who followed his playbook, and that he was willing to take money away from counties that weren't using the funding he was giving them,

that weren't enacting his programs to show progress. It's a proxy for our performance on every other issue. We don't have the luxury of other issues right now. And he also pointed out that this had national implications for his party. You heard the president just mocking Kamala Harris in California. It's about this. That the Democratic nominee for the presidency, Kamala Harris, was already being attacked about

California homelessness. So this is pretty remarkable. You have a Democratic governor going into LA territory to Democratic officials' backyard and really pointing the finger at them and saying, hey, you know, some of you aren't getting the job done and we're going to do this my way. Yeah, that was pretty radical. But, you know, it's worth noting that only a handful of people were living in these encampments. The governor went to two encampments that day. There were something like, I don't know, 22 people, something like that.

And about half a dozen of them accepted some form of housing or shelter from local homeless outreach groups. And the leaders in Los Angeles County reacted kind of tellingly too. On background, people told me, you know, look this appears to be a little more than a stunt because it's only proven that this is a long and hard process. Look at how hard he worked. He spent the entire day cleaning up homeless encampments and he got six people into shelter and he cleaned up two spots. And someone else made the point that, look,

even after you clean out an encampment, the studies show that they'll just come back unless you have everything lined up, services and housing for them and guarantees that they can transition into a different way of living. And so it's a long and arduous and tedious process and there's no fast way of doing it right.

You know it's interesting hearing you talk about this conflict. It strikes me that everyone involved here, the governor, local officials, for the most part they're all Democrats who all want the same thing. They see this as a problem that needs to be solved. But the question is how exactly to do that and how fast to do that. That's right. And Sabrina, it's also worth noting that the Supreme Court decision came only about a month and a half ago. So this is really early stages, right,

of this new era in California when it comes to dealing with its homelessness crisis. And while we've seen a huge amount of activity, really, in the time since the Supreme Court's ruling, everybody, including the governor, even if he doesn't say so publicly, knows that this is really only the beginning. It's going to take a very long time to solve this. Which might not be fast enough for Democratic officials or for the party's presidential nominee.

Yeah, exactly. Problems like this don't necessarily fit into political or campaign timelines. Sean, thank you. My pleasure. We'll be right back. My pleasure. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. On Wednesday, the government released inflation data that provided fresh evidence that the central measure of American prices is moderating.

The consumer price index was 2.9% in July on a yearly basis, down from 3% in June. The rate was still faster than the 2% pace that was normal before the coronavirus pandemic. But it was the first time since 2021 that inflation had slipped below 3%. The measure leaves the Federal Reserve firmly on track to cut interest rates at its next meeting in September. And Columbia University's President, Nimad Shafik, resigned on Wednesday over her handling of pro-Palestinian demonstrations and questions over her management of a bitterly divided campus.

She was the third leader of an Ivy League university to resign in about eight months. Shafik, an economist who spent much of her career in London, said in a letter that after reflecting over the summer, she had come to the conclusion that resigning, quote, would best enable Columbia to traverse the challenges ahead. Today's episode was produced by Astha Chaturvedi, Olivia Gnat, and Eric Krupke. It was edited by Liz O'Balin and Michael Benoit, fact-checked by Susan Lee, contains original music by Dan Powell and Marian Lozano, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsvark of Wonderly. That's it for the daily.

I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.