Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing cities and counties to ban homeless encampments as he continues to press on a core voter concern.
“The time for inaction is over,” Newsom said in a statement. “There are no more excuses.”
Newsom’s release of a model ordinance prohibiting encampments builds on years of efforts to make cities and counties move people off the streets and into shelter. He’s also taking advantage of a political and legal landscape that increasingly favors clearing the tents that have proliferated in parks and on sidewalks across the state.
He embraced the Supreme Court’s 2024 reversal of a lower-court ruling that barred clearing encampments in the absence of sufficient shelter alternatives. His proposal comes amid rising voter support for tougher tactics, reflected by a recent proposal from San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan to arrest people who repeatedly refuse offers of shelter.
The proposed order attempts a balanced approach, with a memo from Newsom emphasizing the need to connect people to services and denouncing “inhumane” policies that “prohibit individuals from sleeping outside anywhere in the jurisdiction without offering adequate indoor shelter, effectively banishing homeless individuals from the jurisdiction’s borders.”
But it speaks to how the issue has vexed Democrats for decades. Six years after Newsom devoted his State of the State speech to California’s homelessness crisis, it continues to be a political hazard for elected officials across the state — and the governor has signaled he is losing patience.
He has doled out billions of dollars to help local governments clear encampments. He has also increasingly demanded cities and counties move more aggressively on the issue or risk losing out on state aid. Last week he excoriated a Central Valley city that refused to allocate a single dollar that would have unlocked state funding.
“Local leaders asked for resources — we delivered the largest state investment in history,” Newsom said in a statement. “They asked for legal clarity — the courts delivered.”