California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an ominous decree: destroy the encampments where people are surviving.
First, he advocated the U.S. Supreme Court open the floodgates on criminalizing homelessness, which the conservative majority obliged in its June 28 Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling.
Now, he issued an executive order requiring encampment sweeps by state agencies. While he can’t force local municipalities to follow suit, they potentially could be pressured by needs for the state purse.
This is an immediate fallout from the Supreme Court decision, and one Oregon needs to steel itself against.
For the time being, Oregon has a law preventing this approach, one Gov. Tina Kotek was involved in drafting during her time as Oregon Speaker of the House.
It’s important for Oregonians to watch what is happening up and down the coast. West Coast cities share high housing costs that are the primary driver of homelessness.
According to the 2024 Point-in-Time Count, about a third of the nation’s people experiencing homelessness live in California, including at least 75,000 people in Los Angeles.
What is particularly concerning about the swiftness of Newsom’s action is his choice to elevate the spectacle of progress over actual progress itself. It’s as if it’s enough to present the mirage of less homelessness to Californians.
For those of us who are not homeless, this strategy is too often effective. Local residents will mention to me that it looks like “things are getting better” because they don’t see people, often said with hope and without the knowledge that what they are seeing is only the aftermath of a sweep.
Don’t believe your eyes. Humans have to exist somewhere. They simply hide with fewer resources and in peril.
OPB reporter April Ehrlich astutely made this connection when she reported this month on people living along rivers and in the woods:
“Portland has recently cracked down on public camping, mostly in residential and commercial neighborhoods,” Ehrlich wrote. “Those removals appear to be pushing people into remote wild areas, spurring environmental hazards like mounting trash and sporadic fires. Some spots are tucked so deep into the woods that they are only accessible by boat or unmarked trails, leaving the people living there alone, and far from help.”
Not only is it concerning that a Newsom-style policy is built on the appearance of — rather than actual — progress, but it also sets people back.
Sweeps drive a level of distress that pushes people further into health instability.
A Rand report following three Los Angeles neighborhoods since 2021 came to a conclusion a report shouldn’t be needed to surmise: sweeping people doesn’t reduce homelessness.
But even more than that, people tend to have fewer tents, sleeping bags and other survival tools, driving them further into desperation.
While Newsom’s executive order does include a vague request to connect people to services, leading with displacement is the wrong approach.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has taken a more constructive approach. In December 2022, she launched her Inside Safe initiative to work with people living outside to directly move them into transitional and then permanent housing.
Bass has fortunately spoken out against the Supreme Court, telling the New York Times the Supreme Court decision “must not be used as an excuse for cities across the country to attempt to arrest their way out of this problem, or hide the homelessness crisis in neighboring cities or in jail.”
The Inside Safe initiative has a limited scope of success. The Los Angeles Housing Services Authority reports the Inside Safe initiative moved 2,809 unhoused residents into hotels, motels and other forms of temporary housing, and 539 people have moved into permanent housing.
But at least it’s moving in the right direction, as opposed to just pushing people around.
Newsom’s approach is more common. It’s the logic perpetrated all over. The Paris Olympics, as with past Olympics, is built on mass displacement of people who are homeless. Societal failures are treated like inconveniences.
Too often, the inconvenience of seeing poverty overrides the urgency of actually addressing it.
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