In August, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, in his working-man’s clothes—aviators, jeans, and a trucker hat—starred in a video where he carted people’s possessions out of a homeless encampment near a Los Angeles highway.

On any given night in 2023, more than 650,000 people in the US experienced homelessness, with almost 400,000 unsheltered—though that figure may be an underestimate. Research by the federal Government Accountability Office found that every $100 rise in median monthly rent brings about a 9 percent increase in homelessness—notable as rent costs have climbed by 25 percent nationally since 2020, according to CNBC.

Newsom’s photo op followed his July order calling for the clearing of encampments on public property, and came alongside a threat to withhold state funding from cities and counties that failed to meet his requirements, much to the ire of local officials like Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. On July 25, the day of the order, the governor posted on X: “No more excuses. We’ve provided the time. We’ve provided the funds. Now it’s time for locals to do their job.”

Earlier this month, Newsom approved more than $130 million in funding for 18 cities, including over $12 million to Riverside, to “sweep” encampments. According to the governor, the goal is to support “efforts to get people out of encampments and connected with care and housing across the state.”

A statewide audit released in April tracked investment during Newsom’s first five years as governor, from 2019 to 2023, and found that California spent roughly $24 billion in that span to address housing and homelessness. At his inaugural address in January 2019, Newsom vowed to “launch a Marshall Plan for affordable housing and lift up the fight against homelessness,” promising to push for the development of 3.5 million housing units across the state by 2025. 

According to CalMatters, his administration has since backtracked numerous times, calling in 2022 for cities to have planned a combined 2.5 million homes by 2030. The state still has about one-third of the country’s unhoused people, more than half of whom, in many cities—like San Francisco—are without any kind of shelter.

In Orange County, many homeless advocates denounced Newsom’s strategy as criminalizing life without shelter rather than driving the construction of affordable homes. 

“All things like this do is just shuffle the chairs on the deck of the Titanic,” said David Gillanders, the executive director of Pathways of Hope, an Orange County organization that provides shelters and other support with housing. “If you uproot a person who’s living in an encampment, they’re just going to find another place to go if you’re not offering them an appropriate sort of accommodation.” 

Gillanders cites California first responders who moved to—and started commuting from—Idaho, or even further afield. Kyle Conforti, an Orange County firefighter who lives in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee, told the Guardian that the rise in cost of living “outpaces my raises and income. So we finally just ran the numbers and figured out it would be cheaper to live out of state and have me commute back.”

According to a 2024 report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, California has the highest housing costs in the nation. At an average of some $2,500 a month, it takes an hourly wage of almost $50 to afford a two-bedroom residence without being “cost-burdened,” or spending more than 30 percent of income. Another study released this year by the California Housing Partnership found even higher average rents in Orange County: just under $2,800, meaning renters would need to earn about $54 per hour. 

“We are going to make them so uncomfortable on the streets of San Francisco that they have to take our offer.”

But not everyone in California is opposed to Newsom’s focus on encampments. San Francisco is among the largest cities to double down on a confrontational policy of eliminating encampments through police enforcement. In August, the city’s mayor, London Breed, strengthened one of its three separate programs to push unhoused people out of the city by offering one-way bus tickets before shelter or other services.

Responding to Newsom’s order in July, Breed said, “We have offered people shelter and space, and many people are declining…But we are going to make them so uncomfortable on the streets of San Francisco that they have to take our offer.”

Other city councils have similarly prioritized police raids of encampments. From 2006 to 2019, the National Homelessness Law Center found, the number of city-wide bans on camping and loitering doubled—and bans on living in vehicles tripled. Newport Beach, another wealthy Orange County municipality, unanimously voted to intensify anti-camping law enforcement by recruiting more officers for its police “Quality of Life” teams, which issue citations for camping and related violations, withdrew funding for a mobile mental health response team, and, according to the Los Angeles Times, is considering the hire of a full-time city attorney dedicated strictly to prosecuting anti-camping laws.

In early October, the city’s ordinance banning camping on public property went into effect, and within hours, all encampments were cleared by public works crews and police. The ordinance does not require Newport Beach to offer services to those who have been forced out.

But the most recent arguments over homelessness began in the lead-up to a June Supreme Court ruling, City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, that overturned a 2018 lower court decision banning local laws against camping on public property if cities didn’t also provide adequate temporary shelter.

In that case, amicus briefs from various parties—including Newsom—were filed to the Supreme Court. One included petitions from 10 California cities, and Orange County, about the consequences of Martin v. Boise, the lower court’s ruling. Orange County called it “financially unsustainable,” citing a 2019 settlement payment of more than $2 million and a potentially “impractical” requirement to provide one shelter bed per person unhoused. The county’s budget for the 2022-2023 fiscal year was $8.8 billion.

Garden Grove, another of Orange County’s largest cities, wrote, “The further impacts of Martin include an increase in homeless individuals by 49% since 2017, an increase in petty crime and theft, and an increase in overdose calls from Fentanyl and other deadly narcotics.” 

The Garden Grove comments came from a declaration by Sergeant Jeffrey Brown, the head of its police department’s “Special Resource Team” on homelessness. Brown referred to 2021 numbers demonstrating that less than one percent of homeless people were accepting referrals to shelter or inpatient mental health facilities, and wrote, “As it relates to encampments, the Martin decision has effectively disabled” local police “from mitigating encampment growth and homeless activity on public streets, sidewalks, and rights of way.” 

“Now part of their housing solution would be to house them in jails.”

Neither the Garden Grove Police Department nor Brown responded to a request for comment. 

Asked why people experiencing homelessness in nearby Newport Beach were turning down shelter bed offers, Natalie Basmaciyan, the city’s homeless services manager, said, “We tend to have a slightly older unhoused population in our region, and they’ve gone through shelters in the ’80s and ’90s and even in the ’00s that were not well-managed. They didn’t have good facilities…You know, here’s a sack lunch. You need to leave for the day. You have to queue up at 5pm and hope you get a bed again.” 

“We don’t do that,” said Basmaciyan. “Once you’re assigned a bed and you’re in our program, you are here until you get housed.” 

Vox found that other reasons many people avoid shelters range from having to give up pets and personal belongings to having to leave a partner at a gender-segregated facility. 

Even adequate shelters present problems absent a system to move people to permanent supportive housing. “We have people that have been in a temporary shelter for three years,” Joe Stapleton, the mayor pro tem of Newport Beach, admitted. 

According to CalMatters, homeless shelters themselves often pose health and safety risks; the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California found raw sewage flowing from porta-potties, broken showers, rodent and maggot infestations, a lack of wintertime heating, and flooding during storms. The ACLU also uncovered accounts of unchecked theft, sexual abuse, and violence. Despite California law requiring shelter inspections and repairs, CalMatters found little to no evidence of accountability, with just four of the state’s 478 cities filing mandatory shelter reports—apparently without consequence.

For those who turn down shelters, Newport Beach’s municipal code provides a list of penalties enforced via civil or criminal citation, which both escalate with repeat offenses and accrue interest and late fees.

According to Stapleton, applying those penalties “is a last resort,” as is calling police. 

“This is where the system has failed, where it’s like, how many times is somebody going to remain on the streets, refusing all the services and everything that we’re providing, to a point where they’re going to continue to sleep in front of a business. I don’t think we have the solution. I don’t think anybody has a solution,” said Stapleton. 

Cesar Covarrubias, executive director of the Kennedy Commission, an Orange County nonprofit that works to increase production of homes for lower-income residents, described the penalty structure as a trap that unhoused people are forced into.

“Individuals who are homeless get citations,” said Covarrubias, and if those go unpaid, “then there’s warrants that are issued against them.” Most people cited “are never going to be able to pay for those,” he said, “and it just continues to be a cycle where now part of their housing solution would be to house them in jails.”

Covarrubias suggested that “more affordable housing needs to happen through regional and local partnerships with cities,” using publicly owned lands and “local, regional, and state funding…to really create more housing that is affordable.” But the focus on clearing encampments, he said—especially following the Grants Pass decision and Newsom’s order— has hindered progress. 

State and local authorities “are really going to stifle this collaboration of addressing housing and homelessness regionally, because there is just no incentive for them to do so,” Covarrubias said. “Now they’re going back to what they traditionally did, which was more enforcement [and] criminalization of homelessness.” 

Cities are also divided on housing construction. According to Covarrubias, many municipalities are failing to satisfy guidelines set by the Regional Housing Needs Assessment, a California mandate that decides how much housing each city requires to meet affordability standards. The assessment is a planning tool, he said, that in theory discourages landlords and developers from building only market-rate housing. 

Covarrubias explained the failures—and the vital impact of housing policy—by contrasting housing development in Santa Ana and Anaheim, two cities in northern Orange County, which has relatively higher rates of poverty and residential overcrowding than its southern part. Although Anaheim was producing more homes than required, most construction served “above moderate” income levels, a floor of about $124,000 a year for a two-person household. Conversely, Santa Ana, where an affordable housing opportunity ordinance preserves at least 15 percent of new housing for low-income residents, exceeded state guidelines for “low” and “very low” income levels: for two-person households, that represents annual incomes of $101,000 and $63,100, respectively. 

Police ordinances and encampment raids “are not addressing the issue of why individuals are homeless.”

So what to do? Covarrubias cited the Kennedy Commission’s suggestion, a $1 billion county bond to leverage state resources and fund affordable housing. Northern California’s Santa Clara County, home to many of Silicon Valley’s largest firms, suffers one of the worst housing crises in the country. It issued a $950 million affordable housing bond in 2016, partnering with 10 of its cities to fund affordable housing development. By December 2023, the measure had facilitated the construction of 5,127 new affordable apartments and 56 multi-unit housing developments.

That’s where the state and groups like the Kennedy Commission come in, said Covarrubias—monitoring housing commitments and progress on construction for low-income residents. The state’s housing department has the ability to initiate lawsuits, request court orders, and administer penalties to cities for noncompliance in housing plan implementation, including fines of up to $50,000 per month and some loss of authority over building permits or zoning changes. Norwalk, a city in Los Angeles County that extended a moratorium on building emergency shelters, recently forfeited state housing and homelessness funding as a consequence, and, according to Newsom, can no longer reject certain affordable housing initiatives. Over the past five years, the city has accepted nearly $29 million to house people experiencing homelessness but has failed to provide a sufficient number of units—just 175 out of 5,034 planned, according to the governor’s office. 

Gillanders, of Orange County’s Pathways of Hope, said that more avenues for public housing are needed—beginning with the repeal of the Faircloth Amendment, which caps the number of public housing units that the federal government can fund and authorize at 1999 levels. Jared Brey, the housing correspondent for nonprofit news organization Next City, wrote that the Faircloth Amendment was part of a wave of welfare reform laws passed during the Clinton administration in the ’90s that considered public assistance programs counterproductive to financial self-sufficiency.  

Gillanders also suggested that the Department of Housing and Urban Development should be empowered to build affordable housing directly, using federal funds—development Reagan-era budget cuts still severely limit to this day, and which would require fiscal backing from Congress. As housing costs have soared, HUD’s budget and power have not. 

In fact, a bill along those lines just hit Congress: the Homes Act, introduced in late September by Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), would repeal the Faircloth Amendment and establish a new federal authority to develop affordable housing with tenant protections. Gillanders calls it a “step in the right direction.”

Covarrubias stressed the need for a human perspective on homelessness: “The reality that we need to understand is that many individuals that are on the streets at some point coped with life normally until something happened”—like a layoff. And as my colleague Julianne McShane writes, many who experience homelessness are survivors of domestic violence and struggle to find safe access to shelter and housing. “In the bigger picture,” Covarrubias said, police ordinances and encampment raids “are not addressing the issue of why individuals are homeless.”