Newsom clears homeless camps in LA County, where he wants more ‘urgency’

LOS ANGELES — The stop in Los Angeles came without the usual courtesy notice.

Gov. Gavin Newsom was in Southern California on Thursday morning to celebrate the debut of two giant pandas at the San Diego Zoo. But hours later, he emerged 127 miles up the freeway, driving home his message of the moment: Famously tolerant California isn’t tolerating homeless encampments anymore.

Since July 25, when the governor urged California cities to dismantle the street camps that have come to define the state’s homelessness crisis, leaders in Los Angeles have been particularly resistant to Newsom, making clear that they plan to deal with the issue in their own way and on their own timetable.

On Thursday, Newsom, in sunglasses, jeans and a black ball cap, visited two homeless encampments on their turf without directly informing city or county leaders. The only advance notice seemed to be state placards that warned people days ago they were facing citation or arrest if they continued to stay there. His office said state officials also called local homeless providers to ask for help in finding shelter.

“People are done. If we don’t deal with this, we don’t deserve to be in office,” Newsom said, tearing into a rancid, garbage-strewn campsite on state property under Interstate 10 in Los Angeles, alongside a crew of state workers in orange vests.

His mission, he said, was part public service, part political flex. The governor said that he particularly wanted more “urgency” from the leaders of Los Angeles County, home to nearly 10 million Californians, where unsheltered homelessness decreased last year at about half the rate as it did in the city of Los Angeles, its largest jurisdiction.

“We need partners, not sparring partners,” Newsom said. “If we can’t move Los Angeles County, we’re not going to move the state.”

The governor cannot demand that local governments crack down on homelessness, so he has encouraged them to remove camps, starting with those that posed the highest health and safety risks. He can, however, deploy his own teams on state property, which is exactly what he did Thursday.

After Newsom issued his executive order last month, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors quickly declared that its county jails would not be used to house people removed from encampments. Sheriff Robert Luna has vowed that his agency will arrest homeless campers only if they commit a crime, not simply for sleeping in public spaces.

Lindsey P. Horvath, the chair of the board of supervisors, said that outreach workers from a county-affiliated homeless authority had already provided services and housing offers to the people who lived at the encampment that Newsom was clearing. The problem with demanding immediate enforcement, county leaders say, is that people have nowhere to go and will simply move elsewhere in the area.

“What’s the point of a cleanup if you don’t match it with housing and services?” she said.

Mayor Karen Bass, who is in Paris this week for the Olympics as her city prepares to host the next Games in four years, has issued a steady stream of statements touting the positive results of her own approach. It prioritizes shelter and offers of support first, rather than scattering homeless campers with threats of citation, arrest or forced eviction.

This summer, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the regional planning body that coordinates homelessness programs for the city and county, announced a 10% drop in the number of unsheltered homeless people compared with the previous year, the first double-digit decline in nearly a decade.

On Thursday morning, as word spread in Los Angeles that the governor was en route from San Diego, Bass sent out three more statements. She reported that her program, called Inside Safe, had recently found housing for 30 more homeless people, and that her lobbying with the federal government and the United States Conference of Mayors had yielded a policy change that will make it easier for homeless veterans to obtain housing.

Newsom did not criticize Bass’ approach Thursday, applauding her as “a good partner” and calling the lowering of Los Angeles’s homeless numbers “one of the most significant declines in the state of California.” Instead, he focused on county officials.

In a phone interview from France, Bass, laughing, said that she had not yet spoken to the governor but had heard that he had gone to San Diego “to welcome some pandas, and he was passing through Los Angeles and was going to help us out.”

“If I were in town, I’d be out there with him,” she added. “I know he’s frustrated with a lot of cities that do not address the problem, but Los Angeles is one of the cities that does address the problem. For the first time in years, homelessness in Los Angeles is down.”

Newsom’s pit stop came weeks after a Supreme Court ruling in June that gave state and local governments greater authority to crack down on encampments. The change had particular effect in the nine Western states covered by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which had ruled that cities could not arrest homeless people for sleeping outside if they had no other legal place to stay, finding such punishment unconstitutionally cruel and unusual.

Western officials from both parties, including Newsom, a Democrat, had asked the Supreme Court to review that ruling, arguing that it had hobbled enforcement so much that encampments were overtaking parks, sidewalks and other public spaces.

An estimated 180,000 people were homeless last year in California, most of them unsheltered. The state has some of the highest housing costs in the nation, complicating the many other factors that contribute to homelessness.

Newsom administration officials have said that the governor’s sweeping executive order is not intended to “lead with enforcement,” but rather to strike a balance between public safety and compassion, based on procedures already used by the state transportation agency, Caltrans.

That model, the governor said, mandates that the state remove encampments “humanely,” prioritizing those that most threaten health and safety.

The state must notify campers in advance and work with local providers to connect them with services and housing. Property collected at each site must be bagged, tagged and stored for at least 60 days.

But campers who refuse to leave state property can be arrested, a point of contention among advocates for the homeless who fear that “criminalization” will further harm an already vulnerable population. And, they note, most cities still are short on shelter space. California, by the most recent estimates, has only about 71,000 shelter beds.

Though the governor cannot force local governments to sweep encampments, he does control billions of dollars for municipalities to address homelessness. And many California cities have enthusiastically embraced Newsom’s order, pressured by constituents who have lost patience.

The Fresno City Council recently initiated a ban on camping in public spaces. Mayor London Breed of San Francisco, a Democrat in a tough fight for reelection, has pledged to aggressively clear encampments and told police that homeless campers who refused shelter could face citation and possible jail time for illegal lodging. Last week, she directed city officials to offer bus tickets to homeless people before providing them shelter beds or other services.

Constance Farrell, a spokesperson for Horvath, said authorities found out that the governor was coming only after Caltrans posted notices of the cleanup and notified local service providers.

By Thursday morning, she said, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority had found shelter for several of the two dozen or so campers at the two sites that Caltrans had indicated the governor would visit. An agency spokesperson, Ahmed Chapman, said that six people from the second encampment that the governor visited, near an overpass in the Pacoima neighborhood, had accepted shelter and moved inside.

“We’re doing the outreach and we’re bringing people inside,” Farrell said. “And we’re not going to pivot from our approach.”

In the working-class neighborhood surrounding the Los Angeles encampment that Newsom visited first Thursday, residents expressed relief that someone, anyone, was rousting the settlement under the freeway. Not because of animus toward the people, they said, but because of the safety hazard.

“They build a lot of fires,” said Omar Godinez, 19, an auto mechanic who does smog checks across the street from the encampment. “There’s only a few of them, but this is our environment, you know? It’s all dirty and smelly and it’s not really pleasant, and it’s been that way since COVID.”

“It doesn’t seem like it’s getting better,” said Jorge Juarez, 29, a waiter who lives down the street who said he had personally seen little evidence of progress, statistics notwithstanding.

Last week, he said, the diner where he works on Hollywood Boulevard was robbed by people he believes were living in a nearby encampment.

At home, south of the freeway near the University of Southern California, he said, “it’s dangerous to walk at night time, and there’s not much we can do about it. It’s just homelessness everywhere. And LA is such a nice city. It’s too bad.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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