Liberal Berkeley’s toughened stance on homeless camps is a bellwether

BERKELEY, Calif. — Berkeley, California, long associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, has a reputation for erring on the side of compassion when it comes to addressing drug use and homelessness. The city is such a liberal outlier that Vice President Kamala Harris downplayed her origins there as she tried to appeal to moderate American voters this year.

So it came as a shock to Californians when Berkeley joined the scores of cities that have decided to tighten enforcement on homeless camps this year. In the coming weeks, Berkeley authorities plan to target two sprawling encampments that for years have generated waves of rats, fires, complaints and police calls.

“People are frustrated — even in this very progressive city that cares deeply about addressing homelessness,” Jesse Arreguín, the mayor of Berkeley, said this past week.

Berkeley is among more than 75 cities nationwide that have imposed new restrictions on homeless encampments since the Supreme Court decided in June to allow state and local governments to prohibit outdoor sleeping, said Eric Tars, the legal director of the National Homelessness Law Center in Washington, D.C., which has been tracking the legislation.

About a third of the measures have been enacted in California, which is the nation’s most populous state and has a disproportionately large number of homeless residents. Other restrictions have been passed in the Midwest and South, as well as in Washington, Montana and other Western states covered by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which had previously banned governments from punishing people for establishing homeless camps.

A handful of cities have made a point of rejecting a hard-line approach, calling it counterproductive. Leaders in Los Angeles, for instance, have said that clearing tents alone will not solve homelessness and that cities need to provide housing, mental health care and employment options to tackle the problem.

But Tars was struck by how quickly liberal enclaves like Santa Monica or blue-dot college towns like Morgantown, West Virginia, have moved in on homeless encampments.

“In almost every one of these communities, the news story about it will say the debate at the City Council went on for like five hours, and lots of people spoke passionately, and a lot of them emphasized that criminalizing homelessness will only make it worse, not better,” Tars said. “But then they criminalize homelessness anyway.”

Homelessness surged to record proportions in the past several years, particularly in California, where contributing factors such as mental illness and drug addiction have been compounded by soaring housing costs.

After 2018, when the 9th Circuit ruled that it was unconstitutionally cruel and unusual to punish people for sleeping outside if they had no other option, the number of encampments exploded. As the public grew weary, politicians in California and elsewhere in the West increasingly blamed the 9th Circuit for the proliferation of homelessness that was visible in communities.

Without enforcement powers, state and local governments spent heavily on homeless services and affordable housing, a strategy that did ease homelessness in some cities. But most communities still have critical shortages of long-term housing, services and shelter beds.

So when the Supreme Court issued its decision this summer, local and state leaders in both parties seized on opportunities to shut down the most persistent encampments.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom urged city and county leaders to quickly and humanely remove homeless camps. To make a point, he showed up at freeway underpasses to clear out encampments, carrying garbage bags and debris from sites.

Newsom accurately read the electorate. In California, voters last week overwhelmingly passed an initiative to impose tougher punishments on theft and drug use, a measure that harnessed the frustrations that residents had about crime and homelessness in the state. The governor did not support the proposition, but it was popular among Democrats and Republicans alike.

“This is an issue that almost seems to transcend politics now,” said Eve Garrow, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “There is just more pressure to make houselessness invisible again.”

Berkeley officials said the situation is more nuanced than civil rights advocates recognize. Arreguín said that his city would try to humanely close down encampments.

“We’re not going to arrest people. We’re going to be thoughtful, we’re going to offer alternatives — but we’re going to be firm,” he said.

The city’s new approach, codified in a September resolution, will apply only to encampments that pose documented and narrowly defined fire hazards, or threaten health and public safety, officials said. The resolution specifies that the city’s first priority will continue to be coaxing homeless campers into housing.

“It’s a hard thing to say that one agrees with this conservative Supreme Court, but a course correction was needed,” said Rashi Kesarwani, the Berkeley council member who was the author of the resolution.

Still, Cecilia Lunaparra, the youngest member of the Berkeley City Council at age 22, said she had assumed that America’s best-known progressive stronghold would take “a more compassionate approach” than most cities.

Her council district includes People’s Park, a hallowed ground for liberal activists that served as a homeless refuge until the University of California, Berkeley, launched plans to build student housing and units for homeless people there.

Lunaparra had urged the City Council to ignore the Supreme Court decision, and to continue treating encampments as if nothing had changed. She said the complaints around the encampments only underscored the need for Berkeley to stay the course with more programs and more housing.

“The fundamental issue here is: What is the actual solution to homelessness?” she said. “I think the actual solution to homelessness is housing.”

Kesarwani said that she agreed — but that Berkeley also had a broader responsibility to the neighborhoods affected by encampments.

“This is us in an impossible situation, trying to be balanced and reasonable,” she said. “This is not the Bay Area swinging to the right.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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