The New Yorker:

The country’s most powerful deep-blue governor, Gavin Newsom, ordered encampments to be dismantled. But lasting solutions are still needed.

By Nathan Heller

California has seventy-one thousand shelter beds to serve a homeless population estimated at a hundred and eighty thousand. By basic measures, that isn’t the worst housing crisis in America—the state with the highest rate of homelessness is New York, followed by Vermont—but it means that California is the state where urban homelessness is most consistently visible, often as encampments, much in the way that utility poles are visible where cables are not buried underground. People with housing space need utility connections, and people without housing space need places to exist and sleep. Since 1967, Californians have invested in underground pathways for the grid, on the theory that being shaded by poles, wires, and other essentials is incompatible with the state’s promise of golden landscapes and good living, and much less safe in a storm. You can now walk through many California cities scarcely spotting a utility pole. Homelessness is different. In surveys over several years, voters have named homelessness and housing as the state’s most pressing problems, but a visible crisis of space remains. If all unhoused Californians sought a night’s emergency shelter, less than half of them could get it.

Late last week, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, issued an executive order for officials to start dismantling homeless encampments on state land. The order followed a U.S. Supreme Court decision in June, City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson, which upheld that city’s ban on homeless residents sleeping outdoors (a case that Newsom had pressed the Court to take up). It is presumed to supersede Martin v. City of Boise, a Ninth Circuit decision from 2018 that made it illegal to punish homeless people for camping if shelter beds were not available. Newsom, who is the country’s most powerful deep-blue governor by virtue of his state’s economic dynamism and his rising status within his party, has become one of the nation’s most active leaders in the fight against homelessness, and he presented his order in the terms of left-of-center concern. “This executive order directs state agencies to move urgently to address dangerous encampments while supporting and assisting the individuals living in them,” he said. He modelled his directive on the California Department of Transportation’s protocols for clearing encampments away from freeways.

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