On May 12, California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, demanded that cities throughout the state adopt anti-camping ordinances that would effectively ban public homelessness by requiring unhoused individuals to relocate every 72 hours.
While presented as a humanitarian effort to reduce homelessness, the new policy victimizes California’s growing unhoused population—approximately 187,000 people—by tying funding in Proposition 1 to local laws banning sleeping or camping on public land.
In his announcement, Newsom pushed local governments to adopt the draconian ordinances “without delay.”
Housing is usually not the issue itself. If I’m not mistaken California actually has enough shelter available to not have homeless people at all. The employed, high functioning, productive yet homeless member of society is a rarity and often remain homeless very temporarily. Most homeless people have mental and/or drug abuse issues, which leads them to decide to be homeless because they don’t like the rules, can’t stick to a schedule, have antisocial tendencies etc etc etc.
I definitely get what you’re saying here, but I think you’ve overblown what you see as the issue.
Housing is DEFINITELY the issue itself. Many homeless people get started on the path to mental and drug abuse issues when that paycheque doesn’t go far enough to pay the bills. Student Loans. Car Notes. Rent. Food. All get more and more expensive, making it harder to be a productive member of society, and meanwhile, pay stays criminally low. Until you watch as your landlord kicks you out, with a few dollars to your name and hundreds or even thousands of dollars of bills screaming for those few bills, and watch as everything you ever owned gets thrown out on the lawn and then stolen because you can’t protect any of it, and then some shadowy figure offers you a hit of the good stuff to make you just forget the fact that society considers you a failure, you can’t know how hard it is to deal with this situation unless you have a tiny bit of empathy.
I’m not saying we should tolerate this. I’m saying that we need to address the real root causes: costs are so high while pay is so low, and get people into housing again, with the understanding that drugging up and being a ‘free spirit’ on the back of somebody else’s labour isn’t an option. But saying housing isn’t an issue shows you don’t actually understand the problem. Please rethink that.
My city of Fresno does not have enough beds, so maybe that is true for wealthier cities with lower unhoused rates. The beds offered are sometimes less safe than the street: https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/02/california-homeless-shelters-purgatory/
Merced checking in, we made homeless camps functionally illegal while having HALF of the required beds to house everyone.
Many of those people don’t start out as drug user or being mentally unwell, that’s what you get in a system where you are not safe in shelters, building for homeless people means adding spikes to benches and now you will be driven from the location that is now closest to “home” like some lepers being run out of town.
Housing and the cost of it is definitely a big part of the problem.
They did a large study of homelessness in California that ended a year or two ago and it concluded that it was mostly the price of housing.
Exactly. People of all income levels struggle with mental health and drug issues. The drug use and mental health struggles of the homeless are just much more publicly visible.
Housing really is the main issue though. People get the cause and effect backwards. People don’t become homeless because they do drugs; they do drugs because they’re homeless. If you were stuck sleeping on the sidewalk, wouldn’t you want to be high 24/7? I sure would.
This one gets it