California Governor Gavin Newsom demands cities force homeless people to move every 72 hours
a year ago by technocrit to c/politics
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.”
Nope, he's just a neoliberal chasing after the center.
He's gearing up for a presidential run, and I'm mostly sure that the DNC wants him for 2028; he's running hard to the right (not that he was ever really far left to start with, FOX made him sound way cooler than he ever was) so that they can try the "run a moderate Republican and see if we can win by peeling off a whole 6 republicans nationally and then shaming the tuned out base when we lose" strategy against Trump for a third time. There for a bit, I would have been pretty okay with voting for Gavin, but it's clear enough to me now as a CA resident that he's the clown prince of shitlibs and he's just desperately scrambling to try and pick up support from DOZENS of moderate republicans all over the country.
About the only thing he's done lately that I agree with is dedicating $1B/yr of California's carbon cap and trade program to CAHSR for the next fifty (I think it was fifty) years, which solves a HUGE problem that's been a big source of delays for CAHSR, which is the lack of predictable funding.
Dude is a terrible governor. He’s as reactionary and as stubborn as W.
IMHO, there is a fair amount of misinformation floating around this issue.
Newsom hasn’t been pushing to blindly kick people off the street with no where to go. The draft ordinance is about filling unfilled shelter beds.
So if you had 200 beds and 1000 unhoused people, Newsom wants to be able to clear enough encampments to get 200 people into shelters. Cities wouldn’t clear all the encampments, only enough to get close to filling the available beds.
And that said, that policy doesn’t really account for the fact that shelters can be pretty dangerous and worse than the streets. So although this policy sounds compassionate, it’s actually quite flawed.
shelters can be pretty dangerous and worse than the streets
That's troubling. What's the solution here?
Housing.
IMO, we should start by focusing the conversation on this issue so we can start to collect and socialize ideas.
That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if we needed some sort of way to rigorously audit and report about shelter conditions. That way we could at least have policies that don’t blindly assume every bed is equal or safe.
So although this policy sounds compassionate, it’s actually quite flawed
That's an understatement the size of "Trump's tariffs might not make eggs cheaper"..
He is now, and always was, a neoliberal. He just aligned himself to blue politics for a while.
Spending millions a day to shuffle around people instead of actually saving money by putting them in unoccupied homes.
Can't wait until the DNC picks him for me tells me this was actually a good thing, like platforming Charlie Kirk and Steve Banon, and saying trans people are actually disgusting with them.
"The politics of failure have failed."
Sounding a bit more like Trump bit by bit. Wtf.
bit by bit
That sounds like "a little" and "slowly"...
Pretty sure Newsom's swing to the right is pretty fair complete by now. He's basically full MAGAt, just managing to keep it somewhat low-key so far.
🤡 🖕
I'm still fuzzy on his reason though... Could be looking for a Presidential run in the near future...??? 🤔
Of course he is. He hasn't been trying to hide it
It’s not surprising, but it is disappointing. He’s showing his true allegiance, and it’s not to a political party. It’s to a socioeconomic class, and that socioeconomic class is “rich people”.
Newsom is just another rich worm who got into politics. Frankly speaking if our recalls weren't fucking braindead he'd probably have been kicked to the curb by now.
Does anyone have a source for the 72 hour thing?
I don’t see it in the draft ordinance. https://www.gov.ca.gov/...
The draft ordinance basically says that, if there are available beds, a city can clear a campsite if they give people 48 hours notice and direct people to the available shelter beds.
Although, this ordinance does not address the fact that many shelters cause more harm than good. People are on the street because it’s safer for their wellbeing and belongings. No one seems to be talking about this.
Enabling shitty behavior from both Democrats and Republicans is what got the United States in this mess to begin with
"Running to the right will work for me because I'm a white dude!"
Yeah. I'm torn.
On one hand, I've seen what happens when homeless people, especially the worst of them, take over a public space without supervision. It is not hyperbole to say they destroy the area. The massive homeless camps in downtown Denver featured needles, excrement, unwashed clothing, and, in two instances I personally witnessed, a fire that tore through the area, destroying the homeless camp and risking damage to everything around. I get that we need to do better on housing all around and support the various proposals (such as homeless communities, repurposing abandoned buildings, etc), but there has to be an element of enforcement, including disallowing camping in areas not specifically purposed for camping, ensuring that people move on, and forced relocations, if for no other purpose than to address buildups of trash and vermin (to be clear: rats, not the people, I'm not calling homeless vermin 🙄 ). And IMO, a key component of this is funding a public healthcare program that addresses mental illness, such as Proposition 1 in California. This is good because addressing mental illness can lead to reduced drug abuse, which is a major cause of homelessness.
But on the other, what Newsom is doing is using tricks right out of the Trump playbook by demanding that cities and counties adopt policies they do not wish to implement to share in the funding that would make homelessness go down. I also notice that there are no requirements for carrots, only sticks. I.E. no demand that supervised camping sites be set up, or empty buildings bought up and repurposed as housing. Just the requirement that you're unwelcome in public places if you're unhoused, and that the law will be brought against you if you dare persist in the same place for 4 days in a row, no matter how much you take care of that space. Seems like he's working to appeal to the Right? "See, I can be as heartless and cruel as any Republican!" Makes me less inclined to vote for him.
Homeless people are human beings. If we housed them, and had a proper social safety net, we wouldn't even be talking about it's. Homeless or not, they need a place to live.
I agree with you. That's why I pointed out that the only mandate was enforcement, aka, the stick, and no incentives, aka carrots, were required. If Newsom was serious about tackling this, the enforcement would be paired with incentives, and the cities would be getting help to set up alternatives to camping in public places, such as the supervised camping we use here in my neck of the woods.
But let's be clear. You still need the stick. It's perfectly OK to say "We'll do everything we can to get you off the streets, but you need to put in the effort yourself, and no, trashing public spaces is not an option."
No, we are not in agreement. I don't not think we should force people from where they live. You wouldn't need this so called "enforcement" if people had access to a safe bed. And if we don't have that, then these tent cities happen, and in my opinion we should do literally nothing about them being there.
There will be people who will, despite having the option to be moved into housing, refuse to move there because they prefer the freedom of panhandling for money, getting drunk and stoned, and being nuisances to people around them. If you think they should not be dealt with, then yes, we don't agree, and you're just as bad as the people that say no help for the homeless and just want them swept away. There is a reasonable position, and it's not either your position or Newsom's position.
This is one of those comforting lies people tell themselves. It's the just world fallacy.
Drug use and homelessness are mostly orthogonal issues, but people latch onto it as a quick and easy way to dismiss providing housing for the homeless. People of all income levels have mental illnesses and drug use issues. But for the homeless, we decide that their drug use issues are such a moral failing that it's OK to deny them housing as punishment.
Also, people confuse cause and effect. Being homeless causes mental health and drug abuse, not the other way around.
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.
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/...
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.
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.
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
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.
I watched what I assume was a meth lab burn the underpass of a major bridge near my apartment in 2023. Then just a couple weeks ago, only a few days away from the two-year anniversary, it happened again.
We need to support people. Otherwise, we will vilify them. The sad fact is, this is a result of decades of destruction, and there doesn’t seem to be any willpower to do the hard thing anymore.
It’s enough to make you want to walk into the ocean.
The other issue that you forgot to mention is a lot of red states take their homeless people and send them to California.
I live in LA. I've been threatened by people who are homeless. Multiple times. Yes, these people deserve help. But there's a billion reasons why our current system isn't working and part of that is the state can't institutionalize these people to get them clean from drugs and to help start them on the pathway to being a productive citizen again.
I live in the Miracle Mile area, and I do not give a shit about someones 'right' to camp on the sidewalk with a huge ass tent that smells of shit. Sorry, but that's a public health hazard.
Do I want people to get help? Absolutely. Do I think that people who live in these areas also deserve to live in a safe and clean environment? Absolutely.
Something has to be done, at least Gavin is trying things.
Something has to be done, at least Gavin is trying things.
This is fascist thinking - the cult of action for the sake of action. You can't identify any real solution to the problem, but by God, you want SOMETHING done. And that something, when undefined, inevitably just means, "send law enforcement to torture them until they kill themselves."
TIL wanting people to not live in homeless encampments that are dangerous is fascist. Thanks for that. Lets see you take in the guy who mumbles to himself and is addicted to heroin into your home and treat him how about that?
Do you not know what fascism is? The cult of action is one of the hallmarks of Fascism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism
"The cult of action for action's sake", which dictates that action is of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.
This policy has all the marks of the cult of action. It does nothing to actually solve the homelessness issue. It focuses on using cruel brute force to punish the undesirable members of society. It's a performative action not meant to actually achieve any noble end, but simply to show that the regime is "doing something."
How is this actually helping anyone? What good actually comes from spending millions in public resources to endlessly shuffle homeless people from one location to another?
The state is using performative violence simply as a propaganda tool to make citizens think the government is "doing something." That is the cult of action for action's sake. It's literally one of the textbook characteristics of fascism.
This isn't hyperbole. We're talking fascism 101 here. California is sending in the jack boots to terrorize the undesiables. How is that not fascism?
Except that's not what WoodScientist said. He didn't say that wanting to end dangerous homeless encampments is fascist. He said that doing something just for the sake of doing something without careful thought is a key aspect of fascist thinking. "Act first and fuck the thinking" is how Fascists work, attacking rationality and denying thought in order to suppress their followers ability to see through the lies Fascism clinks to. Fascist thinking doesn't mean you're a fascist, though. It just means that you're prone to accept Fascism if you continue to think like a fascist, and at a minimum, you're going to make a bad decision.
Again. I don't disagree with the notion of "no, we're not going to let you live on the streets and harass your neighbours." I do think that it should be paired with things like expanding housing in all forms and making it easier for people to get on their feet, however. And I don't think a strong-arm tactic of denying the funding for those positive things to compel communities to adopt your hard ball tactics is something I want to see somebody on my side doing. Those are Trump tactics. Leave them to Trump.
Not the right things. It's like if Gavin went and confiscated everyone's dogs to sacrifice them to Zorak to fix the homelessness issue. It's not going to work, it's never going to work, and then when people complain, you say "well, at least he's trying something." The fact of the matter is that California has an extremely deep deficit of affordable housing. The cheapest rent in Merced should NOT be $800 for a room in a single family house, that's zonko bananas, but it is. We're never going to fix the homelessness crisis without addressing the affordability crisis, and the hell of it is that affordability is actually fairly easy and cheap to address from the government's side, we just don't because it hurts the NIMBY's feelings.
Where you going to build affordable housing in west LA?
There's literally no place for it. Should people living in Venice just be given beachfront housing for free to live in?
Whats your SOLUTION to the problem? Because like I said. There are multiple reasons there's a homeless epidemic across the entire country.
Okay, do you want the lecture, or the tl;Dr?
Tl;Dr: bulldoze every single family home and put up commie blocks with commercial spaces on the bottom floor.
Lecture edition: it doesn't have to be that extreme, and we can do it without bulldozing homes with pretty simple and cheap zoning reforms. Bonus: we can also stop our cities from being constantly bankrupt, fix traffic, protect the environment, and make our cities stop sucking. Here's the lecture, in case you're interested: https://youtube.com/...
He's also giving more funding to services that help the homeless so they can get back on their feet and get a home, right?
... Right?
Freedom^TM
There is a book advocating for UBI, which detailed studies showing it is actually easier and cost effective to just give homeless people unconditional cash grants. Contrary to expectations, 9/10 homeless folks cleaned themselves and looked for accommodation.
Every time I hear about this fuck I get more and more tempted to drive the 10 minutes from my parents house over to the governor's mansion and show him what happens when you ignore the will of your people (violent murder, if I wasn't fucking clear)
Vile slug. They’re people. People. His constituents. A man who lives in a taxpayer-funded mansion should think with humility.
Ignorant morons.
You know... cops.
We know how to fix homelessness. It's not bulldozers; you fucking house them. Newsome has made some good strides in terms of encouraging more housing in California, but we'd be much closer to actually addressing homelessness if:
He hit the bullshit zoning laws that restrict housing in this state with as big of a hammer as he hits homeless people with, and
We stopped trickling money to the homeless via an infinitely recursing filter of non-profits and either directly administered the aid via the state government or just gave them the fucking money / housing. In LA, there's something like 10,000 non-profits focused on homelessness that have to coordinate with each other. That's some looney toons level shit right there, and it should be obvious to anyone that that would never work.
California's been trying to fix homelessness with cops and bulldozers for forty or fifty years, and especially the last twenty. How long do we have to keep "accidentally" killing people and setting taxpayer cash on fire before we acknowledge that it doesn't fucking work and never will? You cannot beat homeless people into being housed, though I can see why Gavin would think that this solution would appeal to potential Republican voters who will ultimately not vote for him anyway.
I understand why he’s chosen to do something.
You're falling for fascist propaganda. Notice, Newsom isn't actually doing anything to fix the problem. He's not providing these people housing at all. All he's doing is sending out law enforcement to endlessly harass the homeless. That's what his "doing something" actually is. He's sending the police to "deal with" the homeless.
You recognize there's a problem. But you can't identify a solution. A fascist strongman comes along and promises to "do something," without any real plans or promises, just the vague cult of action for the sake of action. Newsom tortures some poor people, and you walk away feeling good, believing that at last someone is "doing something."
This won't actually house anyone. People don't disappear simply because you kicked them out of their camping spot. All you really do every time you disburse the homeless is make it that much harder for them to escape homelessness at all. Every time a camp is torn down, people lose invaluable possessions, resources, and documents that are really their only hope of ever pulling themselves out of homelessness. Newsom's actions are only exacerbating the homelessness crisis.
It's the poorest of the poor that will pay the price for Newsom's fascist propaganda campaign. But, at least you get to feel good knowing that he's "doing something." You must be a big fan of the TSA.
Progress has always been an unachieveable ideologically pure outcome for both Democrats and Republicans
Not eating that propaganda that we can't do better and demand better from our leaders
Do you know what fascism is? I am not saying that Newsom is exhibiting fascist behavior as some cheap and quick pejorative. I'm not using fascism as a synonym for "bad" here. I'm pointing out that this kind of policy literally is the textbook definition of fascism.
This is fascism 101. Among Umberto Eco's 14 common features of fascism is the cult of action for action's sake.
The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
Your response would make sense if I was complaining that the police disbanding camps simply wasn't going to enough good. But this action doesn't help anyone. It doesn't reduce homelessness at all. In fact, it actually makes homelessness worse. Every time camps are torn down, people lose possessions and documents they need to escape homelessness. If you bulldoze a homeless camp, you're sending a fair number of personal and ID documents to the landfill. Every time you clear a camp, you're making it that much harder for people to actually get back on their feet.
This isn't the perfect being the enemy of the good. This is simply an unambiguously harmful policy that does no good at all for the community.
Why is this action fascist? It meets several of Eco's points. From the linked list numbers:
(3) Cult of action for action's sake. It is purely performative. It will actually increase the number of unhoused people, as the more unstable someone's situation, the harder it is to return to housing. It's an objectively negative policy, but people support it because Newsom is "doing something." This meets Eco's point 3, the cult of action.
(6) Appeal to social frustration. People are tired of seeing the homeless and being reminded of their own precarious state. Better sweep them out of view.
(10) Contempt for the weak. Pretty obvious. These people have simply been priced out of the housing market. But Newsom vilifies these people and treats them like animals.
(12) Machismo and weaponry. Better send in the SWAT team to tear down some tents.
This is quite literally textbook fascism. I'm not condemning camp sweeps because they fail to meet some ideological purity test. I'm condemning them because they're completely unproductive and are a textbook definition of fascist policy.
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WTF happened to this guy? Did he have a Fetterman stroke?
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