In Fresno, One of California's Toughest New Camping Bans Comes Into Focus

On a foggy morning in early December, Fresno police Sgt. Steven Jaquez scanned the city streets for tents, shopping carts, strewn belongings, and their owners.

From behind the wheel of his patrol car, he pointed out a small group of mostly men sitting on the sidewalk drinking beers with bags and carts around them. As soon as they spotted him, they scrambled to their feet.

“They know there’s a good chance, ‘if I don’t get up and I don’t get moving, those cops are probably going to arrest me,'” said Jaquez, who supervises the department’s police team that responds to complaints about homeless encampments.

Since the Supreme Court empowered local governments to crack down on homeless encampments in June, at least 40 jurisdictions around California have enacted new laws or toughened existing ones, according to the National Homelessness Law Center.

The state is ground zero (PDF) for the nation’s homelessness crisis and NHLC says California’s new tally of camping bans is higher than any other state in the nation. Advocates for homeless people say that Fresno’s law is among the toughest in the state: banning camping, sitting or lying on public property anytime, anywhere.

City officials say the law is crafted to incentivize people to choose rehab by offering substance abuse treatment in lieu of arrest for violating the law — a misdemeanor punishable with up to a year in jail, a fine of up to $1,000 or both.

“Enough is enough,” Fresno City Councilmember Miguel Arias said in late September on the day the law went into effect. “It’s time for them to get the help or expect to go through withdrawals in a county jail.”

Only a subset of unhoused people in the area report being chronic substance users, according to data collected by the federal government. And city officials say they’re also trying to provide housing and services to people who don’t use drugs – but resources are limited.

The new policies in Fresno and across the state mark a dramatic shift from the pandemic, when the CDC advised encampments should be left in place. And as the number of people experiencing homelessness has spiked in the state — growing to more than 181,000 at last count — voters have in turn become increasingly impatient for a change from the status quo. Now, the reality of this new paradigm in Fresno is beginning to take shape.

‘We really don’t know where to go’

The day after the law went into effect in September, a homeless man named Amado Real was sitting with his friends on the sidewalk in front of a boarded-up building near downtown Fresno when police officers with the Homeless Assistance Response Team rolled up.

They told Real and the others they had to leave because of the new law, and offered to take them to a homeless services provider downtown.

Real and his girlfriend refused — Real later said because they feel it’s chaotic and dangerous down there, and they felt safer staying where they were.

“We really don’t know where to go,” Real said.

That same sentiment was echoed by a number of homeless people in Fresno, though others said they had positive experiences getting services. A spokesperson for the city said that they’ve cleaned up an encampment around the service-provider to make it safer.

Real is exactly the kind of person city leaders say they’re targeting with the new law — a longtime heroin addict who has been living on the streets for over four years. Real said he grew up in Fresno and spends much of his time in the neighborhood where he was raised.

Three days into the crackdown, police had already told him to move along at least three times. He couldn’t sit in front of the boarded up building, in a gas station parking lot, or, just a couple minutes later, stand on the sidewalk around the corner.

“It’s like I don’t have any rights anymore,” the 59-year-old said. “I can’t even walk in my own neighborhood. I can’t even sit down. I can’t even be alive.”

This is the kind of “tough love” leaders in Fresno have said they hope will force people to get off the streets. But three months after the law went into effect, Real wasn’t any closer to getting clean or housed.

Like other people living unsheltered in the city, he had found a way to camp out of public view and make do with fewer things, a change many business owners and residents welcome.

Mayor Jerry Dyer said the law is making a difference. “Behavior is changing for the better,” he said. “We’re still utilizing compassion and being humane in the way we approach people, but now there’s the accountability.”

By mid-December, a police spokesperson said they’d arrested more than 300 people. They also said only 15 people had accepted the treatment offer so far.

Real had predicted that kind of reluctant response. He said he’s been to rehab three times, and even started training as a drug counselor before he relapsed.

“You can’t force somebody into rehab. It’s not going to work,” he said. “I know that from experience.”

‘The true long-term solution is housing’

People arrested under the law can be offered the option of completing a six-month drug treatment program to avoid the arrest appearing on their criminal record, according to police training documents. But only about a third report being chronic substance users.

Research finds homelessness is caused by an interplay of both personal and structural factors; trauma, mental illness, discrimination and incarceration make people more vulnerable to ending up on the streets. Drug addiction can be a contributing factor, but experts say it’s the precarity caused by poverty and high housing costs that drives widespread homelessness.

Between 2017 and last year, rents in Fresno County for a typical two-bedroom apartment increased more than 40%, according to the federal government. During that time, the number of unhoused people in Fresno and the neighboring county more than doubled.

Officials emphasize that police and outreach workers regularly offer to connect people with housing and other services before they make an arrest.

But in Real’s case, he said it hasn’t led to actually being housed. Outreach workers have helped him sign up for a spot on the waitlist at an emergency shelter four times, he said, but he hasn’t followed up with them, and they haven’t followed up with him. He doesn’t have a phone, a watch, or a permanent address.

And despite efforts to provide more shelter beds and services, the city struggles to match demand. Dyer said Fresno spends about $15 million on shelter services per year, which helped fund about 1,400 year-round emergency shelter and transitional housing beds. And there were nearly as many people sleeping in them, according to federal data (PDF).

Meanwhile, there were another 1,800 people living unsheltered on Fresno’s streets.

“Based on our outreach, 90% of the unhoused are already waiting for services,” said Fresno civil rights and criminal defense attorney Kevin Little. “So it’s really a meaningless law to give them a choice between being arrested and seeking services that they already are waiting for.”

With the help of volunteers, Little said he has been interviewing unhoused people affected by the camping ban and preparing to file a lawsuit against the city.

He argued the law is leaving unhoused people worse off without actually solving anything, warning these arrests can set off a cascade of negative consequences that only further entrench people into homelessness — an assertionsupported by research.

Jail booking logs in Fresno show the majority of people arrested on public camping charges are only held in custody for a matter of hours, just long enough to be processed. But advocates for the unhoused, and unhoused people themselves, say they can lose most of their belongings in the process and get separated from friends and pets.

According to the city, 51 people arrested on charges of public camping were prosecuted by the City Attorney’s Office by mid-December. Most of those cases were still working their way through the system; eight had been dismissed, and 17 defendants hadn’t shown up to court, likely earning them warrants for failing to appear.

Dyer dismissed concerns that the arrests are ineffectual, saying the camping ban is just one part of the city’s broader strategy to address homelessness, which includes investing in shelter and affordable housing.

“The true long-term solution is housing with services,” Dyer said, adding that he also sees a role for enforcement. “I do believe that it’s the necessary accountability that’s going to cause people to change behavior over the long run. And it is something that the people of Fresno expect.”

California’s Housing and Community Development Department shows that Fresno completed some 780 low-income housing units between 2019 and last year, and a spokesperson for the city said hundreds more are in the works.

Mixed feelings among residents

In interviews, residents expressed mixed feelings about the law. Some business owners said they relied on unhoused people as customers, others said they were glad to see police respond more quickly to complaints.

As Sgt. Jaquez worked his way around the city, following reported complaints from alley to sidewalk to overpass, more than one person approached him to express their gratitude for his team’s work.

Among them was Devonta Mayberry, who uses an electric wheelchair. He told Jaquez the clear sidewalks have transformed his ability to get around his neighborhood, and made his daughter feel safer walking around.

“Y’all finally getting this stuff cleaned up,” he said. “They’re doing drugs out here and then it’s babies right here. All we can do is call for help.”

“You hit me up on 311 if you have problems,” Jaquez said, referring to Fresno’s non-emergency phone number that connects residents to city services. “We’re trying to return neighborhoods back to people who live in the neighborhoods.”

In the roughly 25 years since he began work as a police officer in Fresno, Sgt. Jaquez said he has watched tent encampments take over parts of the city. After three years working with the department’s homelessness response team, he said he’s proud of his work cleaning up some of the larger camps. But even he doesn’t see this as a solution.

“Just moving them right now does not solve this problem,” he said. “But it gives a couple of hours, and then we’ll come back another time and deal with it again.”