‘Look, There’s Nowhere Else to Go’: Inside California’s Crackdown on Homeless Camps

It’s been eight months since the U.S. Supreme Court fundamentally changed how cities in California and beyond can respond to homeless encampments, allowing them to clear camps and arrest people  for sleeping outside — even when there’s nowhere  else to sleep.

The July ruling in the case Grants Pass v. Johnson upended six years of protections for unhoused people. It was a radical change, and it came as many Californians, from small business owners to Gov. Gavin Newsom, were fed up with regularly seeing tent camps that stretched for blocks, human feces smeared on sidewalks and people injecting drugs in the open. Once the Supreme Court gave the green light, even liberal strongholds such as San Francisco were quick to start removing camps — despite a collective outcry from activists supporting the rights of homeless Californians.

What has that meant for people living outside?

CalMatters spent four months interviewing experts, requesting data and making a dozen visits to encampments in San Francisco and Fresno to document enforcement efforts and follow the unhoused people displaced when their camps were cleared. Our public media partner, KPBS, did extensive reporting and visits to encampments in San Diego.

Experts agree clearing or “sweeping” encampments alone can’t end homelessness. But here’s what we did see over and over as a result of sweeps in those cities: people becoming more likely to lose touch with support services, people losing essential items they need to get into housing (such as birth certificates) or to survive the elements (such as tents) and people still stuck on the streets — sometimes in new locations.

In some cases, cities try to pair enforcement with offers of a shelter bed or other services. But shelter is generally in short supply, and the types of programs available often don’t work for everyone on the street.

Cities are continuing with enforcement, anyway. Here’s what that looks like.

San Francisco

Linda Vazquez sat cross-legged on the sidewalk during an afternoon last fall, with two dogs in her lap and her hands cuffed behind her back. A police officer stood over her.

Beside her, balanced on a camp stove, sat the pot of chicharrones she’d been cooking for lunch.

Vazquez, 52, was clearly upset. “Because I did so bad,” she yelled sarcastically at the officer, who was citing her for “unauthorized lodging,” a misdemeanor under California’s penal code. “This is the biggest crime ever.”

The police didn’t end up taking Vazquez to jail, and instead gave her a slip of paper with a date to show up in court. They did confiscate the tarp she was sheltering under as “evidence,” making it harder for her to survive on the street.

The citation was Vazquez’s second in two weeks.

Within hours,  Vazquez was back, setting up camp in the same spot — a block that had essentially become hers. Vazquez was known throughout the neighborhood, always surrounded by dogs and friends. On any given day, you might find her cooking meals to share, giving away blankets and other provisions to her unhoused neighbors or hitting people who caused trouble on the block with a blast of water from her Super Soaker squirt gun. At night, she watched horror movies on a tablet in her tent.

Vazquez continued to camp there for the next three months and received at least one more citation.

“I said, ‘look, there’s nowhere else to go,’” Vazquez said. ‘“All the other places are doing the same thing. So where do you want me to go? Where do you want me to hide out?’”

A California native, Vazquez grew up bouncing between Modesto, Santa Cruz, Gilroy, Monterey and other places as her mother found work on different farms. Her life took a turn for the worse in her 20s when, she says, her former partner became abusive. She fled to San Francisco in 1998, and for the past few years has been bouncing between the street, shelters and subsidized housing placements.

Encampment removals in Vazquez’s neighborhood — a handful of alleys that run between Van Ness Avenue and Larkin Street at the edge of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood — have fallen into a predictable rhythm. There are sweeps nearly every Monday and Friday, regular as clockwork.

CalMatters visited that area about twice a week for five weeks last fall. During that time, city outreach teams spoke with people camping there 138 times, according to Jackie Thornhill, spokesperson for the city’s Department of Emergency Management. They placed people in shelter 27 times, and placed one person in permanent housing. Police made 16 arrests.

On most days during that five-week span, CalMatters saw several people camped on each block, despite the frequent sweeps. Their reasons for living on the street varied. Many couldn’t stand being in a shelter. One man said he once saw a fellow shelter resident get raped, and since then, he’s avoided those facilities at all costs. A woman CalMatters spoke with said she already had housing in a city-funded SRO, but she’s a victim of domestic violence, and her abuser found out where she lives. Now, she doesn’t feel safe going back.

A recent CalMatters investigation revealed that many California shelters are a purgatory — plagued by unsanitary and unsafe conditions, and operating with next-to-no oversight.

Many people opt to sleep on the street and try to be gone in the morning before the city shows up to kick them out.

It’s not uncommon for as many as a dozen city workers to participate in an encampment removal, including police, fire department paramedics and staff from the city’s Department of Emergency Management, Homeless Outreach Team and Encampment Resolution Team.

That work is coordinated by Mary Ellen Carroll, executive director of the city’s Department of Emergency Management. The goal, she said, is to clean up and offer people services.

“Sometimes people will get up and move around and come back after,” said Carroll, who was on site as her team cleaned up encampments in Vazquez’s neighborhood on a Friday afternoon last fall. “But…it’s a matter of consistency, to just keep coming and addressing.”

On that Friday, Carroll’s team spoke with 13 people camping in the alleyways between Van Ness and Larkin. None of them accepted a shelter bed. From January through early November 2024, her team engaged with people in that area 930 times, and referred people to shelter 180 times. In another 47 cases, the person already had housing or shelter.

Typically, only between 20% and 30% of people accept a shelter bed when it’s offered, according to the city.

With those low placement numbers, and with people returning over and over to camp on the same streets, are the city’s efforts helping?

“I think that it is helping, overall,” Carroll said. Clearing encampments is just part of a broader strategy that includes outreach and services, but it’s an important piece, she said.

To David Schmitz, a 60-year-old photographer who lives in an apartment overlooking the street where Vazquez camps, the encampment sweeps have made a difference. When he first moved in, about four months earlier, it was common to see at least a dozen tents on the street. People frequently urinated against his garage door, he said.

On the November afternoon that he spoke to CalMatters, the city had just finished a clean-up that left the street spotless — not a tent or piece of trash in sight. Schmitz said he’d never seen it so clean.

“I was euphoric,” he said. “I was like, this is amazing. This is what it could be like, you know. If it were like this … I would see my neighbors more. It wouldn’t be such an apocalyptic feeling to come out here.”

Not everyone caught camping gets cited or arrested. Police typically give people citations if they have pitched a tent or strung up a tarp, like Vazquez did, to use as shelter, but not if they are sleeping in the open on just a blanket, said Sgt. J. Ellison with the police department’s Healthy Streets Operation Center.

Ellison sees Vazquez frequently because many of the city’s shelter and transitional housing programs won’t allow all of Vazquez’s dogs. She has three, and she’s unwilling to give any up.

“I can’t leave them,” Vazquez said, “because I’ve had them since they were the size of my hand.”

Instead, nearly every Monday and Friday, Vazquez and her friends packed up everything they owned and moved around the corner, waiting there until the police and other city personnel left and they could return.

On a recent rainy Monday afternoon, Vazquez was sick, huddling in a small tent with a hairdryer on (using jumper cables to siphon power from a nearby street light) to keep warm. The city came three days earlier and took her larger, gray tent, tarps, portable heater and other belongings, she said. It was raining then, too, and Vazquez said she stood outside in the rain for hours until a friend could give her a new tent. All her clothes got soaked — as did the two paper camping citations that told her when she was supposed to appear in court.

The city was coming again that afternoon to clear the street.

“I don’t have no energy at all,” Vazquez said, sniffling and coughing. “But I have to move.”

Not long after, Vazquez found a hotel in San Francisco that agreed to take her and her three dogs. A room there costs $70 a day — money Vazquez pays with her disability benefits. She found the place on her own, without the city’s help, she said.

Vazquez isn’t sure how long she’ll be able to keep up with the payments. But she has a more pressing concern: The hotel is making her leave temporarily, so that it doesn’t have to grant her tenant’s rights.

Where will she go until she can return?

“I guess I’m going to be in a tent for three days,” she said. “And then I’m going to come back.”

San Diego

San Diego’s unsafe camping ordinance went into effect nearly a year before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision. It prohibits tent camping in all public spaces if shelter beds are available, and near homeless shelters, schools, parks and transit centers regardless of shelter availability.

It also outlined the process for clearing encampments, reducing a previous 72-hour notice to just 24 hours. Part of the process includes the city’s Environmental Services Department posting neon green notices prior to clearing an encampment.

Aldea Secory has gotten used to it.

“Every other day, pretty much, they make us clean up and move,” she said. She and her husband found they could avoid the sweeps for a while if they stayed near the freeway, on state property the California Department of Transportation oversees.

“We were on the side of the freeway for, like, a month,” Secory said. Then, she said, the California Highway Patrol swept that site.

“That’s the last time we lost all our stuff,” she said. “It’s heartbreaking to come back to that. You have to start over again and again and again.”

Twenty-four hours after the green notices get posted on fences, light posts, tents or nearby vegetation, city staff take photos of the site and look through any remaining bags, boxes and other items that might contain valuable belongings, such as paperwork or medication.

Franklin Coopersmith, deputy director of the Environmental Services Department’s Clean SD Division, said cleanup can take around 10 to 30 minutes in places with frequent sweeps, such as downtown surface streets. In more remote areas, like canyons, it can take several days.

Secory said she’s had valuable items discarded.

“They’ve thrown brand new things away,” she said. “I had a brand new $35, $40 bag of dog food just thrown away. Beds, clothes, it doesn’t matter. Birth certificates, medication. Doesn’t matter. They just throw it away.”

Personal items can get discarded for a few reasons, Coopersmith said.

Sometimes, he said, they’re in pockets or containers city employees might miss.

“A lot of times, too, people are storing them with food that’s spoiled or bags that have gotten wet and they’ve turned moldy,” he said. “We’re not going to be searching a moldy bag that might have a birth certificate at the very bottom of it. If they’re putting their ID or something next to a meth pipe, our code officers aren’t going to be going through that stuff to figure it out.”

“Any remaining items soiled with moisture, food, human waste, pet waste, insect infestation, drug paraphernalia or in disrepair are then discarded,” their policy reads.

“Most people that are out there on the streets know that if it’s something important, they need to keep it close to them or in a place that’s easy for them to grab,” Coopersmith said.

After the cleanup, the city posts a yellow flyer with information on how to get those non-discarded items back. Coopersmith said they put the notices close to where they found the items. They’ll keep things in storage for up to 90 days and deliver them back to the owner, according to the city.

Secory and her husband now live in a tent at one of two campgrounds the city has created on vacant land. The sites, known as Safe Sleeping sites, are operated by Dreams for Change, a nonprofit that provides homeless services and food distribution. The city provides restrooms and wash stations and pays the nonprofit to provide outdoor sleeping arrangements, a daily meal and a snack. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria has asked the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to consider those sites as shelters.

“Having somewhere to keep your stuff and not worry about it getting stolen or messed up, it’s a big help,” Secory said.

San Diego’s camping ordinance has made it more difficult for service providers like Jenni Wilkens to stay in contact with unhoused people. She manages the street health program at Father Joe’s Villages, a nonprofit that runs shelters and does outreach work. Staff from their Village Health Center visit encampments weekly to provide help such as wound care, substance use disorder counseling and prescription management.

“Prior to the ordinance going into effect, we had very, very tight relationships with the community members we were serving,” Wilkens said. “We always knew where we could find them. Follow-up was much, much easier. They knew where to expect us, and we just knew we were going to be able to find our folks. Since the camping ordinance passed, the abatement sweeps have been much more frequent and much more aggressive. So we have not been able to provide that quality follow-up care that we used to be able to provide, just because everybody is moving. We lose track of our patients.”

One of the patients, Lee Alirez, has high blood pressure. She’d been dealing with headaches, blurred vision and chest pain before she got diagnosed. Moving her camp frequently has made it hard to stay in contact with the health team.

“There was a couple of different times they couldn’t find me, and I was just literally across the street and around the corner,” Alirez said. “And that was in the midst of all that, trying to figure out what was going on with my blood pressure.”

In some cases, Wilkens said, the frequent movement has made people more likely to accept shelter. But many others have moved to state property — freeway onramps and offramps, overpasses and under bridges.

“My team can’t put themselves at risk to reach our patients,” she said. “We also can’t go to a location and ask them to cross back over the freeway to see us. So they’re just getting further and further away from resources.”

Steve Shebloski, a captain with the San Diego Police Department’s Neighborhood Policing Division, said the city’s police don’t have the resources or authority to enforce city ordinances on state land.

“I understand the frustration when people see an encampment go from city property, where it feels like officers are doing their job, and it goes right over the state property. That’s frustrating,” he said. “We can only do so much, and we have to focus on city property. And I don’t know if we can get into the world of policing 151 miles of state highways within the city.”

In July, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered state agencies (PDF) to clear encampments from state property.

A spokesperson for Caltrans District 11, which includes San Diego, wrote in an email that they prioritize removing encampments that present “a threat to infrastructure or people.” The agency gives a 48-hour notice to people in an encampment before a sweep, unless there’s an imminent safety risk, and gives social service providers and local governments two weeks’ notice so they can reach out to people staying there.

Shebloski said SDPD has been meeting with California Highway Patrol on how they can work together. But while the city’s neighborhood policing division has been active since 2018, Newsom’s executive order is less than a year old.

“When you look at Caltrans and CHP, they have commuters. We have residents,” he said. “I think this is kind of a new thing for them to dive into.”

Fresno

It’s become less common these days to see large homeless encampments in and around downtown Fresno.

But spend any time there, and you’ll see something else: People walking the streets, pushing carts and strollers loaded with blankets and other necessities.

The city and county banned camping on all public property last year, but the area still struggles with a shortage of shelter beds. Now Robert Fox, 32, sleeps on the ground with no tent because it makes it easier to leave when the police come.

“If I gotta leave, all I gotta do is push the cart and get out of here,” Fox said. “Every morning we pack up and have our stuff ready to go. You can’t get attached to anything. You can’t get comfortable. You’re always on the move.”

Fox ended up outside after getting kicked out of a drug treatment program. He said he was selling drugs to raise money for new lodgings as the program’s end date approached. He spent a few nights at the nearby shelters, but to get a spot, he has to get in line early and spend hours waiting. If he does get a bed, he can’t bring all his belongings with him — so he worries about someone stealing what he has to leave  on the street. It’s not worth it for one night inside, he said.

Instead, he now sleeps on an empty dirt lot behind the Poverello House and Fresno Mission shelters, next to a set of railroad tracks and beneath an overpass. It’s near the methadone clinic he visits daily to keep himself off heroin and fentanyl.

“If I had somewhere else to go, I wouldn’t be here,” Fox said. “Because they don’t really want us here.”

More than 100 people used to camp in the area around the Poverello House and Fresno Mission, and police mostly used to leave them alone, said advocates and people who live on the streets of Fresno.

“Over time, people have gotten more scared to go down there,” said Dez Martinez, a formerly homeless advocate who founded the grassroots organization We Are Not Invisible. She said people worried about getting arrested as police began enforcing the new camping ordinance. “Ever since the ordinance went into effect, (there are) a lot less people. Now everybody’s going to ‘abandos’ (abandoned buildings).”

Last fall, the city removed a large homeless encampment that had spread across streets surrounding the shelters.

“It was not a very healthy and safe place for those that were camping there and for those nearby,” said Phil Skei, assistant director of the city’s Planning & Development Department.

The operation received a lot of fanfare — Mayor Jerry Dyer attended and posted about it on Instagram — and the city held dozens of shelter beds for people displaced from that area. Skei said the city brought 52 people into temporary shelter that day. Another roughly 30 left before the clean-up, and the city doesn’t know where they went.

While Skei says the city had a bed for everyone who wanted one that day, that’s not always the case.

“It’s a common occurrence where we show up to a place where there’s one person camping or two people camping and we don’t have shelter beds available that day,” Skei said.

By late January, three months after the Poverello House operation, the surrounding streets were still mostly clear. Martinez said she knows of people arrested after coming back to that area. Skei said in “a minority of cases,” the city does resort to arrests to keep areas from getting re-encamped.

But though the streets were empty, Fox wasn’t the only one sleeping on the dirt lot behind the shelters.

Leron Bell, 39, said officers with the California Highway Patrol make him move every few days. They usually give a warning of up to 20 minutes, he said, and if he doesn’t move fast enough, they start confiscating things he hasn’t packed up yet. So far, he’s lost a tent, a bicycle, a gas stove, his ID and his birth certificate, which he’s still having a hard time replacing.

“I try to rush,” Bell said, “hurry up and try to put as much as I can in either my shopping cart or my wagon.”

Once he’s packed, he goes to the other side of the railroad tracks and waits until the officers leave. He’s been in and out of shelters, but the strict rules make him feel like he’s in jail, he said.

“I hate having to start over,” Bell said, “but, it’s like, I’m doing my best as I can being homeless.”

Four miles away, another group of tents, makeshift shelters and vehicles was scattered across an empty dirt lot behind a Family Dollar store. That’s where Roy Tellez, 62, was living when CalMatters spoke to him this winter.

Recently, the police told him to pack up and leave his campside, so he did, he said. HHe was thirsty and needed water for his dog, so he pushed his cart, loaded with his belongings, to a store across the street. But police found him there and arrested him for camping, Tellez said.

He said he spent about four hours in jail — just long enough for people to steal all his belongings from where he left them on the street.

“What was the whole point?” he asked. “What was the inconvenience about?”