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.”
