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.”
The programs that are supposed to build affordable housing for the homeless in California are usually gamed by real estate developers that want to build plain old residential real estate. They’ll take the tax dollars to build the housing, and then rent to who they please. Or just sit empty if no one pays the going rate.