The big thing that gets left out of these discussions is shelters. Newsom’s stance is that encampments should only be illegal if indoor shelter is unavailable.
At face value, that doesn’t sound entirely unreasonable, but if you dig deeper, you’ll learn that a lot of indoor shelters endanger the wellbeing and belongings of unhoused people.
IMHO, for any of this to work, shelters need to be evaluated for their ability to provide a safe and caring environment, and if those shelters don’t hold up, a county shouldn’t be able to count those places as beds.
TL;DR: Newsom is arguing that people will be offered a bed first, but a lot of those beds are more dangerous than the street. And people need to start calling that out.
And notably, if the beds are better than literally sleeping on a sidewalk, you don’t need a law to criminalize the latter. The law only becomes useful if you need to make living on the street worse because you don’t want to make living in a shelter better.
Here is the model ordinance he’s asking cities to consider adopting.
https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Encampment-Ordinance-formatted.pdf
The big thing that gets left out of these discussions is shelters. Newsom’s stance is that encampments should only be illegal if indoor shelter is unavailable.
At face value, that doesn’t sound entirely unreasonable, but if you dig deeper, you’ll learn that a lot of indoor shelters endanger the wellbeing and belongings of unhoused people.
IMHO, for any of this to work, shelters need to be evaluated for their ability to provide a safe and caring environment, and if those shelters don’t hold up, a county shouldn’t be able to count those places as beds.
TL;DR: Newsom is arguing that people will be offered a bed first, but a lot of those beds are more dangerous than the street. And people need to start calling that out.
And notably, if the beds are better than literally sleeping on a sidewalk, you don’t need a law to criminalize the latter. The law only becomes useful if you need to make living on the street worse because you don’t want to make living in a shelter better.