California is quickly reshaping its strategy to homeless tent encampments within the wake of final yr’s Supreme Courtroom ruling that allowed cities to implement anti-camping bans even when individuals have nowhere else to go.
There are roughly 275,000 individuals residing unsheltered within the US, with over half of them in California, and the Grants Move v. Johnson choice has emboldened cities to interrupt up such encampments and increase “interim housing” choices, like tiny home shelters and motel rooms, to maneuver individuals extra rapidly off the road.
Critics argue that this strategy dangers making a two-tiered housing system that would masks relatively than remedy the disaster. Nonetheless, the truth that short-term housing models could be erected rather more rapidly than everlasting supportive housing (roughly 5 months relatively than 5 years) and cheaply ($50,000 to 100,000 per unit relatively than $600,000 to $1 million per unit) has offered elected officers with a pretty coverage answer to their mounting political issues.
In California, the place homelessness has develop into each a defining political legal responsibility for elected officers and a nationwide image of the state’s governance challenges, cities are significantly desperate to show progress on their streets. Maybe no California politician has been extra enthusiastic concerning the potential of tiny home shelters than San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who proposed in 2023 to divert greater than a 3rd of his metropolis’s housing funds to extend manufacturing. (San Jose is the biggest metropolis in Northern California, with roughly 1 million residents.)
Mahan campaigned for reelection in 2024 on clearing avenue homelessness, and since successful, he’s pledged to construct greater than 1,000 new short-term housing models by the tip of 2025. Extra just lately he declared that he needs to arrest homeless individuals who repeatedly refuse to go to shelter. “Homelessness can’t be a selection,” Mahan mentioned. “Authorities has a accountability to construct shelter, and our homeless neighbors have a accountability to make use of it.”
This extra forceful strategy can be being embraced in San Francisco, the place the newly elected Mayor Daniel Lurie has been increasing interim housing choices and transferring individuals extra rapidly off the streets. Tent encampments are down in San Francisco — the bottom degree on report for the reason that metropolis began monitoring in 2019 — and crime has equally plummeted. Arrests of homeless persons are additionally up. Based on the San Francisco Chronicle, practically 120 homeless individuals had been arrested in March, the very best recorded of any month within the prior seven years, and greater than 700 individuals had been arrested since August, following the Grants Move choice.
“Prior to now it was solely social services-led, and also you’re simply not going to social work your approach out of this drawback,” Kunal Modi, the mayor’s chief of homelessness coverage, informed me. “However you’re equally not going to arrest your approach out of this problem, so we’re looking for the steadiness between the 2.”
Elizabeth Funk, the CEO of DignityMoves, a nonprofit that started 5 years in the past to use “Silicon Valley-style ‘disruptive considering’ to America’s homelessness disaster,” has been main the cost for increasing tiny home shelters in California. She credit the Grants Move choice for transferring issues alongside. “It did give a push,” Funk informed me, “as a result of satirically cities had been getting off the hook, saying, ‘Nicely why would we construct shelter? We will’t make individuals take it.’ So now there’s no extra excuse to say, ‘Nicely if we construct it it’ll sit there empty.’”
The momentum for interim housing extends past metropolis halls. Final yr, state lawmakers handed the Interim Housing Act in help of the tiny homes strategy and now are advancing two extra payments to speed up the mannequin statewide.
The strategy is gaining nationwide consideration too. Former San Jose Mayor and present US Rep. Sam Liccardo informed me he’s drafting federal laws that will let Housing Alternative Vouchers, generally often called Part 8, fund interim housing choices — one thing these rental subsidies presently aren’t approved to help. As Mahan’s predecessor, Liccardo led the institution of San Jose’s first interim shelters to scale back contagion threat throughout the pandemic. (Every interim shelter unit provided residents extra privateness than congregate shelters, the place individuals sleep in shared areas, or than sleeping outdoors to keep away from Covid-19).
“I’m speaking to my Republican colleagues, together with the chair of the subcommittee within the Home, Mike Flood, and there may be curiosity in better flexibility in Part 8,” Liccardo mentioned, suggesting potential bipartisan enchantment for the mannequin. On homelessness typically, he added, “we simply want a extra nimble response.”
The law-and-order orientation of the Trump administration coupled with its slash-and-burn strategy to federal funding will most likely push the interim housing mannequin ahead, Funk predicts. “It’s an fascinating time,” she mentioned, “and as a lot because it breaks my coronary heart to see so many cuts to packages that assist deal with individuals, in a humorous approach, if there’s no extra federal funding for everlasting housing it’s going to drive the problem that we have to fund inexpensive options.”
The controversy over “success” in fixing homelessness
Throughout the US, 150 cities have handed new restrictions on homeless encampments for the reason that Grants Move choice final June, in accordance with the Nationwide Homelessness Legislation Middle. Roughly a 3rd of these cities have been in California.
Elected officers have partly justified these new guidelines as a step towards attaining “practical zero unsheltered homelessness” — a narrower model of the broader coverage purpose of “practical zero homelessness,” launched in 2014 by the nonprofit Neighborhood Options. The group’s thought was to outline success as constructing methods the place homelessness is uncommon, transient, and nonrecurring, and this framework has since been embraced by the Division of Veterans Affairs and the US Interagency Council on Homelessness. In 2021, Neighborhood Options was awarded the MacArthur Basis’s $100 million grant for its work advancing this strategy.
California lawmakers and DignityMoves have began to invoke the “practical zero” and “uncommon, transient, and nonrecurring” language however utilized solely to these sleeping outdoors or in locations not primarily meant for human residence, like automobiles or practice stations. In different phrases, they’re not specializing in homeless people residing in congregate shelters or these doubling up in cramped flats. (One of many two state interim housing payments this yr is named the Practical Zero Unsheltered Act of 2025.)
“Attending to zero for unsheltered avenue homelessness needs to be the highest precedence,” California state Sen. Catherine Blakespear, who’s sponsoring one of many state interim housing payments this yr, informed me. “And I’ve had a shift in my very own fascinated with this.”
Some homelessness advocates have pushed again on the brand new utilization. “‘Practical zero’ is widely known within the homeless coverage world, however ‘practical zero unsheltered’ shouldn’t be a phrase we acknowledge as a result of it suggests the chance that sheltered homelessness is an appropriate state of affairs for folk,” Alex Visotzky, a senior California coverage fellow with the Nationwide Alliance to Finish Homelessness, informed me. “While you concentrate on unsheltered solely, more often than not you solely make issues worse as a result of that results in a logjam in your shelter system the place people can’t get out.”
Visotzky challenges the idea that solely slow-to-build everlasting housing can remedy homelessness. Whereas it does take years to construct new everlasting housing, he stresses that it doesn’t take years to get individuals into everlasting housing, by means of a focused strategy of case administration, housing subsidies, and reconnecting individuals with household and pals. Advocates like Visotzky say they don’t oppose interim housing per se, however fear about politicians diverting funds for everlasting housing, and stopping individuals from transferring into an actual dwelling for even longer.
The push of personal enterprise into the tiny home house provides advocates pause too, they usually fear what this subsequent period of criminalization will appear like. Multiple-fifth of individuals experiencing homelessness presently have a critical psychological sickness like bipolar dysfunction or schizophrenia, and the US Division of Justice had discovered that “the prevalence of unmet behavioral well being wants” is a key driver in why “individuals who expertise homelessness are likely to have frequent (and infrequently repeat) interactions with regulation enforcement.” Not all interim housing communities have the help providers vital to assist individuals with critical psychological sickness, and advocates fear about what’s going to occur if there’s simply nowhere else for these individuals to go.
In San Francisco, Lurie’s mayoral predecessor, London Breed, responded to the Grants Move ruling by promising to be “very aggressive” on tent encampments, together with by threatening prison penalties. Lurie has stored up Breed’s more durable strategy, together with by extra formally embedding their homeless avenue outreach groups with regulation enforcement.
Whereas campaigning for mayor final yr, Lurie partnered with DignityMoves, and featured Elizabeth Funk prominently in his marketing campaign’s announcement of his plan to sort out homelessness. Lurie has promised to construct 2,500 models of interim housing in his first two years. Modi, the homelessness lead for Lurie’s staff in San Francisco, informed me their first order of enterprise was to concentrate on revamping their avenue outreach technique and opening a brand new disaster stabilization heart, exactly to serve extra individuals with critical well being wants. Now, although, their consideration is popping to constructing the brand new tiny home choices.
Making interim housing much less interim?
Whereas advocates for interim housing have pitched the models as short-term “bridge” choices to everlasting housing, some advocates like Funk say the properties needs to be accessible for much longer to residents in the event that they do wish to dwell there, maybe as a result of they don’t thoughts the house or as a result of they don’t need the effort of looking on the non-public rental market.
“Proper now, the common keep is about eight months, however as we begin scaling this interim factor, it’s going to get longer, and that must be okay,” she informed me. “The one motive we would like individuals out quick is as a result of town has to pay for preserving them in shelter, and cities can’t afford that.”
One of many main boundaries is paying for the price of meals, upkeep, and social providers in these tiny home villages. In San Jose, for instance, every village value about $15 million to launch, however then $3 million to $4 million yearly thereafter to function. When he was mayor, Liccardo mentioned, town struggled to get any county-level funding to take care of the tiny dwelling villages they constructed throughout the pandemic; its tens of millions in working prices had been deemed too costly.
“What we’re against is muddying the definition of what’s really housing.”
— Alex Visotzky, senior California coverage fellow with the Nationwide Alliance to Finish Homelessness
Funk and leaders like Mahan assume they’ve the reply. They’re eyeing the federal authorities’s $3.6 billion voucher program, which presently helps about 2.3 million low-income households. This Housing Alternative Voucher program is notoriously laborious for recipients to make use of; one federal examine discovered solely 60 p.c of these fortunate sufficient to even obtain a voucher might discover a non-public landlord prepared to just accept it. In California final yr, over 40,000 voucher recipients by no means secured housing.
The answer, Funk and her colleagues envision, is permitting the federal rental subsidy to assist cities cowl these annual working prices, so individuals can keep housed and federal subsidies aren’t wasted as a result of renters couldn’t discover prepared landlords.
To maneuver that concept ahead, Liccardo, who represents elements of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, is engaged on a invoice that will make clear that native communities might resolve whether or not voucher holders are allowed to spend their month-to-month subsidy on staying longer-term in a tiny home or motel choice as a substitute of a market-rate condo.
Liccardo blasted Republicans who don’t wish to spend extra money on vouchers, and famous that 60,000 vouchers might disappear by the tip of subsequent yr if Congress doesn’t act. However he praised his conservative colleagues for being open to “better flexibility” in how the cash may very well be spent. “If individuals wish to keep in them, nice,” he mentioned. “Let’s permit the native communities to resolve.”
Visotzky mentioned advocates like himself haven’t any qualms about individuals staying in shelters when there may be nowhere else for them to go, however they fear about creating a brand new class of substandard residing. “What we’re against,” he mentioned, “is muddying the definition of what’s really housing.”
