Will state plan for clearing homeless camps work?

The first time William Joseph Brown filled out a survey to try to get into permanent housing, he was living beside a highway. That was December 2019.

In late August this year, when California’s transportation agency cleared him from the same strip of land tucked behind the San Clemente off-ramp on the northbound Interstate 5, he still had nowhere to live.

Caltrans removed Brown and about 20 other campers due to the “immediate safety threat of fire,” as they were “using open flames to cook near dry vegetation,” a spokesperson told CalMatters.

The agency said six of those people were matched to permanent housing. Brown said he got a voucher for a hotel room for about a week, and then another, which recently expired.

But he’s still waiting on the permanent housing voucher he was promised two years ago. Brown said none of his friends exited homelessness since they were removed from the camp, either: “They’re just in a different place.”

“We were on the off-ramp because we were out of the way,” he said. “People don’t want to see homeless people. A lot of us were there because that was the last place to go.”

California is spending more than ever before on homelessness — $12 billion between 2021 and 2023 — which also means there’s more pressure to make an impact. The bulk of that money will go to creating more living spaces and providing mental health resources for people who are now on the streets.

But some of the money is being used by Caltrans in a ramped-up effort to move people like Brown off the state’s bustling freeways in the name of safety.

“We’ve got to deal with homelessness,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said at the 2021 California Economic Summit in Monterey on Nov. 9. “We’ve got to deal with cleaning the state, the streets, cleaning up our thoroughfares, our underpasses, our overpasses, removing graffiti, dealing with encampments.”

Reducing homelessness is top of mind for many voters. And it’s likely to be a big campaign issue in 2022, as it was for the Sept. 14 election on whether to recall Newsom.

But while it may be good politics to move homeless people out of visible public locations, experts say it’s just moving the problem somewhere else.

“Spending state money on harassing people who are struggling under the impacts of local, state and federal policy failures is counterproductive,” said Margot Kushel, director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco. “I would present the radical idea of taking the perspective of the people living there.”

The last time volunteers and local officials counted the number of people experiencing homelessness in California was on a January night in 2020. They came across more than 161,000 people, in and out of shelters. That is the largest number in the nation, but the tally is widely considered an underestimate, and it doesn’t take into account the economic devastation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic that started two months later.

About 36% of those people had been homeless for at least a year, which means the other two-thirds were newly homeless, according to federal data.

Cities and counties across California reported last year a little more than 53,000 beds in either an emergency shelter or transitional housing — or fewer than one bed for every three people. In some areas, the ratio is as high as five people per bed; no county has at least one full bed per person.

There are, however, some shelter beds — in churches for example — that aren’t counted in these official statistics because they don’t receive any money from the federal government.

A lot more beds became available in California during the pandemic in hotel and motel rooms leased or bought by the state at a record clip. Project Roomkey has provided temporary shelter to more than 48,000 people during the pandemic, and Project Homekey temporarily sheltered thousands more across 94 hotels that created about 6,000 permanent housing units.