San Diego ramps up arrests of unhoused people: ‘Harder to survive’
“Morning, it’s police! Collect all your stuff !”
At 7.30am on a recent Friday, two policemen shouted commands into tents along a sidewalk in downtown San Diego. One barefoot man startled awake and remarked that someone had stolen his shoes. Next to him, Moses Miramontes, 47, was frantically tying up his tent and belongings.
“This is BS. There’s no beds for us,” he said, as the cord he was wrapping around his stuff kept snapping in two. “Oh my God, because I’m not hurrying up enough, they’ll probably arrest me.” Down the street, one camper was getting a ticket.
It was the first week San Diego started enforcing a new anti-camping law, which allows officers to jail unhoused people camping in certain locations if they have previously been cited for living on the streets. It’s one tool in an escalating crackdown on people sleeping outside in California’s secondlargest city, which has been grappling with a spiraling humanitarian disaster.
While cities across the US are struggling with rising homelessness, San Diego’s crisis is by many measures especially dire. The city’s average rents recently surpassed San Francisco’s, making it the third most expensive city in the nation. A regional taskforce estimated earlier this year that there are now more than 10,000 people experiencing homelessness in
San Diego county, some in shelters and transitional programs, but more than 5,000 living outside in encampments and cars. Roughly 2,700 of them are 55 and older. The coroner logged nearly 600 deaths of unhoused people on the streets last year. The figures are undercounts.
Todd Gloria, the San Diego mayor, said his approach to the crisis involves getting tougher: “There has to be consequences for illegal behavior in the city. Now we’re saying you cannot occupy public spaces under certain circumstances.”
Mental illness and high rates of fentanyl addiction among unhoused people have exacerbated the challenges, Gloria said from his 11th-floor office. “Some [unhoused people] are so mentally ill that they don’t know … they’re unsafe.” In county surveys, roughly26% of unhoused adults report having serious mental illnesses and 20% report substance use disorders.
“We will be as helpful as we possibly can to help you address the underlying causes of your homelessness, but we will not be a city where it’s acceptable to live on the sidewalk,” Gloria said. “The impression shouldn’t be that it’s easy to be homeless here and you can do drugs in my city.”
Gloria’s under immense political pressure. Police get 800 to 1,000 complaints a week about encampments and homelessness, said police captain Shawn Takeuchi, who oversees roughly 50 officers policing homelessness. Polls show homelessness and housing affordability are a top concern for San Diego residents.
The “unsafe camping” ordinance, passed in June, says officers can cite and arrest people who have repeatedly refused to move from “sensitive areas”, including near schools, trolley stations or parks, even if the city has no shelter space to offer them. Elsewhere, police can arrest unhoused campers only if they’ve been offered shelter and have previously been ticketed.
The law is premised on the idea that, as Gloria described it, many on the streets remain there because they “won’t avail themselves of the services”, and that jail threats can be a “leverage” to force them into shelter. The policy was passed over the objections of 160 local academics who pointed to research showing criminalization does not reduce the number of unsheltered people.
Across downtown during week one of enforcement, it was not hard to find people desperate for shelter and police officers unable to help. At the Homelessness Response Center, a city-run drop-in site where people can seek services, just before 8am opening, Jerry
Moya, 33, said he’d been waiting in line since 5am to get help; he recently was unable to make rent and lost his housing, spending his remaining cash on a hotel room. The center wasn’t able to offer him a spot, he later said: “I’m tired and trying to figure my situation out.”
Down the street, one man told officers he wanted shelter, but after a policeman looked him up in his system, the officer told him he was ineligible due to his criminal record. Asked if the new ordinance has helped efforts, the officer said, “It’s all the same.”
The man, 31, who declined to give his name, said his backpack had been stolen, so his next move was to get a new charger for his ankle monitor. He said he doesn’t use a sleeping bag or tent, because it’s too much trouble with police forcing him to move all the time: “Wherever I lay my head, I lay my head.”
Gloria said the city has expanded shelter options and was “pushing out more resources than ever”, including programs for women, LGBTQ+ youth and seniors, and a “safe sleeping” lot where people can camp. But data shows it’s not nearly enough.
In a city with thousands on the streets, there is an average of roughly 25 available beds on a given day, typically filled by noon, said the San Diego Housing Commission spokesperson, Scott Marshall. The majority of unhoused people referred to shelter by police or others don’t get placed. In June, out of 1,298 referrals, only 404 ended up with a bed, Marshall said, noting that some lack of placements may be due to people ultimately changing their mind. For every 10 people that move off the streets into housing in San Diego, 13 people newly fall into homelessness.
Bob McElroy, the CEO of Alpha Project, a provider with roughly 600 beds in the city, said his center is full “all the time”. He said he’s generally proenforcement, but not when there aren’t spots available: “This is the most frustrated, demoralized and depressed I’ve been in 37 years of doing this.”
Sweeps and enforcement can be harmful when people end up scattered to new and more hidden locations where McElroy’s staff can’t find them, he said, as was the case with one person who’d been waiting six months for a shelter bed who was finally matched with a spot, but is now missing. Officials counted 167 fewer unhoused people downtown in July compared with June, but it’s unclear where people went.
Tosha Alvarado, 35, has seen this firsthand. Unhoused for years in San Diego, she said she’s on a waiting list for housing but has relied on encampment communities to survive. Her recent site in downtown was swept and she has no idea where her fellow residents ended up. “Some have moved to the outskirts or out of the city, which is just going to make it harder for other cities, which will also criminalize us, and we’ll have nowhere to go.”
Shortly after San Diego passed its anti-camping ordinance, the city of Poway to the north passed a similar ordinance. Chula Vista, to the south, has also reported a surge in unhoused people seeking services. About the concerns of people going missing, Gloria said: “Many of them have cellphones, email addresses, social media accounts – organizations are perfectly capable of inquiring for that information and keeping it.”
“It’s like we ain’t got any rights any more,” said Terry Winslow, 68, seated in his wheelchair in downtown after a round of sweeps. He said he has a case manager, but that she had too many clients to keep track of. He also said he was in a shelter for months, but it was infested with bedbugs and rats, and he had returned to the streets: “It’s a little scary, but I’m all right. But I want a roof over my damn head.”
For some residents, the only roof they get is in a jail cell. On Sports Arena Boulevard, an industrial street north of downtown, Margarito Garduno, 40, pulled out the yellow ticket he’d received from police when he was arrested for “encroachment”. “It sucks because I lose my property. It’s just been awful.” A bike mechanic, Garduno said he’d been arrested multiple times and that in the process, his belongings can get damaged, trashed or taken as evidence. He showed a cracked solar panel that he said was new but was broken during an arrest and sweep. He’d been using it to charge batteries. He said he’d also lost new shoes and a dog bed.
When arrested, he usually spends half a day in jail downtown, 3 miles away, he said. “It’s a waste of time. We’re just there behind bars doing nothing. It just gives them a chance to get rid of our stuff.”
When arrested, Garduno and others get a court date, which they fear can lead to warrants if they don’t show up. Their attorney, Coleen Cusack, has been showing up in court on their behalf, and the resolution has almost always been the same: “Case is not filed,” meaning the city attorney’s office declined to prosecute.
“Just because they don’t have a house, doesn’t mean they don’t have property that’s valuable,” said Cusack.
Andrew Sharp, a spokesperson for the city attorney, said in an email that prosecutors “only pursue charges when they believe they can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt”, adding that the office recently dismissed one of Cusack’s encroachment cases after an “extensive investigation and the interview of independent witnesses”.
Takeuchi, the police captain, said officers who go to this encampment always offer shelter and that they issue verbal warnings, infraction tickets and misdemeanor citations before taking people to jail: “Individuals going to jail are the folks who are continuing to violate the law and not heed our warnings,” he said.
In 2023 through early August, San Diego police have made 82 arrests for encroachment and illegal lodging, and issued 941 tickets for those offenses, according to data provided to the Guardian.
In the first week of the new law, three people were ticketed for violating the camping ordinance, and 55 were contacted, meaning they could later be cited or arrested.
Takeuchi said three people contacted were placed into shelter and that the others declined offers, though he could not say how many were ineligible or unable to be matched to appropriate spots.
At the Sports Arena encampment, Jerry Bergeron, 30, another resident who was arrested for “encroachment”, with a case ultimately dropped, said it was demoralizing to have to walk from jail back to his tent.
“They are just making it harder and harder for us to survive,” he said, adding that he was struggling to get the right paperwork for his housing: “If they could just back off, we could have time to get our shit together and get off the streets.”
He pointed out that his tent was pitched on the dirt by a fence, not obstructing a road or any walkway or property. And “encroachment” tickets are traditionally given to homeowners whose garbage cans block a pathway, he said. “This isn’t a sidewalk, and we’re not trash.”
They are just making it harder and harder for us to survive. If they could just back off, we could have time to get our shit together and get off the streets
Jerry Bergeron
are disrespectful to nature, and they pollute the area in all kinds of ways.”
It is especially galling because the traditionally nudist beaches are chosen for their seclusion, which often coincides with picture-postcard beauty. So visitors come for the postcard (for younger readers: the Instagram backdrop), and in so doing, turn the beach from three dimensions – a place with history, community and a counter-culture – to two.
The public appeal for tourists in swimsuits to stay away caught the world’s attention. It animated a question playing out in beauty spots and heritage sites all over the world: when tourists flock to a place, do they change its character, wipe out its idiosyncrasies, without even noticing what those idiosyncrasies are? Is there an impact on the residents more important than a boost to ice-cream sales? Can you commodify beauty without tainting it? When does tourism become overtourism?
In the 20 years running up to Covid, international tourism doubled, to 2.4 billion arrivals in 2019. Overall, tourism last year was at 63% of its preCovid levels. Every place has its own post-Covid recovery story: Thailand has taken a while and is, at a state level at least, very welcoming to visitors; France has yet to see the same numbers of Chinese and Japanese visitors as before; in Paris – the most popular destination in the world – numbers this year are expected to be almost exactly as they were four years ago, 38.5 million. But people increasingly don’t want a bounce back. Tourist transport accounts for 5% of global emissions, and people are flying into the heatwaves those create. It is all a bit on the nose.
“I think it really helps to think of travelling as a kind of consumption,” says Frederik Fischer, CEO and founder of the social enterprise Neulandia, which connects creative digital workers to rural communities in Germany. “If you only consume another country, or you only consume a city, I’m not sure you’re really doing a benefit to the people and the place.”
Every location has a different challenge with tourists. On Catalan beaches, it may be that they are wearing too many clothes; in Barcelona, there are simply too many people. Whether that turns the entire place into a giant hotel (9.5 million people stayed in Barcelona’s hotels in 2019, a fivefold increase on 1990) or a human traffic-jam (one-way walking systems have been introduced in Barcelona’s city centre), it is impossible to imagine that being a pleasant, livable experience for the host citizens.
In Dubrovnik, tourists are just too annoying. The story went around this summer that wheelie suitcases had been banned from the cobbled old town, an interdiction with quite a substantial fine (€265). In fact, it was just a video suggesting that if people would only pick up their bags, that would be a lot less grating. All the pleas in Croatia’s Respect the City campaign are modest – please don’t fool around on our statuary, or walk around shirtless – but you can hear the quiet desperation you might predict, when a city of 41,000 people greets 1.5 million tourists a year.
Jon Henley, the Guardian’s Europe correspondent, based in Paris, says there is a similar story to Dubrovnik in places such as Prague and Budapest: “Wherever you’ve got a medieval city centre, those become unbearable.” Paris, with its wide boulevards and relatively large city centre, suffers less; when the French tourism minister, Olivia Grégoire, announced a strategy to prevent overtourism earlier this year, her focus was on sites such as MontSaint-Michel abbey in Normandy and the Channel beach Étretat, which aren’t large enough for everyone who wants to see them. In the capital, at peak tourist season, all the Parisians, including many in hospitality and retail, are away. “I quite like it in August in Paris for precisely that reason,” Henley says. “Confused-looking tourists wondering why everything’s shut.” If Paris is very tolerant of tourists, Saint-Tropez is getting close to its hard limit on the ones who don’t tip properly.
Amsterdam is at the vanguard of the stay-away movement. The city council decided this summer to close the cruise ship terminal in the city centre, specifically citing its sustainability goals. But there is always a subtext, which is often the text, with Dutch imprecations about tourism, which is that people (especially British people) go there specifically to behave like animals. There possibly isn’t a city in the world, medieval or not, that could cope with a visit from a group of Britons who had gone there specifically to get off their heads for 72 hours without stopping. An online campaign launched in the spring, with ads triggered whenever anyone in the UK entered “stag party Amsterdam” or “pub crawl Amsterdam” into a search engine, warned people of the possible consequences – fines, arrests, hospitalisation, making life completely miserable for residents – of hedonistic frenzy. The deputy mayor for economic affairs, Sofyan Mbarki, released a statement at the time: “Visitors are still welcome, but not if they misbehave and cause nuisance. As a city, we are saying: we’d rather not have this, so stay away.”
Other cities can increasingly relate to this. A video did the rounds this week in which a woman walks across the Trevi fountain in Rome to fill her water bottle. In June, a guy was filmed carving his and his girlfriend’s names into the Colosseum. Before you even consider the destinations that people go to specifically to behave badly – Aiya Napa, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Ghent (the Belgian city is considering banning stag party-friendly beer bikes) – there is always this problem that, as Cornish business owner Mati Ringrose says: “When you go on holiday, it’s not your place, it’s not your community, so you act completely differently, and out of character.” It cannot go unremarked that British tourists are notorious for this. The streets of “Europe’s latest booze hotspot”, Split, in Croatia, are festooned with signs in English warning of fines for public drinking, vomiting and urinating. One girl complained to a reporter this week that the fines were unfair, as she was quite likely to vomit, having had too many “anus burners” (shots of tequila, orange juice and tabasco).
Then there are digital nomads, itinerant workers who, every month or two, move between beauty spots in locations such as Bali, Mexico City, Lisbon, Chiang Mai in Thailand and Medellín in Colombia. These people would style themselves as the opposite of tourists, although as Dave Cook, an anthropologist at University College London, says: “I’d speak to the Chiang Mai coffee shop owner, and they’d say: ‘they’re in a coffee shop and they’re speaking English, so as far as we’re concerned, they’re just tourists.’” Before the pandemic, Cook says, lifestyle migration was a very niche phenomenon, which would include expats but was more of a counter-cultural movement, people specifically rejecting the worker-bee ethic of life in an office. Since Covid, there have been more strands: the freelance knowledge worker, the digital nomad business owner and the salaried digital nomad, which was more or less unheard of pre-pandemic. “Digital nomads talk about ‘dating’ locations: they’re geographically polyamorous,” Cook says. “Resentment can creep in, but what happens in reality is digital nomads might fall in love, but the locals have an intuitive understanding that they’re going to be left.”
What people often object to about visitors, whether they are tourists, expats, retirees or digital nomads, is what they do to property prices. Lisbon is the prime example of a city altered beyond recognition, to many people’s eyes denatured by an influx of people who could just afford higher rents. Michael Oliveira Salac, who is half-British, half-Portuguese and splits his time between London and the Algarve, says it was a combination of tourists and nomadic financial technology workers, who, between creating Airbnb demand and being able to afford much higher long-term rents, forced Lisbon residents out of the city. The minimum wage in Portugal is €760 (£650) a month. It is not possible to compete with an influx of people paying €1,000 a month for a two-bed and laughing about how cheap that is. That creates a cascade effect, Oliveira Salac says. “The main avenue, where there used to be old multibrand boutiques, now Gucci has come in, Prada has come in, so that’s shot the rents up.” The newcomers “want sushi, they want Thai food, they want vegan. The old lot can’t cater to that, so they’ve shut down. Lisbon has lost its soul.” And that picture has played out in Porto, even in some towns in the Algarve: Portugal sits on this axis, where it is comparatively cheap, very beautiful and in the right time zone for a lot of nomads, which from a resident’s perspective is a curse, like sitting on a fault line.
Venice is probably ground zero of the overtoured effect; tourists and residents have hit bed-for-bed parity, which makes normal life in the service of anything other than a tourist unviable. It creates a theme-park effect, to which even Rome – home to the most melodramatic monuments – hasn’t succumbed. In Rome, you can still at least glimpse the life underneath the day trip; in Venice, despite a recent clampdown on city-dwarfing cruise ships, Unesco recently threatened to “blacklist” the city as a world heritage site, citing Italy’s failure to protect it from mass tourism and the climate crisis.
You have to wonder whether it is worth it. Ringrose, who runs a shop in Redruth in Cornwall, isn’t technically homeless because she lives in a van with her seven-month-old child, but she says even parking charges have skyrocketed. “I have so many friends in emergency housing, it’s insane,” she says. In the summer, Cornish resort towns such as St Ives are so crowded that Ringrose has a disabled friend who has to move out because she can’t get down the street. Then, in the winter, she says: “There are whole towns that you go in and there’s no lights on half the year. There’s nothing open. There are no pubs there. Whole swathes of what used to be communities are shut down. It massively affects the mentality of the county.”
Redruth is relatively untouched by tourism because it is not coastal, and “it’s a really deprived area,” Ringrose says, “but it’s not deprived of community. Redruth is ridiculously rich in nice people, because it’s not a tourist town.” Ringrose tells me about a beach in Polzeath with a fence in the middle that someone built to stop people walking along the bottom of their garden. She tells me about the woman at a car boot sale who bought a jumper off her for a tenner, and asked her to split a £50 note. “I have never been given a 50 in a car boot, ever.” At the planning level, at the level of society, every desirable place on earth will have a variant of the Cornish question: if tourism brings in 12% of its income, yet takes up almost all of its housing, so that the lives of the residents don’t function any more, how can that be OK. At the level of the tourist or the nomad, the proposition is as simple, but an easier fix: look around – if everyone else is naked, either get naked or go away.
imminent – at least if a test of Tui’s app is anything to go by. The Guardian was able to access the chatbot on the second attempt at downloading the app, but a test of the service highlighted its “experimental” nature, as the bot struggled with a basic conversation.
It was able to handle a request for “best destinations in France”, offering
Paris, Nice, Bordeaux, Lyon and the French Alps as options (along with three links to Tui holidays) and asking the user’s preferred city. However, it was then unable to understand “paris” or “Paris”. “I apologise for the confusion, but I am an AI travel assistant and do not have personal preferences,” it said.
Only after the Guardian changed the response to “I am interested in Paris” was the app finally able to understand and offer recommendations – albeit hardly for sites off the beaten track: its tips were to visit the Louvre, Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, three of the most visited tourist sites in the world.
Sebastian Ebel, TUI Group’s chief executive, said ChatGPT would “help to simplify processes and services for customers or make information more easily available”.
The company also sought to address growing privacy concerns over personal data being used to train AI systems, saying that “no customer data is being shared at any time”.
Company executives jumped on the AI bandwagon shortly after ChatGPT’s launch. The number of mentions of “generative AI” in company calls and regulatory filings surged from 214 in November 2022 to 842 by May 2023, according to the data company AlphaSense.
Companies that are aiming to push generative AI into products range from Microsoft, a backer of OpenAI that has integrated ChatGPT into its Bing search engine, to the greetings cards website Moonpig. On Thursday, the charitable donations platform JustGiving said it would offer ChatGPT to help fundraisers write their stories on its website.