Newsom was in favor of the SC ruling because CA has a lot of unused bed capacity. Many cities and counties have more unhoused people than beds, but many of the beds are unfilled.
Newsom wants to clear encampments if shelter space is available, not if shelters are full. That was impossible to do before the SC ruling. If you had 10,000 unhoused people and 2000 total beds, and only 1000 of the beds were filled, you would needed 10,000 beds before you could clear encampments. Newsom wanted to be able to say “I have 1000 more beds, so I want to get 1000 more people off the street.”
Last I checked a few months ago, San Francisco had about 10% of its beds open, and cities like Oakland have something like 30% of its beds open. I was looking for LA’s stats, but I have not been successful.
This all sounds great in theory, but a lot of people avoid shelters because they’re not safe, don’t allow you to have belongings, etc. That’s the first problem we need to solve. Adding more beds isn’t going to help if reasonable people don’t want to take them.
That’s because homeless shelters are dangerous and unpleasant for all sorts of reasons:
I spent most of my time homeless out on the street. It wasn’t until the very end of my homelessness that I ended up in a shelter. And I found out that a lot of what I was afraid of was true. I never found out what a body louse was until I got into the shelter. You know, I had my shoes stolen, just like people said you get your shoes stolen, although I will say that there were three people in the shelter who offered to give me a pair of shoes after that happened.
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Hi, yeah, I was homeless in Berkeley, and I found it very, very difficult to go in at the times that they wanted us to go in and to leave at the times that they wanted us to leave. It was difficult because it was exhausting. You had to leave whether it was rain or shine. And a lot of people had nowhere to go. And so you would find women that were just, you know, sitting outside the shelter at all hours of the day, waiting for the shelter to open up again.
And then, you know, when it was open up again, you had to be in there by a certain time. I was dealing with both mental illness and substance abuse, and I think people forget that with substance abuse, you don’t have much control. You need help, you really need help, and you can’t necessarily come in without having alcohol on your breath.
You can certainly not drink while you’re in the shelter. I’ve been sober for a few years now, but at that time I just, I wasn’t able to do what they wanted me to do and to come in at that time.
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Hi. Nobody has addressed the thing about animals. And I just want to say, when I was homeless, I had a dog. I used my dog as protection because I was just a single young woman on the streets. And, you know, they wouldn’t let him in shelters. They - you couldn’t have an animal, and I needed my dog. I mean, my dog was kind of my family. And so we slept outside because I didn’t want to have to give up my dog.
There used to be this racist picture floating around online of the border between San Diego and Tijuana. And the thing is, the US likes to pretend we are “above” that, but we’re actually worse. Because we don’t even give people the grace of a shack to sleep in anymore. We would have shanty towns in this country if we gave people even that little dignity.
Because they have nowhere else to go.
That’s not actually the case in CA.
Newsom was in favor of the SC ruling because CA has a lot of unused bed capacity. Many cities and counties have more unhoused people than beds, but many of the beds are unfilled.
Newsom wants to clear encampments if shelter space is available, not if shelters are full. That was impossible to do before the SC ruling. If you had 10,000 unhoused people and 2000 total beds, and only 1000 of the beds were filled, you would needed 10,000 beds before you could clear encampments. Newsom wanted to be able to say “I have 1000 more beds, so I want to get 1000 more people off the street.”
Last I checked a few months ago, San Francisco had about 10% of its beds open, and cities like Oakland have something like 30% of its beds open. I was looking for LA’s stats, but I have not been successful.
This all sounds great in theory, but a lot of people avoid shelters because they’re not safe, don’t allow you to have belongings, etc. That’s the first problem we need to solve. Adding more beds isn’t going to help if reasonable people don’t want to take them.
That’s because homeless shelters are dangerous and unpleasant for all sorts of reasons:
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https://www.npr.org/2012/12/06/166666265/why-some-homeless-choose-the-streets-over-shelters
This site goes over it in more detail: https://brightenthecorner.org/2023/02/12/why-some-people-avoid-homeless-shelters/
Sexual assault is also a big problem in shelters. Here’s the ACLU on abuses going on in shelters in Orange County, CA: https://www.aclusocal.org/en/press-releases/aclu-uncovers-horrific-conditions-sexual-harassment-oc-homeless-shelters
There used to be this racist picture floating around online of the border between San Diego and Tijuana. And the thing is, the US likes to pretend we are “above” that, but we’re actually worse. Because we don’t even give people the grace of a shack to sleep in anymore. We would have shanty towns in this country if we gave people even that little dignity.