I wasn’t surprised when news outlets around the country yesterday reported that Gov. Newsom has urged California cities and counties to take “immediate action” to get rid of “dangerous and unhealthy [homeless] encampments.”
My only question was, What took him so long?
It’s not like the Governor didn’t realize the extent of the damage encampments have caused. He was mayor of San Francisco for eight years, Lieutenant Governor of California for eight years, and he’s been Governor since 2019. Newsom has been critical of encampments for a long time; he never was one of those progressives who believed homeless people had the right to camp wherever they wanted, or that municipalities had no right to manage them.
Nonetheless, it took Newsom until yesterday to issue what I hope will be his final edict on the matter: for cities and counties to “dismantl[e] the tents lining streets, parks and waterways throughout much of the state.”
It’s likely that the progressive supporters of encampments will accuse Newsom of doing this for political reasons. Everyone assumes he’s running for President in 2028. Everyone knows there’s been an historic backlash against progressive, Democratic policies like those of Oakland, which permitted (if they didn’t actually encourage) homeless people to do whatever they felt like doing, wherever they felt like doing it. Whether or not Newsom issued his latest ordinance with the Democratic nomination in mind, I don’t know. He insisted to me, in a personal communication, that politics played no role, that he’s been edging toward this decision for many years (and he’s always a bit defensive when anyone accuses him of playing politics). Certainly, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision (for which Newsom authored an Amicus brief) was a factor in his evaluation, but that ruling occurred nearly a year ago (June 28, 2024), so the Governor has had that long to think about it. We may never know precisely why he did what he did this week, but the fact is that he did, and there’s no longer the slightest excuse for a single encampment to remain anywhere in California from now on.
Now, on to the gritty details.
What exactly did Newsom’s edict say? If you read it, not much. It’s not a “law,” it’s a “model ordinance,” which is to say, a suggestion. Cities and counties need not adhere to it. Although Newsom is “calling on every local government to adopt and implement local policies without delay,” there’s no penalty for failure to do so. His ordinance does suggest he may give lots of money ($3.3 billion) to municipalities that adopt his suggestions, but that money has already been approved by the people of California through Proposition 1, which narrowly passed in the March, 2024 statewide election. So it’s not like the Governor has any actual power over releasing those funds. He can’t say to Oakland, for example, “if you don’t take down all your encampments, I’ll withhold Prop 1 funds from you.”
Will Oakland now act aggressively to remove encampments and keep them from returning? I doubt it. Oakland has had some good press lately on the homeless front. The city is boasting that it removed encampments from Mosswood Park and around Lake Merritt and is working on the mess along the BART tracks on East 12th. Last time I was at Mosswood, I didn’t see any tents, but there remain plenty of tents in Lakeside Park, including the absolutely horrific slums along the estuary, by Laney College. The fact is, Oakland simply has too many pro-homeless politicians (Carroll Fife and Rebecca Kaplan, for example) who don’t want the city to roust encampments. And there are too many far-left radicals with great power over city government, who refuse to support any action against encampments. The City Council has always been overly receptive to these radical elements, and there’s no sign that anything will change under a Barbara Lee mayoralty. If anything, Lee—the Godmother of Woke in Oakland—will impede further efforts to clear encampments.
I wish Governor Newsom had mandated his ordinance instead of just offering it as an amuse bouche. I wish there were real penalties for cities like Oakland which refuse to get serious about clearing the streets and parks and keeping them cleared. But the voters of Oakland, in their collective un-wisdom, elected the wrong person for mayor, and those same voters seem hell-bent on continuing the disastrous policies that got Oakland into so much trouble to begin with. We have met the enemy, Pogo, and it is us.
Steve Heimoff