California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) on Monday rolled out a model ordinance he said cities and counties should adopt to address homeless encampments across the state in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court order that allows local governments to criminalize public camping and sleeping.
The model legislation would prohibit persistent camping in one location. It would bar encampments that prevent pedestrians from free passage on sidewalks. And it would require local officials to make what Newsom’s office called a reasonable effort to identify and offer shelter prior to clearing an encampment.
“Now, we’re giving [cities] a model they can put to work immediately, with urgency and with humanity, to resolve encampments and connect people to shelter, housing and care,” Newsom said in a statement. “The time for inaction is over. There are no more excuses.”
Since coming to office, the Newsom administration has sent $27 billion to local communities to combat homelessness. The state has cleared more than 16,000 encampments since July 2021, Newsom’s office said.
The California State Association of Counties disputed the amount Newsom said his administration had spent on homelessness.
“That’s just not true,” Inyo County Supervisor Jeff Griffiths, president of the association, said in a statement. “More than half of it went to housing, not homelessness. How much of that housing has actually been built?”
An annual point-in-time census conducted in January 2024 found California was home to more than 187,000 unhoused people, up 3% from the year prior. That figure was markedly better than the national average, in which homelessness rose by 18%. About a quarter of all unhoused people in the country are in California.
Newsom also said he would release $3.3 billion in spending on mental health, housing and treatment authorized by voters in a ballot measure he supported in 2024. That measure passed by less than half a percentage point.
The model legislation comes a year after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a small Oregon town’s laws criminalizing public camping and sleeping, even when no shelter was available, did not violate the Constitution. Newsom hailed that decision, City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, even as homelessness advocates objected.
“Gov. Newsom has really been pushing encampment resolution since the Grants Pass Supreme Court case, so I don’t see much difference here,” said Donald Whitehead Jr., executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. “What I do see is an attempt to look compassionate without the necessary steps to really address the root causes.”
Newsom, the former mayor of San Francisco, has made tackling homelessness a priority during his six years in office. But the state has had limited success, and local pushback has frustrated Newsom at times.
Even in a liberal state like California, the proliferation of encampments has become a thorn in the side of local leaders. The mayors of San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Jose have all pledged to reduce homelessness and dismantle encampments.