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Yeah. I'm torn.
On one hand, I've seen what happens when homeless people, especially the worst of them, take over a public space without supervision. It is not hyperbole to say they destroy the area. The massive homeless camps in downtown Denver featured needles, excrement, unwashed clothing, and, in two instances I personally witnessed, a fire that tore through the area, destroying the homeless camp and risking damage to everything around. I get that we need to do better on housing all around and support the various proposals (such as homeless communities, repurposing abandoned buildings, etc), but there has to be an element of enforcement, including disallowing camping in areas not specifically purposed for camping, ensuring that people move on, and forced relocations, if for no other purpose than to address buildups of trash and vermin (to be clear: rats, not the people, I'm not calling homeless vermin 🙄 ). And IMO, a key component of this is funding a public healthcare program that addresses mental illness, such as Proposition 1 in California. This is good because addressing mental illness can lead to reduced drug abuse, which is a major cause of homelessness.
But on the other, what Newsom is doing is using tricks right out of the Trump playbook by demanding that cities and counties adopt policies they do not wish to implement to share in the funding that would make homelessness go down. I also notice that there are no requirements for carrots, only sticks. I.E. no demand that supervised camping sites be set up, or empty buildings bought up and repurposed as housing. Just the requirement that you're unwelcome in public places if you're unhoused, and that the law will be brought against you if you dare persist in the same place for 4 days in a row, no matter how much you take care of that space. Seems like he's working to appeal to the Right? "See, I can be as heartless and cruel as any Republican!" Makes me less inclined to vote for him.
Homeless people are human beings. If we housed them, and had a proper social safety net, we wouldn't even be talking about it's. Homeless or not, they need a place to live.
I agree with you. That's why I pointed out that the only mandate was enforcement, aka, the stick, and no incentives, aka carrots, were required. If Newsom was serious about tackling this, the enforcement would be paired with incentives, and the cities would be getting help to set up alternatives to camping in public places, such as the supervised camping we use here in my neck of the woods.
But let's be clear. You still need the stick. It's perfectly OK to say "We'll do everything we can to get you off the streets, but you need to put in the effort yourself, and no, trashing public spaces is not an option."
No, we are not in agreement. I don't not think we should force people from where they live. You wouldn't need this so called "enforcement" if people had access to a safe bed. And if we don't have that, then these tent cities happen, and in my opinion we should do literally nothing about them being there.
There will be people who will, despite having the option to be moved into housing, refuse to move there because they prefer the freedom of panhandling for money, getting drunk and stoned, and being nuisances to people around them. If you think they should not be dealt with, then yes, we don't agree, and you're just as bad as the people that say no help for the homeless and just want them swept away. There is a reasonable position, and it's not either your position or Newsom's position.
Right...showing your prejudice. Just as i thought. Getting drunk and stoned is not the cause of homelessness. You're just blaming the homeless for a problem they didn't create. Funny how we never had a homeless problem back before housing prices started ballooning. Hell, go back to the early 19th century, and basically everyone had a place to live, even if it wasn't a great place to live.
Yeah. You got me. I'm prejudiced against the idea that people can do what they want, without consequence. How heartless of me, eh? Make it difficult for me to remain civil to you, why don't you?
Here's the difference between you, AnalogNotDigital, and me: You both have staked out opposite but equally extremist ends. Let me reduce your position to its core principles.
People should be allowed to do what they want, when they want, without any consequence for their actions.
No. No, a thousand times no. I am not going to sit by and let people walk over me, because I've already dealt enough with people walking over me. I have to get up and do my 9 to 5 every weekday, and moderate my drug and alcohol use to a level that I can function in my job, to keep a roof over my head and food on the table. In no world will "in my opinion we should do literally nothing about them being there" be a valid option to tent cities with rampant drug and alcohol use.
To make this more stark, you engage in the same duplicitous and dishonest debate tactics the Right uses. Because of course if I want accountability for people, I must want homeless people starving in the streets. Let me make this clear for you. I want housing to be available to everyone. Said so multiple times, in fact, in this thread alone. But that housing needs to be contingent on people getting clean and becoming productive members of society to the extent their clean selves can be. I do not support any demand that unhoused people be swept in order to partake of Proposition 1 funding. That's what I expressed in my second paragraph. I guess you skipped that in your rush to attack me for my first paragraph.
News flash, pal. I stand by what I said in that first paragraph. You do not have a right to society subsidising your drug and alcohol habit. You DO have a right to housing, but that right has a responsibility of putting your labour in for society. Your access to transitional housing should be contingent on you getting clean if you have a drug or alcohol problem. It should be clear that the alternative you are proposing, living a drugged, drunk life in a vermin-filled tent on public space, is not an option. If you put the effort in, we give you the carrot of subsidised housing to allow you to get back on your feet and make your way into the workforce. If you decide that's too much effort, then the stick comes out until you rethink your bad decision and go after the carrot. That's been my position all along, and I don't appreciate you putting words in my mouth and bald-faced lying (no homelessness in the 19th century?! History lessons for you). No solution is complete without both the carrot and the stick, because people are jerks and will take advantage of you the first chance they get. There are jerks who are looking to take advantage of homeless people with the Stick Only approach. Then there are gullible fools who will be taken advantage of by some homeless people because they want the Carrot Only approach. I'm advocating for both because I want to minimise being taken advantage here, and you're accusing me of being ... prejudiced and making bald-faced lies that only need a tiny bit of research.
So, in the spirit of launching personal attacks, I see your prejudiced accusation and call you both naive and an asshole. Good day, sir.
Good talk, glad we sorted that out.
Housing is usually not the issue itself. If I’m not mistaken California actually has enough shelter available to not have homeless people at all. The employed, high functioning, productive yet homeless member of society is a rarity and often remain homeless very temporarily. Most homeless people have mental and/or drug abuse issues, which leads them to decide to be homeless because they don’t like the rules, can’t stick to a schedule, have antisocial tendencies etc etc etc.
I definitely get what you're saying here, but I think you've overblown what you see as the issue.
Housing is DEFINITELY the issue itself. Many homeless people get started on the path to mental and drug abuse issues when that paycheque doesn't go far enough to pay the bills. Student Loans. Car Notes. Rent. Food. All get more and more expensive, making it harder to be a productive member of society, and meanwhile, pay stays criminally low. Until you watch as your landlord kicks you out, with a few dollars to your name and hundreds or even thousands of dollars of bills screaming for those few bills, and watch as everything you ever owned gets thrown out on the lawn and then stolen because you can't protect any of it, and then some shadowy figure offers you a hit of the good stuff to make you just forget the fact that society considers you a failure, you can't know how hard it is to deal with this situation unless you have a tiny bit of empathy.
I'm not saying we should tolerate this. I'm saying that we need to address the real root causes: costs are so high while pay is so low, and get people into housing again, with the understanding that drugging up and being a 'free spirit' on the back of somebody else's labour isn't an option. But saying housing isn't an issue shows you don't actually understand the problem. Please rethink that.
My city of Fresno does not have enough beds, so maybe that is true for wealthier cities with lower unhoused rates. The beds offered are sometimes less safe than the street: https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/02/california-homeless-shelters-purgatory/
Merced checking in, we made homeless camps functionally illegal while having HALF of the required beds to house everyone.
Many of those people don’t start out as drug user or being mentally unwell, that’s what you get in a system where you are not safe in shelters, building for homeless people means adding spikes to benches and now you will be driven from the location that is now closest to “home” like some lepers being run out of town.
Housing and the cost of it is definitely a big part of the problem.
They did a large study of homelessness in California that ended a year or two ago and it concluded that it was mostly the price of housing.
Exactly. People of all income levels struggle with mental health and drug issues. The drug use and mental health struggles of the homeless are just much more publicly visible.
Housing really is the main issue though. People get the cause and effect backwards. People don't become homeless because they do drugs; they do drugs because they're homeless. If you were stuck sleeping on the sidewalk, wouldn't you want to be high 24/7? I sure would.
This one gets it
Needing housing is unfortunately only part of the problem. Whether it's part of the reason they became homeless, or damage incurred in the course of being homeless, mental illness and co-occuring substance abuse go hand in hand with homelessness. (Though that majority dynamic may change with the way things have been going, it's becoming easier to fall through the entire net or what's left of it). If those issues aren't addressed simultaneously, the person ends up right back where they were, or even worse off.
This is one of those comforting lies people tell themselves. It's the just world fallacy.
Drug use and homelessness are mostly orthogonal issues, but people latch onto it as a quick and easy way to dismiss providing housing for the homeless. People of all income levels have mental illnesses and drug use issues. But for the homeless, we decide that their drug use issues are such a moral failing that it's OK to deny them housing as punishment.
Also, people confuse cause and effect. Being homeless causes mental health and drug abuse, not the other way around.
Maybe I miscommunicated my position. I'm not interested in withholding housing or support from anyone. As a previous recipient of such services, I will always advocate their value. I think we should be doing more, not less. I simply think the value of housing and mental health services is multiplied exponentially when they are combined.
You're saying this with authority as if it's some sort of universal truth when it is not. Speaking from experience having been homeless myself (2 years between Seattle and LA), both are true. Many people end up homeless because of how their mental illness has affected their ability to go about daily life. For these individuals specifically, housing alone is not a cure-all. If that person doesn't receive some other kind of support, their life is still unmanageable for them.
To treat the general problem of homelessness, both types of people in this binary have to be considered.
I watched what I assume was a meth lab burn the underpass of a major bridge near my apartment in 2023. Then just a couple weeks ago, only a few days away from the two-year anniversary, it happened again.
We need to support people. Otherwise, we will vilify them. The sad fact is, this is a result of decades of destruction, and there doesn’t seem to be any willpower to do the hard thing anymore.
It’s enough to make you want to walk into the ocean.
The other issue that you forgot to mention is a lot of red states take their homeless people and send them to California.
I live in LA. I've been threatened by people who are homeless. Multiple times. Yes, these people deserve help. But there's a billion reasons why our current system isn't working and part of that is the state can't institutionalize these people to get them clean from drugs and to help start them on the pathway to being a productive citizen again.
I live in the Miracle Mile area, and I do not give a shit about someones 'right' to camp on the sidewalk with a huge ass tent that smells of shit. Sorry, but that's a public health hazard.
Do I want people to get help? Absolutely. Do I think that people who live in these areas also deserve to live in a safe and clean environment? Absolutely.
Something has to be done, at least Gavin is trying things.
This is fascist thinking - the cult of action for the sake of action. You can't identify any real solution to the problem, but by God, you want SOMETHING done. And that something, when undefined, inevitably just means, "send law enforcement to torture them until they kill themselves."
TIL wanting people to not live in homeless encampments that are dangerous is fascist. Thanks for that. Lets see you take in the guy who mumbles to himself and is addicted to heroin into your home and treat him how about that?
Except that's not what WoodScientist said. He didn't say that wanting to end dangerous homeless encampments is fascist. He said that doing something just for the sake of doing something without careful thought is a key aspect of fascist thinking. "Act first and fuck the thinking" is how Fascists work, attacking rationality and denying thought in order to suppress their followers ability to see through the lies Fascism clinks to. Fascist thinking doesn't mean you're a fascist, though. It just means that you're prone to accept Fascism if you continue to think like a fascist, and at a minimum, you're going to make a bad decision.
Again. I don't disagree with the notion of "no, we're not going to let you live on the streets and harass your neighbours." I do think that it should be paired with things like expanding housing in all forms and making it easier for people to get on their feet, however. And I don't think a strong-arm tactic of denying the funding for those positive things to compel communities to adopt your hard ball tactics is something I want to see somebody on my side doing. Those are Trump tactics. Leave them to Trump.
Do you not know what fascism is? The cult of action is one of the hallmarks of Fascism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism
This policy has all the marks of the cult of action. It does nothing to actually solve the homelessness issue. It focuses on using cruel brute force to punish the undesirable members of society. It's a performative action not meant to actually achieve any noble end, but simply to show that the regime is "doing something."
How is this actually helping anyone? What good actually comes from spending millions in public resources to endlessly shuffle homeless people from one location to another?
The state is using performative violence simply as a propaganda tool to make citizens think the government is "doing something." That is the cult of action for action's sake. It's literally one of the textbook characteristics of fascism.
This isn't hyperbole. We're talking fascism 101 here. California is sending in the jack boots to terrorize the undesiables. How is that not fascism?
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Banning homeless encampments is not fascism 101.
Let's look at the series of events:
California severely restricts the supply of housing to benefit the wealthy. Existing homeowners and corporate landlords get rich as the price of housing soars, as the state actively restricts people from building enough to keep up with the need.
Homelessness rates soar. Millions find that the market value of their labor is now exceeded by the market value of rent. They become homeless through no fault of their own.
Instead of providing adequate services to the homeless, the state responds by demonizing the homeless. Homeless people are stereotyped. Any crime committed by a homeless person is shouted about from the rooftops. A hate campaign is enacted to portray the homeless as violent, drug-addicted, and insane. The homeless use drugs at a lower rate than the housed, but public opinion believes the opposite. Their disheveled state is portrayed as a deep character flaw rather than simply an inevitable consequence of their material reality. People are made homeless through no fault of their own. But the public is convinced through a vast propaganda campaign that the homeless deserve to be homeless and are fundamentally evil people.
The state unleashes a campaign of performative terror on the homeless population. Police disband camps and force people out, without providing anywhere for these people to go. It is simply action for action's sake. Newsom can proudly state, "I didn't solve homelessness, but I sure made their lives a living hell by forcing them to endlessly move from place to place! The dirty hobos deserve it!"
That's textbook fascism. Newsom doesn't have a solution to this problem. Solutions do exist, but they would require building enough housing to drive down its cost. And that would hurt the bank accounts of rich people. So instead, Newsom has unleashed a state terror campaign against California's homeless population. The goal of this terror campaign isn't to solve homelessness or to help anyone in any manner. It is meant to show middle class and wealthy people that Newsom is making those "dirty homeless people" pay for their sins. Well off folks are tired of seeing the homeless that they created in public view. So Newsom is promising to use state terror to drive them out of the public sphere entirely.
If you think this isn't fascism, well...you need to learn what fascism actually is.
Not the right things. It's like if Gavin went and confiscated everyone's dogs to sacrifice them to Zorak to fix the homelessness issue. It's not going to work, it's never going to work, and then when people complain, you say "well, at least he's trying something." The fact of the matter is that California has an extremely deep deficit of affordable housing. The cheapest rent in Merced should NOT be $800 for a room in a single family house, that's zonko bananas, but it is. We're never going to fix the homelessness crisis without addressing the affordability crisis, and the hell of it is that affordability is actually fairly easy and cheap to address from the government's side, we just don't because it hurts the NIMBY's feelings.
Where you going to build affordable housing in west LA?
There's literally no place for it. Should people living in Venice just be given beachfront housing for free to live in?
Whats your SOLUTION to the problem? Because like I said. There are multiple reasons there's a homeless epidemic across the entire country.
Okay, do you want the lecture, or the tl;Dr?
Tl;Dr: bulldoze every single family home and put up commie blocks with commercial spaces on the bottom floor.
Lecture edition: it doesn't have to be that extreme, and we can do it without bulldozing homes with pretty simple and cheap zoning reforms. Bonus: we can also stop our cities from being constantly bankrupt, fix traffic, protect the environment, and make our cities stop sucking. Here's the lecture, in case you're interested: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa
Honestly I wish we had the balls to turn LA into New York West Coast Edition. I'm right by the Wilshire line being built, and I cannot wait to be able to take public transit from my place to LAX to Grand Central in NYC.
Thanks for giving a real answer and not jingoistic slactivism nonsense you see so many people spouting on here. <3
I'll take a look at that video later when I have more time on my hands.
Hey, bro, it's always cool when you find someone willing to have an actual discussion, thanks for being open to it! In case that playlist is too time consuming, check out Strong Towns. They're an advocacy group focused on local-first evidence-based policy changes to make our cities stop sucking. Those policies almost always include fixing our busted ass zoning system and improving public transit and walk ability/bikeability among other things. I'm part of Strong Towns up here in Merced, and we're pushing the city, kicking and screaming, into being a better place to live for everyone. They're free to join and offer a lot of really great resources and support, and I'm almost certain that there must be a local group in LA.
For sure! I just hate that so many people have strong opinions on this shit then do nothing, don't educate themselves on the problems at hand, and then acknowledge that people on the 'other side' of an issue have actual concerns that do need addressed.
I'd fucking love it if we had our homeless problem under control, and I firmly do believe we would if all the fucking red states would stop bussing THEIR problems here.
I've been in LA for 9 years and I've seen the changes that are taking place. Bike lanes are rampant on the west side, and they're starting to come to places like Weho and others as well which is awesome. We're expanding our subway lines, and things slowly are getting better. I wish we would take a big TVA style initiative, and make some dense public housing districts that were affordable, but that's a HUGE endeavor.
I'd love to get involved with local stuff like that, but I'm currently in a new job, and don't have much free time right now. =(
A lot of times you can get involved by just emailing public comments to municipal authorities ahead of council meetings
Oh cool.