San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan announced an initiative Thursday that would increase pressure on homeless people to receive asylum or face jail time.
“Homelessness is not an option,” Mahan said in a press conference. “I recommend that after the shelter provided by the three shelters, we ask people to take responsibility to turn their lives around.”
Since a key U.S. Supreme Court decision on June 28, Mahan’s proposal is the latest state-wide upgrade to homeless camps that have given local officials the right to ban camping on sidewalks, streets and other public properties, even without shelter. In the months since then, citizen leaders across California have launched various punitive strategies aimed at cleaning up homeless camps and bringing people into shelters and treatment.
The Bay Area is particularly sensitive to the Supreme Court ruling, and communities across the Free Basin have sent a message that in many cases, in many cases, in many cases, in the midst of the closures and service cuts of the Covid-19-19 pandemic, these camps will no longer tolerate. Over the past year, cities including Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco have adopted more aggressive law enforcement strategies to remove tent cities that are often accompanied by public drug use, criminal activities and health hazards.
Fremont, a variety of suburbs 40 miles southeast of San Francisco, became the latest Bay Area city to adopt a campaign approach last month, adopting a statute that prohibits homeless camping on public and private property. The rule will also make this week’s “help and teach betting” homeless camps misdemeanor violations, a strong protest amid nonprofits serving the homeless.
Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has praised the homeless in recent years, praised the Supreme Court ruling and issued an executive order in July to require California agencies to take a more urgent approach to clearing homeless camps in state property and urged cities to follow suit.
Mahan, a moderate Democrat, separated from the state’s Democratic leaders last year, joined several other major city mayors, endorsing Proposition 36, a successful November voting measure that imposed strict penalties on people convicted of alleged repeated theft and crimes of fentanyl. Regarding homelessness, he resisted progress towards an aggressive sweeping and homeless camping ban on homeless camping, believing that there were no more shelter beds, and that such restrictions would only move the problem to neighboring cities.
Instead, since his election in 2022, Mahan has been committed to a substantial increase in the number of short- and medium-term shelter beds in the city to solve the crisis, rather than waiting for a more permanent (expensive – affordable housing option). This work is biased from the “housing first” strategy advocated by progressive democrats, which recognizes the establishment of permanent affordable housing and supports services as the most effective way to homelessness.
Under Mahan, San José has made substantial investments in temporary housing and shelters, and now more than 2,000 vehicles are available or developed. Mahan said that now the city has shelter and it is time for those who live in the street to come inside. The mayor’s office said about one-third of temporary housing residents rejected the offer.
Under Mahan’s proposal, those who refuse a shelter offer will face punishment for each refusal, starting with a written warning and ending with a possible arrest.
According to 2023 estimates, more than 6,250 people are homeless, including nearly 4,400 people living on the street, in cars or in abandoned buildings that are not suitable for living. Mental health and addiction problems are often what keeps people on the streets and cannot “make reasonable decisions about their own happiness”, Mahan said.
“It doesn’t mean we should reach out and give up on them. It means we need to help them break the destructive cycle that damages ourselves and the larger community,” Mahan said.
The proposal would certainly raise objections from the same faction against Mahan’s embrace of temporary housing, as well as advocates of homeless people who refuse to use imprisonment as a tool to address the homeless.
Jamie Chang, a professor of social welfare at UC Berkeley, said her research shows that options for short-term shelter options such as San José can be an effective part of a multifaceted approach to addressing homelessness.
“What we need is a series of responses that will suit the level of preparation, willingness and ability to be indoors for different people,” Chang said.
While permanent support housing is considered the gold standard, Zhang said, “homeless homeless people are at a crisis level across the Bay Area and our state. Now, of course we still need shorter solutions to correct and alleviate the pain and pain that happens on the streets.”
