Mayor, Downtown Councilman Pushing Homeless Camp Crackdown

By Lisa Halverstadt, the Voice of San Diego

March 16, 2023

Mayor Todd Gloria and downtown City Councilman Stephen Whitburn on Thursday unveiled a series of plans to attack visible homelessness amid increasing public exasperation with the city’s foremost crisis.

With Gloria’s blessing, Whitburn said he will next month introduce an ordinance banning camping on public property when shelter options are available. If the City Council approves it, encampments will also be barred at all times within two blocks of schools and shelters, certain parks and along trolley tracks.

Gloria said the city will also pursue a safe campground program championed by Whitburn to accommodate unhoused residents uncomfortable with traditional shelter options and resume enforcement April 1 of the city’s controversial ban on vehicle homelessness.

The overarching goal, Gloria said, is to remove encampments that are “bad for people living, working, and going to school around them” and threaten economic activity.

“We will enforce accordingly, to clear sidewalks, move tent encampments and get folks the help that they need to get back on their feet,” Gloria said.

Gloria also said he’s working on a 2024 ballot measure to streamline the process to open new homeless shelters and “untie our hands when it comes to addressing the impacts of homelessness on San Diego’s quality of life.”

The announcements come amid whisperings among local politicos about the near-term unveiling of a 2024 homelessness-focused ballot measure from former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer.

Faulconer spokeswoman Aimee Faucett said Thursday that the former mayor is not running for mayor and “is solely focused on a citizen’s initiative to provide real solutions for our homeless crisis.”

Faulconer was critical of Gloria’s plans.

Gloria has said he expects the new ordinance, if approved, to be enforced by police.

Lt. Adam Sharki, a San Diego police spokesman, said the department supports Whitburn’s proposal and “will do our part to ensure its success.”

The announcements, though, coincide with a police staffing shortage and increased overtime spending that Police Chief David Nisleit recently said forced cuts to overtime for officers focused on addressing quality-of-life crimes, a move that has stymied enforcement of Gloria’s October order that unhoused residents take down their tents during the day.

The city already has laws on the books that it has aimed at homeless camps. For years, the city has used encroachment and illegal lodging laws not written to directly address unsheltered homelessness in its current iteration.

Police data shows officers last year wrote 925 encroachment citations and made 513 arrests for encroachment or illegal lodging using the city’s “progressive enforcement” model of offering shelter and warnings before citations or arrests.

Whitburn’s vision to also add more safe places for unhoused people to sleep reflects the need to add dramatically more options if it expects to make a visible dent in street homelessness. Gloria said Thursday his administration will also continue to work to add more options, noting that the city has already added hundreds of additional beds since he took office.

But the shelters that already exist are often full – and unhoused people seeking beds often struggle to access them.

A 2018 federal appeals court ruling barred the citing of homeless people for sleeping on sidewalks if no other shelter is available and a 2007 legal settlement prevents police from ticketing or arresting homeless San Diegans if shelters are full. 

For now, the city has nearly 1,800 shelter beds. By comparison, a downtown business group’s late February tally of people sleeping on the street downtown and its outskirts alone hit 1,837 and a regionwide point-in-time count last year tallied about 2,500 unsheltered residents. 

Most of the nation’s prominent homeless service experts discourage using enforcement as a tool to try to address surging street homelessness, including when shelter is offered in the process.

Gloria’s team has defended the city’s approach, arguing that its goal with enforcement has been to clear public rights of way and avoid public health crises. He and Whitburn have also emphasized the need for more shelter options to accommodate different needs.

Ann Oliva, lead author of the city’s 2019 homelessness plan and now CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, told Voice of San Diego last fall that she would discourage the city from continuing its current enforcement approach.

“Criminalizing and ticketing already-traumatized people who do not have money to pay rent is not a strategy or a solution. In fact, it runs counter to the city’s vision as expressed in its Community Action Plan,” Oliva wrote in a statement. “Without safe and affordable housing and services, people will continue to perish on the streets, no matter how many times they are arrested or ticketed.” 

Attorney Ann Menasche, who has been leading an ongoing class-action lawsuit challenging city crackdowns against people living in vehicles, has a similar perspective.

“When people have good programs, people line up around the block to get into them,” Menasche said. “They’re being treated like wayward children and that’s not the story. We’re in a housing crisis.”

Menasche, whose case challenges the constitutionality of the city’s vehicle habitation ordinance, said Voice – not the city – informed her of Gloria’s plan to resume enforcement next month.

Voice previously revealed that the city had stopped enforcing the ordinance during the pandemic and then quietly decided not to resume that enforcement due to the class-action lawsuit.

Gloria said Thursday that the city decided to resume enforcement after ramping up safe camping options for people living in cars.

Menasche has argued that only one existing lot can accommodate people living in RVs and that the lots don’t work for people who may have unique circumstances such as owning multiple vehicles.

She expected the end of the moratorium could allow lawyers working on the case to find additional witnesses to speak to the impact and inequities of the city’s vehicle habitation ban.

“They’ll be developing our record even more,” Menasche said.

Faulconer, Gloria’s predecessor and champion of another yet-to-be detailed homelessness ballot measure, was unsurprisingly also unimpressed with Gloria’s plans – but for different reasons.

Aimee Faucett, Faulconer’s onetime chief of staff, said the former mayor’s initiative “deals with compassionate solutions for the homeless and at the same time protects and preserves the safety and quality-of-life of our communities.”

She said it will focus on giving unhoused San Diegans the right to shelter, but also “an obligation to use the shelter.”

Gloria made similar pronouncements about the need to use shelter on Thursday.

“When we ask you to come off the street and we have a place for you to go, no is not an acceptable answer,” Gloria said Thursday. “The sidewalk is not a home.”

Faulconer argued in a statement that Gloria’s announcement was a reaction to his work on a homelessness ballot initiative.

“It was a last-minute reaction to the fact that a strong coalition has formed to take this issue to the ballot. Most people don’t believe City Hall will ever take bold action on their own,” Faulconer wrote. “It’s time to give voters the power to tell City Hall to provide more shelters and services, enforce the law, and clean up the encampments in all of our public spaces.”

Gloria spokeswoman Rachel Laing countered that all the plans discussed Thursday had “been in development for at least several months,” including the proposed encampment ban and ballot measure.

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