Less than six months after the U.S. Supreme Court gave California cities the green light to ban homeless encampments, homelessness policy across much of San Diego County is rapidly changing direction.
Yearslong efforts to reach out to homeless residents and connect them with services suddenly are taking a back seat to encampment bans and stepped-up enforcement.
Four of the county’s five largest cities now either outlaw public camping or are actively considering a ban. Advocates for the homeless say they have mostly stopped contesting the bans and are recalibrating in the face of hardening public opinion. City officials say residents are forcing their hand by demanding tougher laws.
Last week, National City became the sixth city in the county to move toward an encampment ban. This week, Chula Vista will take up its own ban. Carlsbad is considering updating its homelessness policy to beef up enforcement. Next month, the county Board of Supervisors plans to discuss updating its own policies. Though Board Chair Nora Vargas said she prefers “collaboration and long-term support to break the cycle of homelessness” she also “understand[s] the urgency behind Gov. [Gavin] Newsom’s [recent statewide directive] to clear encampments.”
If all three cities plus the county adopt bans, they will join San Diego, Escondido, Poway, Vista and San Marcos in outlawing some form of camping on public property.
A little more than a year ago, encampments were permitted throughout the county and the consensus of experts and policymakers was that outreach and affordable housing, not enforcement, were the keys to solving homelessness. Now, the vast majority of San Diego County residents live in places where public camping is against the law.
“It’s a domino effect,” said John Brady of Lived Experience Advisors, a San Diego organization that advocates for the homeless. “It’s a foregone conclusion that pretty much every city is going to [outlaw encampments…] We have to rethink what we’re thinking and saying as advocates because we’ve lost the narrative.”
Mayor Ron Morrison of National City was more blunt about the sudden shift in policy and public opinion.
“The pendulum has swung,” he said. “It went from ‘[homeless] people have needs’ to ‘this just gets disgusting.’”
How We Got Here
The topline reason given by city leaders for the sudden policy shift is a June Supreme Court ruling that freed cities from an earlier requirement to provide adequate shelter before outlawing public camping.
The ruling ended a yearslong standoff between cities and advocates for the homeless, who say banning encampments without providing shelter simply criminalizes homelessness and does nothing to help struggling people.
Officials said the court case, which began with a lawsuit filed in 2020 on behalf of homeless residents in Grants Pass, Oregon, had an unintended effect. It gave cities four years to try alternate approaches—and decide that offering services alone often wasn’t enough to reduce the number of people on the streets.
John McCann, mayor of Chula Vista, said that since 2016 his city has sought to offer homeless people a growing range of services. A city outreach team of caseworkers and police officers seeks out homeless people and offers to connect them with help. The city recently opened a transitional shelter and is in the process of developing 156 units of permanent supportive housing. The city also provides vouchers for motels and offers rental assistance to struggling tenants.
A city report acknowledged that the vast majority supportive housing units will not be available until 2026 at the earliest. And the transitional shelter was initially slow to accept homeless clients because of building delays and a lengthy intake process.
Still, McCann said, outreach efforts frequently fail to move people into housing because “there were many people who for different reasons—mental health or drug addiction—they wouldn’t accept the help and wanted to stay on the streets…We have people we offer help to 30-plus times and they refuse services. Compassion is the way to go but we need to have boundaries.”
Outreach workers reported similar results in National City, where fewer than 20 percent of homeless people contacted over the past year accepted offers of help, according to a city report.
Since 2020, the number of homeless people in both cities has grown, nearly doubling in Chula Vista to roughly 650, according to federal statistics.
“We need to have an encampment ban to be able to protect neighborhoods and kids and families,” McCann said. “Encampments are happening…in the poorest parts of our community, and we need to be protecting our children in those poor neighborhoods.”
Changing Priorities
Brady said the rapid shift in public opinion has forced advocates to rethink their strategy in the face of both tougher laws and soaring housing costs.
Brady estimated it now costs an average of $3,000 per month to shelter one homeless person in San Diego County’s high-cost housing market, even as the number of people becoming homeless each year outstrips the number of shelter beds available.
“We can’t shelter our way out of this,” he said.
Instead, advocates now are seeking to overhaul the county’s entire approach to homelessness by encouraging greater coordination between service providers and lobbying the federal government for what Brady called “a Marshall Plan for housing.”
“We’re 171,000 units short of housing” in San Diego County, he said. “Everyone in San Diego talks about needing 10,000 units. That’s just treading water.”
The View from Residents
At a recent city council meeting in National City, residents lined up to voice their support for the city’s proposed encampment ban, which would outlaw camping on all public property, including near schools, waterways and major public transit stops.
No speaker opposed the ban and no activists attended in protest. Councilmembers voted unanimously to advance the ban for final consideration next week.
The proceedings were a marked contrast from five months ago, when a similar proposed ban drew strong opposition from activists and was rejected by councilmembers, who directed city staff to explore less punitive options.
Since then, said Councilmember Jose Rodriguez, who did not support the earlier ban, “I heard from residents who visit parks and don’t feel safe. That’s not okay…We need to protect our residents.”
Flor Burciaga, a National City resident who attended the council meeting in support of the ban, said that as a professional social worker, “empathy and compassion is innate in me. But how many times do you offer services to people who don’t want them? [I don’t want] to be punitive but there needs to be enforcement.”
Burciaga said she lives near Interstate 5 freeway, close to a homeless encampment. “Homeless people go through our trash and leave trash,” she said. “One of our neighbors had squatters come to his home and he was attacked by a man trying to stay in his shed. I used to want to help everyone and now I just want peace and quiet.”
Brady, of Lived Experience Advisors, said the proliferation of encampment bans has left homeless people feeling “angry, frustrated, mad and disturbed.” He predicted the bans would hurt more people than they helped. “Our deaths on the street will skyrocket this year,” he said.
Sitting at a shaded picnic table in Chula Vista’s Bayfront Park last week, Chula Vista resident Betty Calica offered a view that encompassed all sides of the debate. Calica said she herself has experienced homelessness. Yet, she insisted cities need to draw the line with people who refuse offers of help.
“The best way to do it is give [homeless people] a chance,” she said. “If [they] mess it up then the city shouldn’t do it again. By all means, have the police enforce it. You lost your opportunity the first time.”
Calica said she first became homeless 12 years ago after friends of her children vandalized the family’s apartment building and the family was evicted. Calica ended up on the streets and sent her children to live with their grandmother. The children ran away and were placed in foster care.
Being homeless “is devastating,” she said. “I was crying every day I was on the street.”
Calica said she sought help at a county service agency and was sent to Father Joe’s Villages in San Diego’s East Village. “They saved me,” she said. “I went every day and stood in line until I got” into the center’s residential program. “I got my kids back in three months,” she said.
Calica said the center’s many rules—“get up, make your bed, straighten your room, it’s like boot camp”—helped her stabilize her life. She became a chore supervisor and transitioned into permanent housing after a year. She said she now lives in an unairconditioned trailer near the Chula Vista waterfront and works part time at a 7-11 convenience store.
Calica said she spent a lot of time at Bayfront Park escaping the heat in her trailer and reading books on her phone.
“I know a lot of the homeless people around here,” she said. “They’ve been on the streets for years. They’re struggling with drugs, alcohol…The services are there. You have to want it. They’re there to help you, not screw you over…It’s more about the motivation. You have to stay positive. In the shower you have to say, ‘You can do this. You are strong. Thank you, God, for this day.’ I count my blessings every day.”
What the politicians fail to realize is that there are unintended consequences to their camping bans. The homeless are still there, they are just scattered. They are scattered to more out of the way and dangerous locations. They are going to freeway margins, they are going to canyons, they are going to riverbeds.
Already the homeless are being killed on the freeways. One of these times we will have a multi vehicle accident where drivers are killed due to a homeless person trying to cross a freeway.
There have been small fires in the canyons around San Diego. If this keeps up we could have a major fire in a canyon resulting in the loss of homes as the fire tops out of the canyon in a residential neighborhood.
There are multiple encampments in the river and creek beds around the city. When the rains come these waterway go from a trickle to as much as 10 feet deep in almost no time. This puts both the homeless camping next to the waterways in immediate danger. It also puts members of the swiftwater rescue teams tasked with trying to save their lives in danger.
These are some of the consequences of the politician’s decision to criminalize homelessness. The politicians don’t seem to care, they are only worried about their reelection.
And what you fail to realize about these “people” you are coddling is that your light-handed approach is definitely not working and people are fed up with your garbage people trashing up our cities. Most of your “consequences” affect the bums more so that is fine. If their poor life choices result in one final choice (cremation or burial) for them, so be it.
I notice that in many photos of outlaw encampments, there are a lot of bicycles. I’ve been told that one way homeless people have to make money is by stealing bikes, rebuilding them and selling them. Can VOSD investigate this business and educate your readers on how it works?
The SD Union-Tribune has covered this topic several times.
I say, we make a nice camp 10-15 miles out and take care of them until they are ready to rejoin society. Better than living on the streets!
Yes, tough love would work best but you have to get past all of these naive “advocates” (like Bruce Higgins) who believe that coddling these “people” is the best solution.
your children should be cannibalized
Lock every one of them up and deport the ones who shouldn’t be here to begin with.
I prefer to grind every one of them up, regardless of whether they belong here or not. That will fix the problem faster.
You are the worst kind of people. I know you all with your trolling names think you are somehow tough guys. I know you are guys because your level of empathy is so low you wouldn’t know what kindness was if it hit you in the head. That’s how I know you “men” are masquerading. You are really little boys that have grown up weak and scared of the world and lash out at others to feel some kind of excitement at having any kind of power. – From an Actual Man. – Semper Fi
Did you ever write the article about Chula Vista’s new ban and their not allowing homeless into the Chula Vista shelter. Why is the CV shelter empty while the other in San Diego County are full? Chula Vista is committing fraud by pretending they are trying to help the homeless when the evidence shows the opposite. The City accepted ten million dollars in Federal funds to create the Otay Village homeless shelter only to have the legal right to run homeless off of public property. You don’t discuss how the new bans will create a culture of profiling poor people who are now not allowed within 500 feet of a trolley station. This is unamerican! Shame!