'Cowardice': Homeless Advocates Condemn Newsom Order to Remove Encampments

Civil rights advocates and progressive commentators on Thursday condemned California Gov. Gavin Newsom after the Democrat issued an executive order to shut down homeless encampments on state property and to incentivize local authorities to do the same.

The order marks the first notable state policy shift to result from a momentous U.S. Supreme Court ruling on June 28, decided 6-3 on ideological lines, that the liberal dissenting justices argued criminalized homelessness.

Eric Tars, a policy director at the National Homelessness Law Center, toldThe New York Times that the executive order effectively blamed the victims of a systemic problem.

"The only way to end homeless encampments in California is to end the need for homeless encampments," he said. "California has an affordable housing crisis, and unless Newsom's executive order is coming with sufficient resources to address that, this new push isn't going to work."

In a direct response to Newsom on social media, Diane Yentel, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said that the governor hadn't provided the fundamental ingredient needed to solve the homelessness problem.

"You didn't provide the needed affordable housing," she wrote. "You're choosing political expediency over real solutions. That's not leadership, it's cowardice. This will only worsen homelessness."

Echoing the need for more housing, Nina Turner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy, called the Newsom decision "shameful," while Jordan Chariton, a journalist at Status Coup, a progressive media outlet, called it "disgusting," saying Newsom's solution was to "sweep them all up like it's taking out the trash."

Mel Buer, a reporter for The Real News Network, indicated on social media that the decision was in keeping with the political approach of the governor, who is widely believed to have presidential ambitions.

"Saw this one coming from a mile off," Buer wrote of Thursday's executive order. "Newsom's a fucking heartless dipshit who would rather court billionaire donors to his 2028 presidential run than be a real human being."

Critics of last month's Supreme Court ruling in City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson argued that it would lead to a crackdown on homelessness throughout the country. The conservative justices ruled that the Oregon city could ban sleeping in public places—sidewalks, streets, parks—overturning a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that the local law was unconstitutional.

The San Francisco-based 9th Circuit is one of the most liberal courts in the country and had issued a number of rulings in favor of the rights of homeless people in recent years, frustrating Republicans and some Democrats including Newsom.

California is home to roughly one-third of the nation's homeless population and the reasons for the problem are the subject of fierce ideological debate, as are the solutions. This was evident in the response to the Supreme Court ruling, which led one Republican mayor in California to declare that he was "warming up the bulldozer."

Newsom welcomed the ruling but other Democrats, such as Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, expressed dismay and concern.

"This ruling must not be used as an excuse for cities across the country to attempt to arrest their way out of this problem or hide the homelessness crisis in neighboring cities or in jail," Bass said a statement at the time.

Newsom doesn't have the power to force local authorities such as Bass to remove homeless encampments but could wield influence at the municipal level because of his control over billions in funding to address homelessness, The New York Timesreported.

Newsom's administration has spent $24 billion in responding to the homelessness crisis since he took office in 2019, including $1 billion to help municipalities remove encampments and $3.3 billion to expand housing for homeless people, the executive order says.

Homeless people still have civil rights, advocacy groups say, warning that they will sue local governments that mistreat the unsheltered. They also point to research showing that sweeping encampments is ineffective, as it doesn't address the root problems of homelessness. A Rand Corporation survey last year showed that sweeps affect homeless populations in an area only temporarily.