As California Clears Homeless Camps, Two Projects Point a Way Forward

Outside, it is a colorful five-story mix of puzzle-block shapes, raised on stilts, with a jagged roofline and gabled breezeway playing off the single-family houses behind it. Painted patches of green, rose and blue piping sing in the Southern California sun.

Inside, it’s home to 76 people who were recently sleeping on the streets of Long Beach. The building, called 26 Point 2, is a new permanent supportive housing development along the Pacific Coast Highway. The name is an exhortation, not an address. Solving homelessness is a marathon, not a sprint.

After the Supreme Court gave the green light in June to cities that elect to arrest people for sleeping outdoors, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered that thousands of homeless encampments across California be dismantled. He made a pit stop the other day to help state workers clear an especially troubled, rat-infested one from an underpass below Interstate 10 in Los Angeles.

Many Californians have had enough. Officials are registering voters’ frustration and Republicans are weaponizing the issue before November. Mayor London Breed of San Francisco, facing a tough re-election, instructed police officers in her long-besieged city to cite homeless campers who refuse shelter, with the threat of jail on the table. “We need some tough love on the streets,” the mayor allowed.

Where those who do not accept help should go isn’t clear. Mayor Breed is offering free one-way bus tickets out of town.

California doesn’t guarantee a right to housing or shelters, both of which are in notoriously short supply. Study after study shows that just arresting people or shooing them along doesn’t work. Neither have progressive legal efforts championing the right to sleep in the streets. Heather Knight, reporting for The Times on Mayor Breed’s crackdown, described the 16th attempt this year to clear an encampment outside a local Department of Motor Vehicles office. The encampment simply shifted to a different corner.

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