California is quickly reshaping its method to homeless tent encampments within the wake of final yr’s Supreme Court docket ruling that allowed cities to implement anti-camping bans even when individuals have nowhere else to go.
There are roughly 275,000 individuals residing unsheltered within the US, with over half of them in California, and the Grants Cross v. Johnson determination has emboldened cities to interrupt up such encampments and develop “interim housing” choices, like tiny home shelters and motel rooms, to maneuver individuals extra rapidly off the road.
Critics argue that this method dangers making a two-tiered housing system that would masks somewhat than clear up the disaster. Nonetheless, the truth that non permanent housing models might be erected way more rapidly than everlasting supportive housing (roughly 5 months somewhat than 5 years) and cheaply ($50,000 to 100,000 per unit somewhat than $600,000 to $1 million per unit) has offered elected officers with a horny coverage resolution to their mounting political issues.
In California, the place homelessness has grow to be each a defining political legal responsibility for elected officers and a nationwide image of the state’s governance challenges, cities are notably desperate to exhibit progress on their streets. Maybe no California politician has been extra enthusiastic concerning the potential of tiny home shelters than San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who proposed in 2023 to divert greater than a 3rd of his metropolis’s housing funds to extend manufacturing. (San Jose is the most important metropolis in Northern California, with roughly 1 million residents.)
Mahan campaigned for reelection in 2024 on clearing avenue homelessness, and since profitable, he’s pledged to construct greater than 1,000 new non permanent housing models by the tip of 2025. Extra lately he declared that he desires to arrest homeless individuals who repeatedly refuse to go to shelter. “Homelessness can’t be a selection,” Mahan stated. “Authorities has a accountability to construct shelter, and our homeless neighbors have a accountability to make use of it.”
This extra forceful method can be being embraced in San Francisco, the place the newly elected Mayor Daniel Lurie has been increasing interim housing choices and transferring individuals extra rapidly off the streets. Tent encampments are down in San Francisco — the bottom degree on document because the metropolis began monitoring in 2019 — and crime has equally plummeted. Arrests of homeless persons are additionally up. In response to the San Francisco Chronicle, almost 120 homeless individuals had been arrested in March, the best recorded of any month within the prior seven years, and greater than 700 individuals had been arrested since August, following the Grants Cross determination.
“Prior to now it was solely social services-led, and also you’re simply not going to social work your manner out of this drawback,” Kunal Modi, the mayor’s chief of homelessness coverage, advised me. “However you’re equally not going to arrest your manner out of this problem, so we’re looking for the stability between the 2.”
Elizabeth Funk, the CEO of DignityMoves, a nonprofit that started 5 years in the past to use “Silicon Valley-style ‘disruptive considering’ to America’s homelessness disaster,” has been main the cost for increasing tiny home shelters in California. She credit the Grants Cross determination for transferring issues alongside. “It did give a push,” Funk advised me, “as a result of sarcastically cities had been getting off the hook, saying, ‘Effectively why would we construct shelter? We will’t make individuals take it.’ So now there’s no extra excuse to say, ‘Effectively if we construct it it’ll sit there empty.’”
Elizabeth Funk. Gabriela Hasbun for Vox
The momentum for interim housing extends past metropolis halls. Final yr, state lawmakers handed the Interim Housing Act in help of the tiny homes method and now are advancing two extra payments to speed up the mannequin statewide.
The method is gaining nationwide consideration too. Former San Jose Mayor and present US Rep. Sam Liccardo advised me he’s drafting federal laws that will let Housing Alternative Vouchers, generally generally known as Part 8, fund interim housing choices — one thing these rental subsidies at present aren’t approved to help. As Mahan’s predecessor, Liccardo led the institution of San Jose’s first interim shelters to scale back contagion danger in the course of the pandemic. (Every interim shelter unit supplied residents extra privateness than congregate shelters, the place individuals sleep in shared areas, or than sleeping outdoors to keep away from Covid-19).
“I’m speaking to my Republican colleagues, together with the chair of the subcommittee within the Home, Mike Flood, and there may be curiosity in better flexibility in Part 8,” Liccardo stated, suggesting potential bipartisan attraction for the mannequin. On homelessness usually, he added, “we simply want a extra nimble response.”
The law-and-order orientation of the Trump administration coupled with its slash-and-burn method to federal funding will most likely push the interim housing mannequin ahead, Funk predicts. “It’s an fascinating time,” she stated, “and as a lot because it breaks my coronary heart to see so many cuts to packages that assist maintain individuals, in a humorous manner, if there’s no extra federal funding for everlasting housing it’s going to pressure the difficulty that we have to fund inexpensive options.”
The talk over “success” in fixing homelessness
Throughout the US, 150 cities have handed new restrictions on homeless encampments because the Grants Cross determination final June, in accordance with the Nationwide Homelessness Legislation Middle. Roughly a 3rd of these cities have been in California.
Elected officers have partly justified these new guidelines as a step towards attaining “practical zero unsheltered homelessness” — a narrower model of the broader coverage aim of “practical zero homelessness,” launched in 2014 by the nonprofit Neighborhood Options. The group’s concept was to outline success as constructing techniques the place homelessness is uncommon, temporary, and nonrecurring, and this framework has since been embraced by the Division of Veterans Affairs and the US Interagency Council on Homelessness. In 2021, Neighborhood Options was awarded the MacArthur Basis’s $100 million grant for its work advancing this method.
California lawmakers and DignityMoves have began to invoke the “practical zero” and “uncommon, temporary, and nonrecurring” language however utilized solely to these sleeping outdoors or in locations not primarily meant for human residence, like automobiles or practice stations. In different phrases, they’re not specializing in homeless people residing in congregate shelters or these doubling up in cramped residences. (One of many two state interim housing payments this yr is known as the Purposeful Zero Unsheltered Act of 2025.)
“Attending to zero for unsheltered avenue homelessness needs to be the highest precedence,” California state Sen. Catherine Blakespear, who’s sponsoring one of many state interim housing payments this yr, advised me. “And I’ve had a shift in my very own serious about this.”
Some homelessness advocates have pushed again on the brand new utilization. “‘Purposeful zero’ is widely known within the homeless coverage world, however ‘practical zero unsheltered’ shouldn’t be a phrase we acknowledge as a result of it suggests the likelihood that sheltered homelessness is an appropriate state of affairs for folk,” Alex Visotzky, a senior California coverage fellow with the Nationwide Alliance to Finish Homelessness, advised me. “Once you concentrate on unsheltered solely, more often than not you solely make issues worse as a result of that results in a logjam in your shelter system the place of us can’t get out.”
Visotzky challenges the belief that solely slow-to-build everlasting housing can clear up homelessness. Whereas it does take years to construct new everlasting housing, he stresses that it doesn’t take years to get individuals into everlasting housing, via a focused method of case administration, housing subsidies, and reconnecting individuals with household and associates. Advocates like Visotzky say they don’t oppose interim housing per se, however fear about politicians diverting funds for everlasting housing, and stopping individuals from transferring into an actual house for even longer.
The frenzy of personal enterprise into the tiny home house offers advocates pause too, and so they fear what this subsequent period of criminalization will appear like. A couple of-fifth of individuals experiencing homelessness at present have a severe psychological sickness like bipolar dysfunction or schizophrenia, and the US Division of Justice had discovered that “the prevalence of unmet behavioral well being wants” is a key driver in why “individuals who expertise homelessness are inclined to have frequent (and sometimes repeat) interactions with legislation enforcement.” Not all interim housing communities have the help providers obligatory to assist individuals with severe psychological sickness, and advocates fear about what’s going to occur if there’s simply nowhere else for these individuals to go.
In San Francisco, Lurie’s mayoral predecessor, London Breed, responded to the Grants Cross ruling by promising to be “very aggressive” on tent encampments, together with by threatening felony penalties. Lurie has stored up Breed’s harder method, together with by extra formally embedding their homeless avenue outreach groups with legislation enforcement.
Whereas campaigning for mayor final yr, Lurie partnered with DignityMoves, and featured Elizabeth Funk prominently in his marketing campaign’s announcement of his plan to sort out homelessness. Lurie has promised to construct 2,500 models of interim housing in his first two years. Modi, the homelessness lead for Lurie’s staff in San Francisco, advised me their first order of enterprise was to concentrate on revamping their avenue outreach technique and opening a brand new disaster stabilization middle, exactly to serve extra individuals with severe well being wants. Now, although, their consideration is popping to constructing the brand new tiny home choices.
Making interim housing much less interim?
Whereas advocates for interim housing have pitched the models as short-term “bridge” choices to everlasting housing, some advocates like Funk say the houses needs to be obtainable for much longer to residents in the event that they do need to stay there, maybe as a result of they don’t thoughts the house or as a result of they don’t need the effort of searching on the non-public rental market.
“Proper now, the common keep is about eight months, however as we begin scaling this interim factor, it’s going to get longer, and that must be okay,” she advised me. “The one motive we wish individuals out quick is as a result of the town has to pay for holding them in shelter, and cities can’t afford that.”
One of many major boundaries is paying for the price of meals, upkeep, and social providers in these tiny home villages. In San Jose, for instance, every village value about $15 million to launch, however then $3 million to $4 million yearly thereafter to function. When he was mayor, Liccardo stated, the town struggled to get any county-level funding to take care of the tiny house villages they constructed in the course of the pandemic; its tens of millions in working prices had been deemed too costly.
“What we’re against is muddying the definition of what’s truly housing.”
— Alex Visotzky, senior California coverage fellow with the Nationwide Alliance to Finish Homelessness
Funk and leaders like Mahan suppose they’ve the reply. They’re eyeing the federal authorities’s $3.6 billion voucher program, which at present helps about 2.3 million low-income households. This Housing Alternative Voucher program is notoriously laborious for recipients to make use of; one federal research discovered solely 60 p.c of these fortunate sufficient to even obtain a voucher may discover a non-public landlord keen to simply accept it. In California final yr, over 40,000 voucher recipients by no means secured housing.
The answer, Funk and her colleagues envision, is permitting the federal rental subsidy to assist cities cowl these annual working prices, so individuals can keep housed and federal subsidies aren’t wasted as a result of renters couldn’t discover keen landlords.
To maneuver that concept ahead, Liccardo, who represents elements of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, is engaged on a invoice that will make clear that native communities may resolve whether or not voucher holders are allowed to spend their month-to-month subsidy on staying longer-term in a tiny home or motel choice as an alternative of a market-rate residence.
Liccardo blasted Republicans who don’t need to spend extra money on vouchers, and famous that 60,000 vouchers may disappear by the tip of subsequent yr if Congress doesn’t act. However he praised his conservative colleagues for being open to “better flexibility” in how the cash could possibly be spent. “If individuals need to keep in them, nice,” he stated. “Let’s enable the native communities to resolve.”
Visotzky stated advocates like himself haven’t any qualms about individuals staying in shelters when there may be nowhere else for them to go, however they fear about creating a brand new class of substandard residing. “What we’re against,” he stated, “is muddying the definition of what’s truly housing.”
