SACRAMENTO, Calif. >> Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered California state officials today to begin dismantling thousands of homeless encampments, the nation’s most sweeping response to a recent Supreme Court ruling that gave governments greater authority to remove homeless people from their streets.

Homeless encampments have vexed California, where housing costs are among the nation’s highest, more than any other state. An estimated 180,000 people were homeless last year in California, and most of them were unsheltered. Unlike New York City, most jurisdictions in California do not guarantee a right to housing.

Newsom, a Democrat, called on state and local leaders to “humanely remove encampments from public spaces” in an urgent manner, prioritizing those that most threaten health and safety.

His executive order could divide Democratic local leaders in California, some of whom have already begun to clear encampments while others have denounced the decision from conservative justices as opening the door to inhumane measures to solve a complex crisis.

The order also comes as Democrats are uniting around Vice President Kamala Harris, a former senator and prosecutor from California, to replace President Joe Biden on the ballot this fall. Republicans have frequently pointed to homelessness in California as an example of the state’s purported decline under Newsom and other Democrats, and they are expected to do the same with Harris in the coming weeks.

The Supreme Court decision on June 28 upheld an Oregon city’s ban on homeless residents sleeping outdoors. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had found in earlier opinions that it was unconstitutional to punish people for sleeping in public spaces when they had no other legal place to spend the night.

Encampments spread as the 9th Circuit, which covers nine Western states, limited the ability of cities to tackle homelessness with arrests and citations. Many politicians from both parties blamed the appellate court’s rulings, and Newsom was among a host of leaders who begged the Supreme Court to intervene.

The justices granted their request, taking the case that originated in Grants Pass, Oregon, and subsequently ruled 6-3 along ideological lines that the city had not violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment by ticketing homeless campers. Advocates for the rights of homeless people denounced the decision as cruel and predicted that it would incite a “race to the bottom” as cities cracked down.

In his executive order, Newsom advised California cities and counties on how best to ramp up enforcement on a signature issue of his administration. He cannot force them to take action, but can exert political pressure through billions of dollars the state controls for municipalities to address homelessness.

The order also expanded to other state agencies an approach that the California Department of Transportation has used to clear encampments alongside freeways in the state. Newsom mandated that state officials not simply move campers along, but also work with local governments to house people and provide services into which the state has pumped billions of dollars.

“The state has been hard at work to address this crisis on our streets,” Newsom said in a statement.

“There are simply no more excuses,” he said. “It’s time for everyone to do their part.”

Some state agencies are poised to immediately ramp up enforcement, said Tara Gallegos, a spokesperson for the governor’s office, while others must develop policies and plans for enforcement, which could take a couple of weeks.

Newsom, who is widely viewed as having presidential aspirations, has channeled about $24 billion into homelessness since he took office in 2019. His administration says it helped move more than 165,000 homeless people into temporary or permanent housing two fiscal years ago, the most recent period for which data is available.

Some local Democratic leaders, including Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles, have criticized the ruling. Bass has had early success in reducing the homeless population by moving people off the streets and into motels and shelters, where they receive supportive services.

After the Supreme Court ruling, Bass said the decision “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.”

But others have welcomed the ruling.

In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed, a Democrat, said last week that city officials planned to become “very aggressive and assertive in moving encampments” starting next month and might start citing homeless people who refused offers of shelter. The Republican mayor of Lancaster, California, said after the ruling that his community was eager to get moving. “I’m warming up the bulldozer,” Mayor R. Rex Parris said.

Most local governments, however, have been torn since the decision over whether to aggressively enforce laws against homelessness. The Supreme Court ruling left many civil protections intact, including prohibitions on excessive fines and violations of due process, and civil liberties groups have warned local governments that they would sue over mistreatment of vulnerable people living on the street.

Research also indicates that clearing encampments may be of limited value. One recent study of three Los Angeles encampments, by the Rand Corp., found that dismantling them cleaned up the area for a few months but seemed to have little or no long-term effect on a city’s homeless population. Another survey, conducted last year by the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco, found that 75% of homeless adults in California were local residents who had become homeless in the county where they had last been housed.

Administration officials, who spoke on background before the executive order was issued, said it had been drawn up as a regulatory template for government entities that still must deal with encampments, which continue to sprawl across sidewalks, peek from rural wild lands and crop up nightly along beaches and waterways.

So many people have sought shelter near freeways, for example, that the California Department of Transportation has developed its own protocol and dedicated employees for clearing encampments. From one-person pup tents pitched near offramps to large encampments sheltering dozens of people beneath overpasses, Caltrans, as the department is known, has cleared more than 11,000 campsites since 2021, removing more than 248,000 cubic yards of debris, Newsom administration officials said.

The governor’s directive ordered other state agencies — including California State Parks and the Department of Fish and Wildlife, both of which oversee immense tracts of land — to adopt versions of the approach being used at Caltrans. Under that approach, the departments will first target encampments that pose a health and safety risk. The state will provide 48-72 hours of advance notice, and state officials will work with local service providers to connect homeless campers with services and housing. Personal property collected at each site will be bagged, tagged and stored for at least 60 days.

Eric Tars, senior policy director at the National Homelessness Law Center in Washington, D.C., called the executive order “a misdirection of a systemic problem onto the victims.”

“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.”

He noted that the order does not explicitly mandate that alternative shelter be provided for homeless campers, although it does require agencies and urge local leaders to connect people with service providers.

“Any policy that doesn’t provide for where people can actually be will prolong how long people are on the streets and increase encampments, exactly contrary to their goal,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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