New York Times, August 17, 2024, As California Clears Homeless Camps, Two Projects Point A Way Forward
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.
What works is housing. That’s what all the evidence, not to mention common sense, suggests. But building homes — as opposed to shelters or even tiny-house villages, useful but temporary measures, which more Western states now lean into — can take ages, cost a fortune and run headlong into community road blocks and a mountain of legal obstacles.
