“Morning, it’s police! Collect all your stuff!”
At 7.30am on a recent Friday, two policemen shouted commands into tents along a sidewalk in downtown San Diego. One barefoot man startled awake and remarked that someone had stolen his shoes. Next to him, Moses Miramontes, 47, was frantically tying up his tent and belongings.
“This is BS. There’s no beds for us,” he said, as the cord he was wrapping around his stuff kept snapping in two. “Oh my God, because I’m not hurrying up enough, they’ll probably arrest me.” Down the street, one camper was getting a ticket.
It was the first week San Diego started enforcing a new anti-camping law, which allows officers to jail unhoused people camping in certain locations if they have previously been cited for living on the streets. It’s one tool in an escalating crackdown on people sleeping outside in California’s second-largest city, which has been grappling with a spiraling humanitarian disaster.
While cities across the US are struggling with rising homelessness, San Diego’s crisis is by many measures especially dire. The city’s average rents recently surpassed San Francisco’s, making it the third most expensive city in the nation. A regional taskforce estimated earlier this year that there are now more than 10,000 people experiencing homelessness in San Diego county, some in shelters and transitional programs, but more than 5,000 living outside in encampments and cars. Roughly 2,700 of them are 55 and older. The coroner logged nearly 600 deaths of unhoused people on the streets last year. The figures are undercounts.
Todd Gloria, the San Diego mayor, said his approach to the crisis involves getting tougher: “There has to be consequences for illegal behavior in the city. Now we’re saying you cannot occupy public spaces under certain circumstances.”
Mental illness and high rates of fentanyl addiction among unhoused people have exacerbated the challenges, Gloria said from his 11th-floor office. “Some [unhoused people] are so mentally ill that they don’t know … they’re unsafe.” In county surveys, roughly 26% of unhoused adults report having serious mental illnesses and 20% report substance use disorders.
“We will be as helpful as we possibly can to help you address the underlying causes of your homelessness, but we will not be a city where it’s acceptable to live on the sidewalk,” Gloria said. “The impression shouldn’t be that it’s easy to be homeless here and you can do drugs in my city.”
Gloria’s under immense political pressure. Police get 800 to 1,000 complaints a week about encampments and homelessness, said police captain Shawn Takeuchi, who oversees roughly 50 officers policing homelessness. Polls show homelessness and housing affordability are a top concern for San Diego residents.
The “unsafe camping” ordinance, passed in June, says officers can cite and arrest people who have repeatedly refused to move from “sensitive areas”, including near schools, trolley stations or parks, even if the city has no shelter space to offer them. Elsewhere, police can arrest unhoused campers only if they’ve been offered shelter and have previously been ticketed.
The law is premised on the idea that, as Gloria described it, many on the streets remain there because they “won’t avail themselves of the services”, and that jail threats can be a “leverage” to force them into shelter. The policy was passed over the objections of 160 local academics who pointed to research showing criminalization does not reduce the number of unsheltered people.
Across downtown during week one of enforcement, it was not hard to find people desperate for shelter and police officers unable to help. At the Homelessness Response Center, a city-run drop-in site where people can seek services, just before 8am opening, Jerry Moya, 33, said he’d been waiting in line since 5am to get help; he recently was unable to make rent and lost his housing, spending his remaining cash on a hotel room. The center wasn’t able to offer him a spot, he later said: “I’m tired and trying to figure my situation out.”
Down the street, one man told officers he wanted shelter, but after a policeman looked him up in his system, the officer told him he was ineligible due to his criminal record. Asked if the new ordinance has helped efforts, the officer said, “It’s all the same.”
The man, 31, who declined to give his name, said his backpack had been stolen, so his next move was to get a new charger for his ankle monitor. He said he doesn’t use a sleeping bag or tent, because it’s too much trouble with police forcing him to move all the time: “Wherever I lay my head, I lay my head.”
Gloria said the city has expanded shelter options and was “pushing out more resources than ever”, including programs for women, LGBTQ+ youth and seniors, and a “safe sleeping” lot where people can camp. But data shows it’s not nearly enough.
In a city with thousands on the streets, there is an average of roughly 25 available beds on a given day, typically filled by noon, said the San Diego Housing Commission spokesperson, Scott Marshall. The majority of unhoused people referred to shelter by police or others don’t get placed. In June, out of 1,298 referrals, only 404 ended up with a bed, Marshall said, noting that some lack of placements may be due to people ultimately changing their mind. For every 10 people that move off the streets into housing in San Diego, 13 people newly fall into homelessness.
Bob McElroy, the CEO of Alpha Project, a provider with roughly 600 beds in the city, said his center is full “all the time”. He said he’s generally pro-enforcement, but not when there aren’t spots available: “This is the most frustrated, demoralized and depressed I’ve been in 37 years of doing this.”
Sweeps and enforcement can be harmful when people end up scattered to new and more hidden locations where McElroy’s staff can’t find them, he said, as was the case with one person who’d been waiting six months for a shelter bed who was finally matched with a spot, but is now missing. Officials counted 167 fewer unhoused people downtown in July compared with June, but it’s unclear where people went.
Tosha Alvarado, 35, has seen this firsthand. Unhoused for years in San Diego, she said she’s on a waiting list for housing but has relied on encampment communities to survive. Her recent site in downtown was swept and she has no idea where her fellow residents ended up. “Some have moved to the outskirts or out of the city, which is just going to make it harder for other cities, which will also criminalize us, and we’ll have nowhere to go.”
Shortly after San Diego passed its anti-camping ordinance, the city of Poway to the north passed a similar ordinance. Chula Vista, to the south, has also reported a surge in unhoused people seeking services. About the concerns of people going missing, Gloria said: “Many of them have cellphones, email addresses, social media accounts – organizations are perfectly capable of inquiring for that information and keeping it.”
“It’s like we ain’t got any rights any more,” said Terry Winslow, 68, seated in his wheelchair in downtown after a round of sweeps. He said he has a case manager, but that she had too many clients to keep track of. He also said he was in a shelter for months, but it was infested with bedbugs and rats, and he had returned to the streets: “It’s a little scary, but I’m all right. But I want a roof over my damn head.”
For some residents, the only roof they get is in a jail cell. On Sports Arena Boulevard, an industrial street north of downtown, Margarito Garduno, 40, pulled out the yellow ticket he’d received from police when he was arrested for “encroachment”. “It sucks because I lose my property. It’s just been awful.” A bike mechanic, Garduno said he’d been arrested multiple times and that in the process, his belongings can get damaged, trashed or taken as evidence. He showed a cracked solar panel that he said was new but was broken during an arrest and sweep. He’d been using it to charge batteries. He said he’d also lost new shoes and a dog bed.
When arrested, he usually spends half a day in jail downtown, 3 miles away, he said. “It’s a waste of time. We’re just there behind bars doing nothing. It just gives them a chance to get rid of our stuff.”
When arrested, Garduno and others get a court date, which they fear can lead to warrants if they don’t show up. Their attorney, Coleen Cusack, has been showing up in court on their behalf, and the resolution has almost always been the same: “Case is not filed,” meaning the city attorney’s office declined to prosecute.
“Just because they don’t have a house, doesn’t mean they don’t have property that’s valuable,” said Cusack.
Andrew Sharp, a spokesperson for the city attorney, said in an email that prosecutors “only pursue charges when they believe they can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt”, adding that the office recently dismissed one of Cusack’s encroachment cases after an “extensive investigation and the interview of independent witnesses”.
Takeuchi, the police captain, said officers who go to this encampment always offer shelter and that they issue verbal warnings, infraction tickets and misdemeanor citations before taking people to jail: “Individuals going to jail are the folks who are continuing to violate the law and not heed our warnings,” he said.
In 2023 through early August, San Diego police have made 82 arrests for encroachment and illegal lodging, and issued 941 tickets for those offenses, according to data provided to the Guardian. In the first week of the new law, three people were ticketed for violating the camping ordinance, and 55 were contacted, meaning they could later be cited or arrested.
Takeuchi said three people contacted were placed into shelter and that the others declined offers, though he could not say how many were ineligible or unable to be matched to appropriate spots.
At the Sports Arena encampment, Jerry Bergeron, 30, another resident who was arrested for “encroachment”, with a case ultimately dropped, said it was demoralizing to have to walk from jail back to his tent.
“They are just making it harder and harder for us to survive,” he said, adding that he was struggling to get the right paperwork for his housing: “If they could just back off, we could have time to get our shit together and get off the streets.”
He pointed out that his tent was pitched on the dirt by a fence, not obstructing a road or any walkway or property. And “encroachment” tickets are traditionally given to homeowners whose garbage cans block a pathway, he said. “This isn’t a sidewalk, and we’re not trash.”
