Outsider Ilan Wurman targets Berkeley unhoused: "you don’t get to just pitch a tent"

Berkeley, Calif., long associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, has a reputation for erring on the side of compassion when it comes to the enforcement of drug use and homelessness. The city is such a liberal outlier that Vice President Kamala Harris downplayed her origins there as she tried to appeal to moderate American voters this year.

So it came as a shock to Californians when Berkeley joined the scores of cities that have decided to tighten enforcement on homeless camps this year. In the coming weeks, Berkeley authorities plan to target two sprawling encampments that for years have generated waves of rats, fires, complaints and police calls.

“People are frustrated — even in this very progressive city that cares deeply about addressing homelessness,” Jesse Arreguín, the mayor of Berkeley, said this week.

Berkeley is among more than 75 cities nationwide that have imposed new restrictions on homeless encampments since the Supreme Court decided in June to allow state and local governments to prohibit outdoor sleeping, said Eric Tars, the legal director of the National Homelessness Law Center in Washington, D.C., which has been tracking the legislation.

About a third of the measures have been enacted in California, which is the nation’s most populous state and has a disproportionately large number of homeless residents. Other restrictions have been passed in the Midwest and South, as well as in Washington, Montana and other Western states covered by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which had previously banned governments from punishing people for establishing homeless camps.

A handful of cities have made a point of rejecting a hard-line approach, calling it counterproductive. Leaders in Los Angeles, for instance, have said that clearing tents alone will not solve homelessness and that cities need to provide housing, mental health care and employment options to tackle the problem.

But Mr. Tars was struck by how quickly liberal enclaves like Santa Monica or blue-dot college towns like Morgantown, W.Va., have moved in on homeless encampments.

“In almost every one of these communities, the news story about it will say the debate at the City Council went on for like five hours, and lots of people spoke passionately, and a lot of them emphasized that criminalizing homelessness will only make it worse, not better,” Mr. Tars said. “But then they criminalize homelessness anyway.”

Homelessness surged to record proportions in the past several years, particularly in California, where contributing factors such as mental illness and drug addiction have been compounded by soaring housing costs.

After 2018, when the Ninth Circuit ruled that it was unconstitutionally cruel and unusual to punish people for sleeping outside if they had no other option, the number of encampments exploded. As the public grew weary, politicians in California and elsewhere in the West increasingly blamed the Ninth Circuit for the proliferation of homelessness that was visible in communities.

Without enforcement powers, state and local governments spent heavily on homeless services and affordable housing, a strategy that did ease homelessness in some cities. But most communities still have critical shortages of long-term housing, services and shelter beds.

So when the Supreme Court issued its decision this summer, local and state leaders in both parties seized on opportunities to shut down the most persistent encampments.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom urged city and county leaders to quickly and humanely remove homeless camps. To make a point, he showed up himself at freeway underpasses to clear out encampments, carrying garbage bags and debris from sites.

Mr. Newsom accurately read the electorate. In California, voters last week overwhelmingly passed an initiative to impose tougher punishments on theft and drug use, a measure that harnessed the frustrations that residents had about crime and homelessness in the state. The governor did not support the proposition, but it was popular among Democrats and Republicans alike.

“This is an issue that almost seems to transcend politics now,” said Eve Garrow, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “There is just more pressure to make houselessness invisible again.”

Ms. Garrow said she was alarmed by the willingness of more liberal areas to strengthen enforcement. She was particularly concerned because the attitudes coincide with a push by Republican activists to roll back federal housing programs for homeless people, as described in Project 2025, a policy blueprint for a conservative presidential administration.

Republican-led states like Florida and Tennessee have already instituted policies that were influenced by the Cicero Institute, a conservative Texas think tank that pushes to ban unauthorized camping and defund homeless programs that prioritize housing. The institute was founded by Joe Lonsdale, a tech investor who is close to Elon Musk and who has advised the transition team for President-elect Donald J. Trump.

“Unhoused people are some of the most politically powerless folks in society,” Ms. Garrow said. “How do we stem the tide of cruelty against them if even ostensibly progressive cities like Berkeley are not on our side?”

Berkeley officials said the situation is more nuanced than civil rights advocates recognize. Mr. Arreguín said that his city would try to humanely close down encampments.

“We’re not going to arrest people. We’re going to be thoughtful, we’re going to offer alternatives — but we’re going to be firm,” he said.

The city’s new approach, codified in a September resolution, will apply only to encampments that pose documented and narrowly defined fire hazards, or threaten health and public safety, officials said. The resolution specifies that the city’s first priority will continue to be coaxing homeless campers into housing.

“It’s a hard thing to say that one agrees with this conservative Supreme Court, but a course correction was needed,” said Rashi Kesarwani, the Berkeley councilwoman who was the author of the resolution.

Since 2018, Berkeley has opened an emergency shelter and helped fund two additional housing projects with services for homeless people, relying on a real estate tax increase. On Election Day, voters agreed to raise that tax even higher for homeless services.

Between 2022 and 2024, the number of homeless people living without shelter, such as on the streets or in cars, fell 45 percent in Berkeley, Ms. Kesarwani wrote in a September report to the Council. Still, according to the last federal count, nearly 850 people were estimated to be homeless in the city, with about half of them unsheltered and living in her district.

Most problematic, she said, were two persistent encampments in an industrial area in West Berkeley, where some people repeatedly refused to move, even when offered housing. When the city opened motel rooms for 52 people at one encampment last June, 18 refused, while others swiftly moved into the tents that were vacated by the 34 who accepted shelter, according to Ms. Kesarwani’s report.

“What they’re offering is the exact same circumstances you have if you’re in jail or prison,” said Erin Spencer, 44, a homeless veteran who clambered out of a dumpster at an encampment on Harrison Street, in reference to the motel rooms. “No visitors. Can’t bring your stuff in from outside.”

Mr. Spencer pointed to a row of tents and tarps where he said he had lived for about three years with his dog, Bastet. Mr. Spencer called the city’s offers “a trap” and said that if authorities dismantled his camp, he would “go watch them bulldoze it all and then come back and start rebuilding.”

After civil rights groups cited his situation in their Supreme Court argument to protect public encampments, Mr. Spencer was quoted by name in the scathing dissent written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who argued that rousting encampments only traumatized unstable people and deterred them from accepting help.

Across the street from Mr. Spencer, a fellow camper groused that the city also prohibited smoking in its motel rooms. Nearby, a bearded compatriot said that he did not need shelter because he could make a living selling firewood. As he spoke, he poured gasoline from a can into a whiskey bottle, and from the whiskey bottle into a tank of a battered chain saw that he was tinkering with on the curb.

City records over the past year showed that police officers have been called to the West Berkeley sites every day and a half, on average, and that the Fire Department has been summoned about every four and a half days. Complaints from surrounding businesses — automotive shops, artisan bagel bakeries, makers of A.I.-powered robotics — included reports of dumpster fires, bottles of urine tossed at delivery drivers and rodents chewing through the wiring of parked cars.

One group of businesses, including a craft brewery and a firm that builds movie sets, has claimed in a lawsuit that the city’s tolerance for the camps has created a public nuisance.

“𝐎𝐮𝐫 𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐚 𝐜𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐞𝐝 𝐬𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐭𝐲, 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐝𝐨𝐧’𝐭 𝐠𝐞𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐩𝐢𝐭𝐜𝐡 𝐚 𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐚 𝐛𝐚𝐫𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐮𝐞 𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐨𝐧𝐞’𝐬 𝐡𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐨𝐫 𝐛𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬,” said Ilan Wurman, a Minnesota-based lawyer who brought similar litigation in Phoenix, where business owners waged a long and contentious battle against a sprawling homeless encampment known as The Zone.

Still, Cecilia Lunaparra, the youngest member of the Berkeley City Council at age 22, said she had assumed that America’s best-known progressive stronghold would take “a more compassionate approach” than most cities.

Her Council district includes People’s Park, a hallowed ground for liberal activists that served as a homeless refuge until the University of California, Berkeley, launched plans to build student housing and units for homeless people there.

Ms. Lunaparra had urged the City Council to ignore the Supreme Court decision, and to continue treating encampments as if nothing had changed. She said the complaints around the encampments only underscored the need for Berkeley to stay the course with more programs and more housing.

“The fundamental issue here is: What is the actual solution to homelessness?” she said. “I think the actual solution to homelessness is housing.”

Ms. Kesarwani said she agreed — but that Berkeley also had a broader responsibility to the neighborhoods affected by encampments.

“This is us in an impossible situation, trying to be 𝐛𝐚𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞,” she said. “This is not the Bay Area swinging to the right.”

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